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Much contemporary political philosophy has been a debate between utilitarianism on the one hand and Kantian, or rights-based ethic has recently faced a growing challenge from a different direction, from a view that argues for a deeper understanding of citizenship and community than the liberal ethic allows.
The writings collected in this volume present leading statements of rights-based liberalism and of the communitarian, or civic republican alternatives to that position. The principle of selection has been to shift the focus from the familiar debate between utilitarians and Kantian liberals in order to consider a more powerful challenge ot the rights-based ethic, a challenge indebted, broadly speaking, to Aristotle, Hegel, and the civic republican tradition.
Contributors include Isaiah Berlin, John Rawls, Alasdair MacIntyre,
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The issue of liberalism is examined by modern thinkers........1998-05-12
This collection of articles from several prominent thinkers such as Berlin, Hayek, and Nozick, allowed for an all encompasing overview of issues facing both proponents and opponents of modern liberalism. General themes ranging from definitions of liberty to the role of the free-market in issues of distributive justice are examined. For a beginning or curious political thinker, this book offers an ideal overview for understanding the bigger, broader issues facing modern political thought.
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The University of Chicago Readings in Western Civilization (nine volumes) makes available to students and teachers a unique selection of primary documents, many in new translations. These readings, prepared for the highly praised Western civilization sequence at the University of Chicago, were chosen by an outstanding group of scholars whose experience teaching that course spans almost four decades. Each volume includes rarely anthologized selections as well as standard, more familiar texts; a bibliography of recommended parallel readings; and introductions providing background for the selections. Beginning with Periclean Athens and concluding with twentieth-century Europe, these source materials enable teachers and students to explore a variety of critical approaches to important events and themes in Western history.
Individual volumes provide essential background reading for courses covering specific eras and periods. The complete nine-volume series is ideal for general courses in history and Western civilization sequences.
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Russian Conservatism and Its Critics provides the first account of Russia’s immemorial commitment to the theory and practice of autocracy, the most formative and powerful idea in Russia’s political history. Richard Pipes considers why Russian thinkers, statesmen, and publicists have historically always argued that Russia could prosper only under an autocratic regime.
Beginning with an insightful study of the origins of Russian statehood in the Middle Ages, when the state grew out of the princely domain but was not distinguished from it, Russian Conservatism and Its Critics includes a masterful survey of Russia’s major conservative thinkers and demonstrates how conservatism is the dominant intellectual legacy of Russia. Pipes examines the geographical, historical, political, military, and social realities of the Russian empire—fundamentally unchanged by the Revolution of 1917—that have traditionally convinced its rulers and opinion leaders that decentralizing political authority would inevitably result in the country’s disintegration. Pipes has written a brilliant thesis and analysis of a hitherto overlooked aspect of the Russian intellectual tradition that continues to have significance to this day.
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How Can You Understand Russia if you Don't Understand Orthodoxy.......2007-07-29
Like so many other Western scholars, Pipes sees monarchy and autocracy as retrograde, a "system" that impeded Russia's transition to an enlightened, modern state. This has resulted in an ongoing dynamic between those forces that sought to integrate Russia into a broader European culture and those that saw Western Europe as anti-Christian. Unfortunately, to understand this dynamic properly, one has to first understand Orthodoxy and how it differs metaphysically and ontologically from what would eventually become Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. Many of the ideas credited to the Enlightenment and initiated by the Renaissance by men like Ficino, Pico, and Bruno were esoteric in nature, having their roots in Gnostic and Christian Kabbalism. The degree to which Orthodoxy took root in Russia meant that it was immune from these ideas and their apotheosis in the Englightenment. While Peter and Catherine were sympathetic to the Philosophes, the peasants and Church resisted them because they introduced distortions into what can only be called a Christian, Trinitian anthropology of Man. This is reflected in the reviewer below who quotes the Declaration of Independence -- that all Men are created equal. For the Orthodox, the first most basic truth is that all Men are created in the image and likeness of God. A specific Trinitian anthropology follows this, one involving ancestral sin, the nous, the soul, and what is possible in a fallen world - not a specifically ordered political reality geared towards what the "pure practical rules of Reason" determine to be just. Orthdoxy is not interested in creating Rawlsville but in creating a Christian society. The ideal for Orthodoxy is theosis -- not a "this worldly" ideal of social justice and the like. I would argue that one can't properly understand the Slavophiles' critique of the West or the writings of Dostoyevsky and Pobedonostsev without undestanding why they prefer monarchy to democracy. Since monarchy ideally represents the Law of God and the Law of God provides for the salvation of Man, social inequalities are simply not as relevant. Of course it is worth pointing out that while the Founding Fathers penned the Declaration of Independence, it didn't necessarily translate into a more just system that what was in place in Russia at the time. The federal government slaughtered the Indians, gave them the Trail of Tears, enslaved blacks, and embraced a doctrine of Manifest Destiny that was as jingoistic as anything that ever came out of Russia. In fact, Russia introduced more meaningful reforms for its peasants and disenfranchised than the US or Britain in the 19th century. Had the world revolutionary forces not assassinated Stolypin, who knows how the 20th century would have turned out. But one thing is clear: after the kings of Europe, Asia, and Russia had been sacrificed on the altar of freedom, equality and liberty, the world would become drenched in blood thereafter. Stick that in your "Pipes" and smoke it --
The Continuity of Authoritarian Government in Russia.......2007-05-01
Russian Conservatism and Its Critics, by Professor Richard Pipes, traces the intellectual history of Russian political thought from the late middle ages through the twentieth century. As Pipes observes early in the book, one must be careful to define what one means when using the terms such as "conservative" or "liberal". In his context, Russian conservatism connotes the pattern of strong, centralized, authoritarian government that has dominated Russia's history from early Muscovy to Vladimir Putin, with brief respites in period between the 1905 and 1917 revolutions and under Boris Yeltsin. Pipes demonstrates the strong degree of continuity in Russian political thought and practice across 500 years. Both the totalitarian nature of the Soviet regime and Putin's increasingly centralized and authoritarian rule can be better understood as directly descended from centuries old Russian political patterns. A few key points from Russian Conservatism include:
* Early Muscovite Tsars did not differentiate between the state and their personal property - they literally "owned" Russia, including both the land and it people. As late as the early 19th century, political thinkers wrote that the nobles were the slaves of the tsar and the serfs were the slaves of the nobles.
* Peter the Great westernized Russia by opening it to western ideas, but he and subsequent "liberal" rulers neither accepted nor tolerated even the most limited concepts of popular sovereignty. Western concepts such as Natural Law were actually used to justify the Tsar's absolute power.
* Peter also created the Table of Orders which established the hierarchy of the state bureaucracy. Under this scheme, the highest levels automatically became nobles, regardless of their prior social status, thereby diluting the exclusiveness of the old nobility. This process created a split in the nobility which effectively prevented it from presenting an effective challenge to the Tsar's absolute authority. Perhaps it also set the precedent for the bureaucracy's dominance in the Soviet era.
* In the west, the Catholic Church acted as a brake on the power of the monarchies by insisting that kings should rule (at least in part) in the interest of their subjects. In Russia, the church was co-opted into supporting tsarist autocracy. In the debate between the non-possessors and the possessors over whether monasteries should possess property, the tsar sided with the possessors, allowing them to retain their landed estates. In return, the church supported unlimited tsarist power.
* Western feudalism was a two-way street: the feudal lord could expect service from his retainers but was also obligated to provide them with protection - failure by either party could be grounds for termination of the feudal obligations of the other party. In Russia, feudalism was a strictly on-way street: Everyone owed service to the Tsar, who owed nothing to his subjects.
Russian Conservatism touches on themes that Pipes presented in his previous books, Russia Under the Old Regime and Property and Freedom. His newer book presents these themes in the context of the history of Russian political philosophy and its main contributors. I found it to be a useful addition to his prior works and a framework for understanding current political trends in Russia.
I suspect that another key to understanding modern Russia may lie in the concept of nationalities. In Western Europe, the multinational empires largely gave way to nation states in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The 1991 disintegration of the Soviet Union into its 15 constituent republics might be viewed as the latest manifestation of this trend. Even in its currently reduced form, which resembles Russia's borders circa 1600, Russia appears to contain a diverse collection on nationalities, characterized by differing ethnic, linguistic, cultural, and religious affiliations. Conflict between nationalities is most apparent in the Chechen war, but may exist in less violent forms among other groups within today's Russia. Perhaps Professor Pipes will be able to contribute our understanding of this issue as well.
Scratch a Russian and find a Tatar.......2006-02-16
Pipes' view of Russian history is the classical one which finds everything Russian non-European, barbaric, autocratic, and incorrigible. There is plenty of evidence supporting this view. Many Russian thinkers have concurred. Yet objective observers have to call this view of Russia "Polonophile," that is to say pro-Polish. This is what the Poles always said about the Russians, often with justification but not always. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was the exact opposite of Russia: it had powerful nobles and gentry, a Catholic as opposed to a Byzantine Church, political institutions, an openness to the West and its intellectual and religious diversity. But with all these advantages the Poles could not maintain their world, they treated the peasantry no better than the Russians did theirs, and the Poles never achieved the cultural heights of Russian literature and music. The Germans who also had all the cultural advantages of the West fell into a despotism even more degenerate and evil than the Russians. So one has to agree with Pipes that Russia is not good liberal material, but then neither are many other nations with more advantages than the Russian ever had.
In sum, one does learn much about the Russian proclivity towards authoritarianism but the book does not prove that the Russians cannot change. We may yet be surprised by Russia.
Pipes is also known for his belief that Soviet Communism simply replayed the traditional Russian proclivity for autocracy. This ignores the real achievements, the positive achievements of the Soviets: education, science, culture, literacy, modernity. Tsarist Russia was making progress by 1914 but it is hard to know what it would have achieved without the Bolsheviks.
NOT EVERYTHING SHOULD BE CONSERVED.......2006-01-16
It is perhaps sufficiently self-evident by now that we will not stand accused of mere jingoism when we say that most of the ideas necessary to the End of History were encapsulated in less than a paragraph some two hundred and thirty years ago:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Indeed, that's such idea-rich terrain that we're unlikely to be able to address them all, but let's pluck out just a few of the key ones:
(1) Human dignity comes from our Creation by God.
(2) As a result of that Creation, all Men begin life as moral equals.
(3) God grants us Rights that precede any human institutions and can not be justly compromised by any such.
(4) Governments are, in fact, created by Men in order to safeguard human dignity and vindicate those Rights.
(5) Legitimate government, then, can be said to serve God's ends and to require the consent of the governed. Any government that does not do both is by its very nature illegitimate.
So pervasive are these ideas that, for instance, I just happened to be reading a book, The Case for Goliath, by a rather non-partisan/non-ideological foreign policy wonk, Michael Mandelbaum, wherein he states as a fact:
Government is not the essence of social life. In human affairs it is secondary, emerging from, and playing a supporting role for, what is primary: the social relations and the norms they embody that make up society.
Thereby he dismisses, quite correctly, all of the competing ideologies of government to our own ideal of liberal/parliamentary/republican democracy.
The recent competitors--well worth dismissing--have been Nazism, communism/socialism, and Islamicism. But the original competitors were autocracies, which not only viewed government as primary but located that government in the person of one ruler. The longest lived of these despotisms, at least in the West, was the tsardom of Russia and it is this tragic phenomenon that Mr. Pipes explores here.
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- Is this the future for society?
- A Book For Both Philosophers and Non-Philosophers.
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Communitarianism and Its Critics
Daniel Bell
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Universalism vs. Communitarianism: Contemporary Debates in Ethics
ASIN: 0198279221 |
Book Description
Many have criticized liberalism for being too individualist, but few have offered an alternative that goes beyond a vague affirmation of the need for community. In this entertaining book, written in dialogue form, Daniel Bell fills this gap, presenting and defending a distinctively communitarian theory against the objections of a liberal critic. In a Paris cafe Anne, a strong supporter of communitarian ideals, and Philip, her querulous critic, debate the issues. Drawing on the works of such thinkers as Charles Taylor, Michael Sandel, and Alasdair MacIntyre, Anne attacks liberalism's individualistic view of the person by pointing to our social embeddedness. She develops Michael Walzer's idea that political thinking involves the interpretation of shared meanings emerging from the political life of a community, and rebuts Philip's criticism that this approach damages her case by being conservative and relativistic. She goes on to develop a justification of communal life and to answer the criticism that communitarians lack an alternative moral vision. The book ends with two later discussions, by Will Kymlicka and Daniel Bell, in which Anne and another friend, Louise, criticize the book's earlier debate and put it in perspective.
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Is this the future for society?.......2006-12-25
Communitarianism occupies an interesting place between liberalism and conservativism. Many of the conclusions that Daniel Bell reaches seemed to be progressive, but not all of the underlying theory is liberal some is a lot closer to conservativism. This is what makes Communitarianism such an intriguing philosophy for many people. The first part of the book is concerned with what people are really like, what people really are. Bell's answer to the question is what people really are is determined by the communities that they belong to. At least some of the communities we belong to determine, what we really are. So for Bell, who we are is really determined by the communities that we belong to. Bell believes that there are some communities that we belong to that are responsible for making us who we are not necessarily that every community we belong to has an effect on us. Moreover, largely, these are not communities that we can choose to belong to or largely that we can choose to get out of, since they are a part of who we are as a person. Moreover, the significance of this is that the communities that we ultimately belong to in some sense has a determination on the kind of life that ultimately, we ought to lead. We live in the communities, we have certain roles in these communities, and ultimately the way we reaffirm life will be successfully determined on how we complete our roles in these communities. Bell is saying that the good life for people is about all the different communities that they belong to and how they deal and them. We belong to a family. We belong to a neighborhood. We belong to religion. We belong to a nation and the good life is going to be how we successfully complete all of the roles in the different communities. The book talks allot about constitutive communities and Bell is talking about communities that we all have grown up in and belong to, such as our nation and the city that we grew up in, our family, our nation. For Bell, what is really important is where you grow up. So we have these communities that we are socialized into, most of our lines are more or less on automatic pilot just acting in ways that we've learned to act in these different communities. Bell thinks it is the learning from our constitutive to communities, which is the determining factor in how we make decisions. Bell seems to imply that one cannot convert from a religion or come out of our community and I think that this raises all kinds of problems with his theory. In addition, if you were raised without any kinds of communities then Bell uses a phrase in his book, which implies that you are going to go through life always having problems. The phrase "you are bitched from the start."
There is a lot of Rousseau in communitarianism however, communitarians would say that you can have large nations and belong to large groups and Rousseau did not think that that was the case. Rousseau would also say that the only way change society is through revolution. Rousseau is actually more interested in making society. Rousseau said, you can only do this on a small scale, and people like Bell say no. All of Western civilization can be communitarian. In addition, part of why this is true is that communitarians are interested in smaller communities and not just state or national communities. They are not just talking about the communities that Rousseau would they are also talking about communities such as family and religion. Communitarians do believe that real communities are possible.
There is an idea out this book that I want to emphasize. It is the idea that communities share the same values and "shared meanings" the phrase Bell uses, within a community. This then raises the question on, what are the shared meanings or shared values that a community shares? The other thing that falls under the heading of advocacy is that the government should act in ways that makes people take all of their constituent communities seriously. They should encourage people to accept and indorse the constitutive communities that they have. There is not a lot of detail in the book. However, there is a notion that the government should give some type of economic incentive to keep people in their communities and that they do not move away. In other words, change the economic system so that people could stay in their community, and people moving would become less often.
The important thing to get out of this book is the opposition between the communitarianism that certain communities we are a part of, we just can't stop being a part of; versus the liberal view that says that we can choose, that we can step back and reflect on different community attachments and cut ourselves off from some of these. Bell would say as for instance that you cannot cut yourself off from your family and all of the psychological effects and a liberal would say yes you could. For Bell, free will really means acting on the moral basis or framework that your community gave you. Those who are actually spurning their communities are the ones that Bell thinks really do not have free will, and are acting in a restricted manner.
I read this book for a graduate class in Philosophy.
Recommended reading for anyone interested in philosophy, political science, and history.
A Book For Both Philosophers and Non-Philosophers........2001-02-05
I am not a philosopher and I do not have any knowledge of communitarianism prior to reading Bell's work. Still, I find this doctorate thesis which Bell wrote at Oxford a very interesting, engaging and thought-provocative one.
Bell traces the history of communitarianism and illustrates the main pillars in this paradigm. In so doing, he also argues that communitarianism is closer to the natural aspirations of human beings and its political implications offer more protection on human freedom than the liberals would otherwise suggest.
This is not a typical doctorate thesis that one would normally expect - one that is very dry and has citations appearing almost at the end of every sentences. Rather, Bell presents the thoughts of communitarians and those of its critics (mostly libertarians) in an often lively dialogue format - not indifferent from those in Plato's time.
I highly reccommend this book to those who are dissatisfied with liberalism and the current political system it shapes. Bell and his fellow communitarians may offer you important insights to human aspirations. It may also give you inspirations for a new form of participatory democracy which emphasizes more on the common good and overcomes the challenges of individualism.
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Embedded Liberalism and Its Critics: Justifying Global Governance in the American Century (New Visions in Security)
Jens Steffek
Manufacturer: Palgrave Macmillan
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ASIN: 1403971803
Release Date: 2006-07-20 |
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Focusing on the development of justificatory discourse on global governance, Steffek examines how differing conceptions of distributive and social justice have played a role in negotiations in the domains of economics and protecting the environment.
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Liberal Democracy and its Critics: Perspectives in Contemporary Political Thought
Geoffrey Stokes
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ASIN: 0745619207 |
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Liberal Democracy and its Critics examines the contribution of eleven contemporary political social theorists to understanding democracy today. The theorists are prominent in political and philosophical debates in the 1990s, for example between neo-liberalism (Hayek) and social liberalism (Rawls), and between liberalism and republicanism (Arendt), communitarianism (Taylor and Walzer), 'anti-political politics' (Havel) and feminism (Pateman and Young). The book also explores how the philosophical defence of universalism (Habermas) or critiques of it (Foucault and Rorty) impinge on assessments of liberal democracy. The eleven theorists reflect varying approaches to key issues in democratic thought since 1945: liberal constitutionalism or popular sovereignty, elitism or participation and parliamentary or council democracy. Many also engage with more recent themes such as civil society, the politics of difference, deliberative democracy, and the nature of cosmopolitan democracy. Some focus on the justification of democracy, others make specific institutional proposals. The chapters set the thinkers within their intellectual and political contexts and explore the relationship between their philosophical positions and explicit or implicit views on democracy. They will be of interest both to students of contemporary social thought and of democracy.Contributors to the book include Margaret Canovan, April Carter, Don Fletcher, John Horton, Mark Kingwell, Chandran Kukathas, Martin Leet, Lois McNay, Barbara Sullivan, Katherine Welton and Jonathan Wolff.
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Liberalism and Its Critics
Kirk F. Koerner
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ASIN: 0312483236 |
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Liberalism at the Crossroads: An Introduction to Contemporary Liberal Political Theory and Its Critics
Christopher Wolfe
Manufacturer: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
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ASIN: 0742532704 |
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Liberalism at the Crossroads offers succinct, accessible, and well-written surveys of the ideas of the leading participants in the contemporary philosophical debate about liberalism. Visit our website for sample chapters!
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