Preamble

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Ryan
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
Bertrand Russell ◽  
Alexis De Tocqueville ◽  
Isaiah Berlin

This book explores the history and nature of liberalism and includes the views of political thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, John Stuart Mill, Bertrand Russell, Isaiah Berlin, Alexis de Tocqueville, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and G.W.F. Hegel. Part 1 of the book deals with conceptual and practical issues and covers topics ranging from liberalism and freedom to culture, and death penalty. Part 2 deals with liberty and security and includes Hobbes's political philosophy as well as Locke's thoughts on freedom. Part 3 examines liberty and progress and includes topics such as Mill's political thought, utilitarianism and bureaucracy, democracy, and Berlin's political theory. Part 4 focuses on liberalism in America, and Part 5 is concerned with work, ownership, freedom, and self-realization.

The Making of Modern Liberalism

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Ryan
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Social Identity ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Liberal Tradition ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of

This book is a deep and wide-ranging exploration of the origins and nature of liberalism from the Enlightenment through its triumphs and setbacks in the twentieth century and beyond. The book is the fruit of more than four decades during which the author reflected on the past of the liberal tradition—and worried about its future. This is essential reading for anyone interested in political theory or the history of liberalism. The book consists of five parts. It covers subjects such as liberalism, freedom, the liberal community and the death penalty, Thomas Hobbes's political philosophy, individualism, human nature, John Locke on freedom, John Stuart Mill's political thought, utilitarianism and bureaucracy, pragmatism, social identity, patriotism, self-criticism, and more.

Kierkegaard's Socratic Alternative to Hegel in Fear and Trembling

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Matthew Dinan
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Fear And Trembling

Abstract Søren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling has traditionally attracted interest from scholars of political theory for its apparent hostility to political philosophy, and more recently for its compatibility with Marxism. This paper argues for a reconsideration of Kierkegaard's potential contributions to political theory by suggesting that the work's shortcomings belong to its pseudonymous author, Johannes de Silentio, and are in fact intended by Kierkegaard. Attentiveness to the literary development of the pseudonym allows us to see a Kierkegaard who is a deeper and more direct critic of Hegel's political philosophy than is usually presumed. By creating a pseudonym whose argument ultimately fails, Kierkegaard employs Socratic irony in order to point readers to the need to recover Socratic political philosophy as the appropriate adjunct to the faith of Abraham, and as an alternative to Hegelian, and post-Hegelian, political thought.

Roger Boesche: The Strange Liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville

1988 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 419-422
Author(s):  
James Schleifer
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Alexis De Tocqueville ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
History Of

Roger Boesche, Chair of the Department of Political Science at Occidental College in Los Angeles, lias already written several thoughtful articles about Tocqueville, each marked by clarity of thought and expression: ’The Prison: Tocqueville’s Model for Despotism,” Western Political Quarterly 33 (December 1980):550-63; “The Strange Liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville,” History of Political Thought 2 (Winter 1981): 495-524; “Why Could Tocqueville Predict So Well?” Political Theory 11 (February 1983): 79-104; “Tocqueville and Le Commerce’. A Newspaper Expressing His Unusual Liberalism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 44 (April-June 1983): 277-92; and “Hedonism and Nihilism: The Predictions of Tocqueville and Nietzsche,” The Tocqueville Review 8 (1986/87): 165-84.

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.

Calvinists, Arminians, Socinians: Popular Sovereignty and Natural Rights in Early Modern Political Thought

2019 ◽  
pp. 21-35
Author(s):  
James Moore
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
The Political ◽  
Reformed Church ◽  
Hugo Grotius

This chapter focuses upon natural rights in the writings of Hugo Grotius, the Levellers and John Locke and the manner in which their understanding of rights was informed by distinctive Protestant theologies: by Arminianism or the theology of the Remonstrant Church and by Socinianism. The chapter argues that their theological principles and the natural rights theories that followed from those principles were in conflict with the theology of Calvin and the theologians of the Reformed church. The political theory that marks the distinctive contribution of Calvin and the Reformed to political theory was the idea of popular sovereignty, an idea revived in the eighteenth century, in the political writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

The Scholastic and Conciliar Roots of Samuel Rutherford’s Political Philosophy

2020 ◽  
pp. 208-226
Author(s):  
Simon J. G. Burton
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Way

Samuel Rutherford’s Lex Rex remains a source of perennial fascination for historians of political thought. Written in 1644 in the heat of the Civil Wars it constitutes an intellectual and theological justification of the entire Covenanting movement and a landmark in the development of Protestant political theory. Rutherford’s argument in the Lex Rex was deeply indebted to scholastic and Conciliarist sources, and this chapter examines the way he deployed these, especially the political philosophy of John Mair and Jacques Almain, in order to construct a covenantal model of kingship undergirded by an interwoven framework of individual and communal rights. In doing so it shows the ongoing influence of the Conciliarist tradition on Scottish political discourse and also highlights unexpected connections between Rutherford’s Covenanting and his Augustinian and Scotistic theology of grace and freedom.

Political Theory and the Study of Politics: A Report of a Conference

1956 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 475-487 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harry Eckstein
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The Other ◽  
Sharp Distinction ◽  
Basic Issue ◽  
Political Inquiry ◽  
The One

The issues which arose during the discussions of the conference fall fairly conveniently into three compartments.First, we obviously had to settle, with reasonable clarity, what we were talking about: what “political philosophy” is, what “political science” is, and whether they are really distinguishable. The basic issue of the conference was to determine the relevance of the one to the study of the other, and if we had decided that they were really the same thing, there would simply have been no problems for us to discuss. On the whole, we felt that a valid, if not necessarily sharp, distinction was to be made between the “philosophical” and the “scientific” approaches to the study of politics and that we were not discussing absurd or tautological issues. We agreed, however, that all types of political inquiry involve the construction of theory, implicit or explicit, and that the title “political theory” has been unjustifiably appropriated by the historians of political thought.

Kant’s Political Philosophy as a Theory of Non-Ideal Normativity

Kant-Studien ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 107 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christoph Horn
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Categorical Imperative ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract:Kant’s political philosophy confronts its interpreters with a crucial difficulty: it is far from clear if (or how) Kant, in his political theory, makes use of the Categorical Imperative (CI). It is notoriously demanding to clarify the relationship that exists between his political thought on the one hand and the ethics of the

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