Uniting Individualism and Statism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick J. Deneen
Keyword(s):  
John Dewey ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Richard Rorty ◽  
National Government ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Local Institutions ◽  
Classical Liberalism ◽  
Individual Liberty ◽  
Social Equality

This chapter examines the ways in which the individualist philosophy of classical liberalism and the statist philosophy of progressive liberalism reinforce each other. It begins with a discussion of the conflict between the “conservatives,” who advance the project of individual liberty and equality of opportunity especially through defense of a free and unfettered market, and the liberals, who aim at securing greater economic and social equality through extensive reliance upon the regulatory and judicial powers of the national government. The chapter shows how statism and individualism grow together while local institutions and respect for natural limits diminish, noting that, despite their differences, this ambition animated thinkers such as John Locke, John Dewey, Francis Bacon, Francis Bellamy, Adam Smith, and Richard Rorty.

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.

Classical Liberalism

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Tomasi
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
David Hume ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Free Market ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Classical Liberalism ◽  
Market Society ◽  
Economic Liberty ◽  
Service Programs ◽  
Revolutionary America

This chapter offers an intellectual history of liberalism, focusing on the classical view that was eventually displaced by modern, “high” liberalism. It first considers classical liberalism's notion of equality and property rights as well as economic liberty before discussing the ideas of thinkers like John Locke, Adam Smith, David Hume, and F. A. Hayek. It then explores the emergence of market society, with particular emphasis on what Smith called “the system of natural liberty.” It also examines classical liberal ideas in action during under revolutionary America and concludes with an analysis of the essential features of classical liberalism: a thick conception of economic liberty grounded mainly in consequentialist considerations; a formal conception of equality that sees the outcome of free market exchanges as largely definitive of justice; and a limited but important state role in tax-funded education and social service programs.

Origins of British Enlightenment Rhetoric

2014 ◽  
pp. 522-534
Author(s):  
Arthur Walzer
Keyword(s):  
David Hume ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Rhetorical Theory ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Traditional Theory ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
George Campbell ◽  
Joseph Priestley ◽  
Literature History

British rhetorical theory in the eighteenth century departs from classical theory in significant ways. First, influenced by the empiricism of Francis Bacon, John Locke, and especially David Hume, Joseph Priestley and George Campbell recast traditional theory in psychological terms. Second, influenced by the belles lettres tradition, Adam Smith and Hugh Blair shift the focus of rhetoric from composition to criticism and create a theory intended to account for literature, history, philosophy, and oratory. Furthermore, in terms of rhetoric’s formative ideal, Quintilian’s ideal orator would share his place of privilege with the polite person of “taste” and “sensibility,” who would speak in a conversational register, as the coffeehouse emerged as a venue to rival the forum. Some scholars have welcomed these innovations; others have seen them as a radical wrong turn. This chapter discusses this transformation of rhetoric during the Enlightenment and reviews and attempts to resolve the scholarly debates the transformation has prompted.

The Novel of Sensibility in the 1780s

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caroline Franklin
Keyword(s):  
John Locke ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Francis Hutcheson ◽  
Literary Movement ◽  
Epistolary Novels ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter studies the novels of sensibility in the 1780s. The philosophy of John Locke, Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, Adam Smith, and Francis Hutcheson had influenced the first wave of epistolary novels of sensibility beginning in the 1740s. These explored the interaction between emotion and reason in producing moral actions. Response to stimuli was minutely examined, especially the relationship between the psychological and physiological manifestations of feelings. Later in the century, and, in particular during the late 1780s when the novel enjoyed a surge in popularity, the capacity for fine feeling became increasingly valued for its own sake rather than moralized. Ultimately, sensibility should be seen as a long-lasting literary movement rather than an ephemeral fashion. It put paternal authority and conventional modes of masculinity under question.

THE EARLY MODERN ORIGINS OF BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS

2020 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-54
Author(s):  
Richard Boyd
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Cognitive Biases ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Economic Rationality ◽  
Homo Economicus ◽  
Behavioral Psychology ◽  
Human Conduct ◽  
The Social

AbstractFor all the recent discoveries of behavioral psychology and experimental economics, the spirit of homo economicus still dominates the contemporary disciplines of economics, political science, and sociology. Turning back to the earliest chapters of political economy, however, reveals that pioneering figures such as Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, and Adam Smith were hardly apostles of economic rationality as they are often portrayed in influential narratives of the development of the social sciences. As we will see, while all three of these thinkers can plausibly be read as endorsing “rationality,” they were also well aware of the systematic irrationality of human conduct, including a remarkable number of the cognitive biases later “discovered” by contemporary behavioral economists. Building on these insights I offer modest suggestions for how these thinkers, properly understood, might carry the behavioral revolution in different directions than those heretofore suggested.

Passion's Fictions from Shakespeare to Richardson

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benedict S. Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Adam Smith ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Theoretical Knowledge ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Critical Moment ◽  
Intimate Relation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Social Scenes

Passion’s Fictions traces the intimate links between literature and the sciences of soul and mind from the age of Shakespeare to the rise of the novel. It chronicles the emergence of new sciences of the passions between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries out of and in some ways against a received “science of the soul,” and it argues that this history was shaped by rhetoric, which contained the most extensively particularized discourse on the passions, offering principles for moving and affecting the passions of others in concrete social scenes. This rhetoric of the passions centered on narrative as the instrument of a non-theoretical knowledge of the passions in their particularity, predicated on an account of passion as an intimate relation between an empassioned mind and an empassioning world: rhetoric offers a kind of externalist psychology, formalized in the relation of passion to action and underwriting an account of narrative as a means of both moving passion and knowing it. This book describes the psychology of the passions before the discipline of psychology, tracing the influence of rhetoric on theories of the passions from Francis Bacon to Adam Smith and using that history to read literary works by Shakespeare, Milton, Haywood, Richardson, and others. Narrative offers a means of knowing and moving the passions by tracing them to the events and objects that generate them; the history of narrative practices is thus a key part of the history of the psychology of the passions at a critical moment in its development.

scholarly journals Pragmatismo e economia: elementos filosóficos para uma interpretação do discurso econômico

2006 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 637-661
Author(s):  
Paulo Gala ◽  
Danilo Araújo Fernandes ◽  
José Márcio Rego
Keyword(s):  
John Dewey ◽  
William James ◽  
Richard Rorty ◽  
Charles Sanders Peirce ◽  
Thorstein Veblen ◽  
Milton Friedman

Partindo do debate atual sobre retórica em economia, o trabalho tem por objetivo trazer elementos da corrente filosófica do pragmatismo para a discussão metodológica entre economistas, particularmente no que diz respeito à teoria da verdade e suas implicações epistemológicas. Após apresentar as contribuições dos pioneiros da filosofia pragmatista, William James, John Dewey e Charles Sanders Peirce, e discutir aspectos da obra de Willard Quine e Richard Rorty, procura identificar influências dessa corrente filosófica em importantes economistas tais como John M. Keynes, Milton Friedman e Thorstein Veblen. Por fim conclui com algumas reflexões possivelmente úteis para a prática da ciência econômica.

Evaluating conditions for successful co-management of subsistence fisheries in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa

2005 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-177 ◽  
Author(s):  
VICTORIA R. NAPIER ◽  
GEORGE M. BRANCH ◽  
JEAN M. HARRIS
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Rural Communities ◽  
National Government ◽  
Strongly Correlated ◽  
Local Institutions ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Subsistence Fisheries ◽  
Perceived Success ◽  
Kwazulu Natal

Conditions important for the success of co-management have repeatedly been identified, but their relative influence has not been quantitatively evaluated. To investigate the implementation of co-management in 11 subsistence fisheries within seven rural communities in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, perceptions of the responsible authorities and the fishing communities were surveyed. Of 16 conditions often considered important for the success of co-management, only nine were correlated with perceived success, the most strongly correlated being (1) benefits of co-management must exceed costs of participation, (2) training and empowerment, and (3) existence of a long-term ‘champion’ to drive the process. The perceptions of the authorities concurred with those of the communities with regards to the attainment of conditions, but views on the success of co-management differed significantly owing to disagreements that were specific to three particular fisheries. Both groups agreed that co-management is a viable improvement on top-down authoritarian imposition of regulations. However, it takes time to become effective; perceived success was directly correlated with how long individual programmes had been operating. Failure to devolve power from national government to local institutions, and delays in awarding subsistence permits, remain the major stumbling blocks to full realization of co-management.

The Political Culture of Emancipation: Morality, Politics, and the State in Garrisonian Abolitionism, 1854–1863

1995 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-184
Author(s):  
Mark Voss-Hubbard
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
National Government ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Moral Purpose ◽  
Individual Liberty ◽  
Federal Authority ◽  
Emancipation Proclamation

Historians have long recognized the unprecedented expansion of federal power during the Civil War. Moreover most scholars agree that the expansion of federal power manifested itself most immediately and profoundly in the abolition of slavery. In a sense, through the Emancipation Proclamation, the Republican administration injected the national government into the domain of civil rights, and by doing so imbued federal power with a distinct moral purpose. The passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments codified this expression of federal authority, rejecting the bedrock tenet in American republican thought that centralized power constituted the primary threat to individual liberty.

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