Liberals II

Just Property ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 34-57
Author(s):  
Christopher Pierson
Keyword(s):  
John Rawls ◽  
John Dewey ◽  
Private Property ◽  
Social Institution ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
Liberal Tradition ◽  
The Us

This chapter continues the evaluation of ideas about property within the modern liberal tradition. Much of this thinking has its origins in the later work of John Stuart Mill. I begin with some key ‘new’ liberals: T. H. Green, J. T. Hobhouse, and J. A. Hobson. These thinkers take a varyingly radical view of the provisionality of individual claims to private property. Following a short interlude on interwar liberalism, I turn to the development of liberal ideas on property in the US. My two key thinkers here are John Dewey and John Rawls. Both of these iconic liberal thinkers take a view of property which emphasizes its function as a social institution, one which has to be justified by its societal outcomes rather than its private and personal origins.

Liberalism

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Ryan
Keyword(s):  
John Rawls ◽  
John Dewey ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
Thomas Jefferson ◽  
Liberal Theory ◽  
Religious Authority ◽  
Isaiah Berlin ◽  
The Individual

This chapter explains what liberalism is. It is easy to list famous liberals, but it is harder to say what they have in common. John Locke, Adam Smith, Montesquieu, Thomas Jefferson, John Stuart Mill, Lord Acton, T. H. Green, John Dewey, and contemporaries such as Isaiah Berlin and John Rawls are certainly liberals. However, they do not agree on issues such as the boundaries of toleration, the legitimacy of the welfare state, and the virtues of democracy. They do not even agree on the nature of the liberty they think liberals ought to seek. The chapter considers classical versus modern liberalism, the divide within liberal theory between liberalism and libertarianism, and liberal opposition to absolutism, religious authority, and capitalism. It also discusses liberalism as a theory for the individual, society, and the state.

The Philosophic Origins of Deliberative Ideals

2018 ◽  
pp. 54-69
Author(s):  
Simone Chambers
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Deliberative Democracy ◽  
John Rawls ◽  
John Dewey ◽  
Democratic Theory ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
American Pragmatism ◽  
The Core ◽  
Intellectual Heritage ◽  
The Way

Deliberative democracy is a relatively recent development in democratic theory. But the theorists and practitioners of deliberative democracy often reach far back for philosophical and theoretic resources to develop the core ideas. This chapter traces some of those sources and ideas. As deliberative democracy is itself a somewhat contested theory, the chapter does not present a linear story of intellectual heritage. Instead it draws on a variety of sometimes disparate sources to identify different ideals that become stressed in different versions of deliberation and deliberative democracy. The philosophic sources canvased include Aristotle, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, John Dewey and American Pragmatism, John Rawls, and Jürgen Habermas. The chapter pays special attention to the way different philosophical sources speak to the balance between the epistemic and normative claims of deliberative democracy.

Liberals I

Just Property ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 5-33
Author(s):  
Christopher Pierson
Keyword(s):  
Social Institution ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
Thomas Jefferson ◽  
Careful Attention ◽  
Jeremy Bentham ◽  
James Madison ◽  
Henry George ◽  
The Us ◽  
William Paley ◽  
Benjamin Constant

This chapter begins with a brief discussion of what we mean by liberalism. It continues with an evaluation of the views that liberals have taken of the justification of property. I first consider the broadly utilitarian case developed by William Paley, James Mill, and Jeremy Bentham. I then assess the distinctive view taken (in France) by Benjamin Constant and (in the US) by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. I devote careful attention to the work of John Stuart Mill, who is a key source for a distinctively modern (or ‘new’) liberal view in which property is not so much a right of persons as a social institution, legitimately open to collective regulation. The chapter ends with an outline of the liberal case for communal ownership of the land made by the American journalist Henry George.

CAPITALISM IN THE CLASSICAL AND HIGH LIBERAL TRADITIONS

2011 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 19-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel Freeman
Keyword(s):  
Public Good ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
John Rawls ◽  
Essential Role ◽  
Private Property ◽  
Price System ◽  
Classical Liberalism ◽  
The Public ◽  
Liberal Tradition ◽  
Equality Of Opportunities

AbstractLiberalism generally holds that legitimate political power is limited and is to be impartially exercised, only for the public good. Liberals accordingly assign political priority to maintaining certain basic liberties and equality of opportunities; they advocate an essential role for markets in economic activity, and they recognize government's crucial role in correcting market breakdowns and providing public goods. Classical liberalism and what I call “the high liberal tradition” are two main branches of liberalism. Classical liberalism evolved from the works of Adam Smith and the classical utilitarian economists; its major 20th century representatives include Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. The high liberal tradition developed from John Stuart Mill's works, and its major philosophical representatives in the 20th century are John Dewey and, later, John Rawls. This paper discusses the main distinguishing features of the classical and the high liberal traditions and their respective positions regarding capitalism as an economic and social system. Classical liberals, unlike high liberals, regard economic liberties and rights of private property in productive resources to be nearly as important as basic liberties. They conceive of equality of opportunity in more formal terms, and regard capitalist markets and the price system as essential not only to the allocation of production resources, but also as the fundamental criterion for the just distribution of income, wealth, and economic powers. High liberals, by contrast, regard the economic liberties as subordinate to the exercise of personal and civic liberties. They are prepared to regulate and restrict economic liberties to achieve greater equality of opportunities, reduce inequalities of economic powers, and promote a broader conception of the public good. And while high liberals endorse markets and the price system as essential to allocation of productive resources, they do not regard markets as the fundamental criterion for assessing just distributions of income, wealth, and economic powers and positions of responsibility. The paper concludes with some reflections upon the essential role that dissimilar conceptions of persons and society play in grounding the different positions on economic justice that classical and high liberals advocate.

Welfare Rights in the Liberal Tradition

1990 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-11
Author(s):  
Thomas A. Horne
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
John Rawls ◽  
Private Property ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Government Programs ◽  
The West ◽  
Welfare Rights ◽  
Liberal Tradition ◽  
Welfare Measures ◽  
The Relationship

It was hardly surprising that John Rawls' argument that a liberal political theory had to include a commitment to welfare rights was quickly countered by Robert Nozick's contention that welfare rights were incompatible with liberalism's devotion to freedom and private property. This controversy over the relationship between state funded welfare and liberty, especially the liberty to acquire property, has been and is still part of the politics of all advanced industrial nations, including America. As a matter of political fact, however, the welfare interpretation of liberalism has been triumphant. Government programs to alleviate suffering, to increase economic opportunities available to the poor, and to redistribute wealth go hand in hand with representation and civil liberties in virtually all of the advanced industrial nations of the West. That this has occurred, I want to argue here, is entirely consistent with the mainstream of the liberal tradition and ought to be presented that way to students.The distinction between classical or libertarian liberalism and welfare or the new liberalism emerged at the end of the nineteenth century in England. From the start this distinction was politically charged, meant to imply that the welfare measures enacted particularly during the second Gladstone administration represented a treasonous repudiation of the liberal tradition. Herbert Spencer's The Man Versus the State (1884), little read now but enormously influential then, was most important to spreading this view.

Environmental Political Theory and the Liberal Tradition

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Piers Stephens
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
John Rawls ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Private Property ◽  
Environmental Concern ◽  
Current Debate ◽  
Nature Protection ◽  
Liberal Tradition ◽  
Self Development ◽  
History Of

This chapter discusses the history of environmental concern within the liberal tradition from the latter’s roots onwards, moving from the private property orientated “old liberalism” of John Locke into the self-development orientated “new liberalism” of John Stuart Mill, then onwards into American pragmatism and the neutralist liberalism of John Rawls and his contemporary followers. This leads into an overview of the current debate, which started in the 1990s, over the possibilities of synthesizing environmentalist goals of sustainability and nature protection with some variant of liberalism. The chapter concludes with an argument that yokes the new liberal concern with self-development to the environmentalist emphasis on nature protection, arguing that the continued existence of relatively untransformed nonhuman nature is a vital precondition and assistance to human imaginative development and thus freedom.

scholarly journals Liberalism and Epistemic Diversity: Mill's Sceptical Legacy

Episteme ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 248-265 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Kelly
Keyword(s):  
John Rawls ◽  
John Dewey ◽  
Social Epistemology ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Value ◽  
Compare And Contrast ◽  
Epistemic Diversity

ABSTRACTAlthough John Stuart Mill places considerable emphasis on three information signalling devices – debate, votes and prices – he remains curiously sceptical about the prospects of institutional or social epistemology. In this paper, I explore Mill's modest scepticism about institutional epistemology and compare and contrast that with the attitudes of liberal theorists such as F. A. Hayek and John Dewey who are much more enthusiastic about the prospects of social epistemology as part of their defences of liberalism. The paper examines the extent to which Hayek and Dewey ignore concerns originally raised by Mill. I conclude that Mill's modest scepticism is reflected in the epistemological abstinence of contemporary liberal philosophers such as John Rawls, and that his elevation of philosophy over democracy remains a challenge to contemporary defenders of the political value of social or institutional epistemology.

scholarly journals The New Control of Territory and Urban Planning: the Eminent Domain in the US

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 38
Author(s):  
Sonia Paone
Keyword(s):  
Private Property ◽  
Cost Benefit Analysis ◽  
Cost Benefit ◽  
The United States ◽  
Eminent Domain ◽  
Public Utility ◽  
Transfer Property ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Supreme Court ◽  
The City

The article analyses the transformations of the use of eminent domain in the United States in the context of urban redevelopment programs. In the past the private property has been expropriated for public use only. Recently it is possible to forcibly transfer property, from a private subject to private developers, on the basis of a cost-benefit analysis that demonstrates that the new use is more efficient than the previous one. This profound change has been possible thanks to a progressive modification of the concept of public use. Traditionally, public use coincided with the construction of infrastructures and public utility, such as highways and railroads. Over the time, it has come to include other aims: firstly, projects of urban renewal and economic development carried forth by private developers. Essentially, it has resulted in the use of expropriation to assemble lands which are then granted to subjects who intervene in the reconfiguration of the city for private purposes. Starting from some important examples of urban development, the main phases of this process are reconstructed, also taking into account the most important decisions of the US Supreme Court that contributed to the change of doctrine, invalidating the postulate of public use as justification for expropriation.

POPULIST PERFECTIONISM: THE OTHER AMERICAN LIBERALISM

2006 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-163
Author(s):  
Thomas A. Spragens
Keyword(s):  
John Dewey ◽  
American History ◽  
Walt Whitman ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
The Other ◽  
Recent Argument ◽  
Normative Conception ◽  
American Liberalism

Recent debates over American liberalism have largely ignored one way of understanding democratic purposes that was widely influential for much of American history. This normative conception of democracy was inspired by philosophical ideas found in people such as John Stuart Mill and G. W. F. Hegel rather than by rights-based or civic republican theories. Walt Whitman and John Dewey were among its notable adherents. There is much that can be said on behalf of Richard Rorty's recent argument that American liberals would be well advised to recover and reclaim the heritage of Whitman and Dewey; but some additions and emendations to his construction of these champions of democracy would strengthen his case.

J. S. Mill's Liberal Utilitarian Assessment of Capitalism Versus Socialism

Utilitas ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-71 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Riley
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Private Property ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
Market Socialism ◽  
High Quality ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Moral Qualities ◽  
Personal Qualities ◽  
The Government ◽  
Joint Property

John Stuart Mill argued, in his Principles of Political Economy (1848, 7th edn., 1871), that existing laws and customs of private property ought to be reformed to promote a far more egalitarian form of capitalism than hitherto observed anywhere. He went on to suggest that such an ideal capitalism might evolve spontaneously into a decentralized socialism involving a market system of competing worker co-operatives. That possibility of market socialism emerged only as the working classes gradually developed the intellectual and moral qualities required for worker co-operatives to succeed against private firms. Workers would tend to reject the hierarchical wage relation as they developed the requisite personal qualities, he believed, and capitalists, facing escalating wages for skilled labour as a result of the diminishing supply of high-quality workers for hire, would tend to lend their capital to the worker co-operatives ‘at a diminishing rate of interest, and at last, perhaps, even to exchange their capital for terminable annuities. In this or some such mode’, he speculated, ‘the existing accumulations of capital might honestly, and by a kind of spontaneous process, become in the end the joint property of all who participate in their productive employment: a transformation which, thus effected, (and assuming of course that both sexes participate equally in the rights and in the government of the association) would be the nearest approach to social justice, and the most beneficial ordering of industrial affairs for the universal good, which it is possible at present to foresee.’

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