Ugly Freedoms

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisabeth R. Anker
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
American Democracy ◽  
Individual Liberty ◽  
Economic Exploitation ◽  
Multispecies Interactions ◽  
Sugar Plantations ◽  
The Right ◽  
Liberal Thought

In Ugly Freedoms Elisabeth R. Anker reckons with the complex legacy of freedom offered by liberal American democracy, outlining how the emphasis of individual liberty has always been entangled with white supremacy, settler colonialism, climate destruction, economic exploitation, and patriarchy. These “ugly freedoms” legitimate the right to exploit and subjugate others. At the same time, Anker locates an unexpected second type of ugly freedom in practices and situations often dismissed as demeaning, offensive, gross, and ineffectual but that provide sources of emancipatory potential. She analyzes both types of ugly freedom at work in a number of texts and locations, from political theory, art, and film to food, toxic dumps, and multispecies interactions. Whether examining how Kara Walker’s sugar sculpture A Subtlety, Or the Marvelous Sugar Baby reveals the importance of sugar plantations to liberal thought or how the impoverished neighborhoods in The Wire blunt neoliberalism’s violence, Anker shifts our perspective of freedom by contesting its idealized expressions and expanding the visions for what freedom can look like, who can exercise it, and how to build a world free from domination.

Freedom to Move, Freedom to Stay, Freedom to Return

2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 (135) ◽  
pp. 138-159
Author(s):  
Sunaina Maira
Keyword(s):  
San Francisco ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
San Francisco Bay Area ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
The United States ◽  
Freedom Of Movement ◽  
Bay Area ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Neoliberal Capitalism ◽  
The Right

Abstract This article focuses on the sanctuary movement in the United States and Europe, putting into conversation with one another migrant solidarity activists from different national contexts. This transnational roundtable draws on interviews with activists in the San Francisco Bay Area as well as in the United Kingdom and Switzerland, and on a workshop on sanctuary activism that involved forty activists from the Bay Area, Europe, and Australia. The article explores the meaning of sanctuary in these different locations and the strategies used by activists to create various forms of sanctuary while grappling with its contradictions. It addresses three key themes: (1) the meaning of sanctuary in campaigns that enact the right to freedom of movement across borders; (2) the binary of “good”/deserving versus “bad”/unworthy migrants; and (3) an abolitionist sanctuary model that links border violence to carcerality, neoliberal capitalism, white supremacy, settler colonialism, and fascism.

A Virtue for Courageous Minds

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aurelian Craiutu
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Moral Virtue ◽  
Individual Liberty ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
Common Notion ◽  
History Of ◽  
Benjamin Constant ◽  
Intellectual Foundations

Political moderation is the touchstone of democracy, which could not function without compromise and bargaining, yet it is one of the most understudied concepts in political theory. How can we explain this striking paradox? Why do we often underestimate the virtue of moderation? Seeking to answer these questions, this book examines moderation in modern French political thought and sheds light on the French Revolution and its legacy. The book begins with classical thinkers who extolled the virtues of a moderate approach to politics, such as Aristotle and Cicero. It then shows how Montesquieu inaugurated the modern rebirth of this tradition by laying the intellectual foundations for moderate government. The book looks at important figures such as Jacques Necker, Germaine de Staël, and Benjamin Constant, not only in the context of revolutionary France but throughout Europe. It traces how moderation evolves from an individual moral virtue into a set of institutional arrangements calculated to protect individual liberty, and explores the deep affinity between political moderation and constitutional complexity. The book demonstrates how moderation navigates between political extremes, and it challenges the common notion that moderation is an essentially conservative virtue, stressing instead its eclectic nature. Drawing on a broad range of writings in political theory, the history of political thought, philosophy, and law, the book reveals how the virtue of political moderation can address the profound complexities of the world today.

scholarly journals Toleration as the Balance Between Liberty and Security

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Elisabetta Galeotti ◽  
Federica Liveriero
Keyword(s):  
Social Security ◽  
Harm Principle ◽  
Social Tolerance ◽  
Individual Liberty ◽  
Self Defense ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Harm Principle

AbstractTraditionally, an adequate strategy to deal with the tension between liberty and security has been toleration, for the latter allows the maximization of individual liberty without endangering security, since it embraces the limits set by the harm principle and the principle of self-defense of the liberal order. The area outside the boundary clearly requires repressive measures to protect the security and the rights of all. In this paper, we focus on the balance of liberty and security afforded by toleration, analyzing how this strategy works in highly conflictual contexts and sorting out the different sets of reason that might motivate individual to assume a tolerant attitude. We contend that toleration represents a reliable political solution to conflicts potentially threatening social security when it is coupled with social tolerance. Hence, we examine the reasons the agents may have for endorsing toleration despite disagreement and disapproval. In the range of these reasons, we argue that the right reasons are those preserving the moral and epistemic integrity of the agent. The right reasons are however not accessible to everyone, as for example is the case with (non-violent) religious fundamentalists. Only prudential reasons for toleration seem to be available to them. And yet, we argue that an open and inclusive democracy should in principle be hospitable towards prudential and pragmatic reasons as well, which may potentially lay the grounds for future cooperation. We conclude therefore that the tolerant society has room for the fundamentalists, granted that they do not resort to violence.

Governmental Censorship in War-Time

1942 ◽  
Vol 36 (5) ◽  
pp. 837-849 ◽  
Author(s):  
Byron Price
Keyword(s):  
National Security ◽  
Free Enterprise ◽  
Individual Liberty ◽  
News Stories ◽  
Radio Industry ◽  
Democratic Principles ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Right ◽  
Free People ◽  
Magazine Articles

To a free people, the very word “censorship” always has been distasteful. In its theory, it runs counter to all democratic principles; in practice, it can never be made popular, can never please anyone.Everything the censor does is contrary to all that we have been taught to believe is right and proper. The Post Office Department, for example, has two proud mottoes: “The mail must go through,” and “The privacy of the mail must be protected at all hazards.” But censorship stops the mail, it invades the privacy of the mail, it disposes of the mail as may seem best. The same thing holds true in the publishing business. Censorship limits the lively competition and free enterprise of reporters. It relegates many a scoop to the waste basket. It wields a blue pencil—both theoretical and actual—on news stories, magazine articles, advertisements, and photographs. Censorship also enters the radio industry, where it may edit scripts and in some cases stop entire programs.Yet even the most vociferous critics of the principle of censorship agree that in war-time some form and amount of censorship is a necessity. It then becomes not merely a curtailment of individual liberty, but a matter of national security. It is one of the many restrictions that must be imposed on people fighting for the right to throw off those restrictions when peace returns.

scholarly journals The Negro Digest: Race, Exceptionalism and the Second World War

2018 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 358-389 ◽  
Author(s):  
NICHOLAS GRANT
Keyword(s):  
White Supremacy ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Global Analysis ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Border Crossing ◽  
American Democracy ◽  
Racial Oppression ◽  
The Us ◽  
The World ◽  
Second World

This article examines the border-crossing journalism of the Negro Digest, a leading African American periodical, published from 1942 to 1951. The first title produced by the Johnson Publishing Company, the Digest had an international focus that connected Jim Crow to racial oppression around the world. However, while the magazine challenged white supremacy on a local and global level, its patriotic tone and faith in American democracy occasionally restricted its global analysis of racism. Ultimately, the internationalism of the Negro Digest was quintessentially American – wedded to the exceptional status of American freedom and an overriding belief that the US could change the world for the better.

“Philosophy, Therefore, Is within Yourself”

2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 166-187
Author(s):  
Elad Carmel
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Necessary Conditions ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Human Potential ◽  
Human Reason ◽  
Advanced Form ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Relationship

The connection that Hobbes makes between reason, method, and science renders reason a faculty that is not only natural but also acquired and even somewhat exclusive. This idea might pose a serious problem to Hobbes’s political theory, as it relies heavily on the successful use of reason. This problem is demonstrated in Hobbes’s account of the laws of nature, for which some equality in human reason is clearly needed, but Hobbes is not explicit about the relationship between that and the more advanced form of reason that eventually leads to science. This article suggests that Hobbes’s account of reason is developmental. The seed of natural reason is common to everyone, and is sufficient for the establishment of the commonwealth. Thereafter, peace and leisure provide the necessary conditions for developing the rational skill, that is, fulfilling the human potential for rationality. Consequently, under the right circumstances, knowledge and science are expected to progress dramatically for the benefit of society, an open-ended vision which Hobbes nevertheless leaves implicit. Following Hobbes’s account of reason and philosophy closely can therefore show that he might have had great hopes for humankind, and that in this sense he was a key member of an English Enlightenment.

Democracy and Empire

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duncan Bell
Keyword(s):  
United Kingdom ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Imperial Politics ◽  
Liberal Thought

This chapter analyzes two renowned “new liberal” thinkers, J. A. Hobson and L. T. Hobhouse. It first highlights how they figured themselves within narratives charting the evolution of liberal thought and practice, allowing them simultaneously to pay homage to their predecessors while carving out a space for the new liberal project. It then discusses their writings about the settler colonies in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. Their accounts of colonialism undermine neat distinctions between “domestic,” “international,” and “imperial” politics and political theory. For Hobson and Hobhouse, as well as for many of their contemporaries, the colonies exhibited characteristics of all three: constitutive elements of the empire, they were nevertheless semi-autonomous states purportedly composed of people of the same nationality and race as the inhabitants of the United Kingdom.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Anushka Singh
Keyword(s):  
Free Speech ◽  
Hate Speech ◽  
Freedom Of Expression ◽  
University Of California ◽  
American Democracy ◽  
Mob Violence ◽  
A Chain ◽  
The Right ◽  
The University ◽  
Public Lecture

On 1 February 2017 at the University of California, Berkeley, USA, mob violence erupted on campus with 1,500 protesters demanding the cancellation of a public lecture by Milo Yiannopoulos, a British author notorious for his alleged racist and anti-Islamic views.1 Consequently, the event was cancelled triggering a chain of reactions on the desirability and limits of freedom of expression within American democracy. The Left-leaning intellectuals and politicians were accused of allowing the mob violence to become a riot on campus defending it in the name of protest against racism, fascism, and social injustice. In defending the rights of the protesters to not allow ‘illiberal’ or hate speech on campus, however, many claimed that the message conveyed was that only liberals had the right to free speech....

14. Power

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Owen
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Political Activity ◽  
American Democracy ◽  
Contemporary Debate ◽  
Community Power ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Freedom And Responsibility ◽  
Power Play

This chapter examines the roles that the concept of power play in the understanding of politics as well as the different modes of power. Recent political theory has seen a variety of views of power proposed, and these views have significantly different implications for conceptualizing the scope and form of political activity. Two main views concerning power are the locus of contemporary debate. The first, ‘agency-centred’ view, emerges in the Anglo-American debate that follows discussions of community power in American democracy. The second, ‘non-agency-centred’ view, emerges from the post-structuralist work of Michel Foucault. At stake, in the debate between them, are how we distinguish between injustice and misfortune, as well as how we approach the issues of freedom and responsibility. The chapter explores this debate and presents a case study on racialized inequality in America, along with Key Thinkers boxes featuring Foucault and Steven Lukes.

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