Rousseau is considered to be at once the most modern political thinker of the 18th century and the most ancient in his allegiance to classical republicanism. These essays address the place of liberty in his moral and political philosophy, and the origins, meaning, strength, weakness and significance of his argument.

This paper evaluates Mill’s arguments favoring a society with an economy dominated by “a principle of individual property” over alternatives dominated by the common ownership of the conditions of life and wealth. Mill’s strategy for addressing the problem of property consists in conducting a comparison of competing systems of ownership (capitalism, socialism or communism) on the criterion of which best distributes wealth to the individual. Mill applies this criterion in the evaluation of these systems in light of three considerations: (...) (1) their feasibility in a highly developed society, (2) their efficiency and likelihood of continuing improvement in comparison to competing systems, and (3) their consistency with and conduciveness to individual liberty. This paper investigates Mill’s arguments regarding the application of these and related considerations to the arguments of socialist and communist theorists with whose views he was familiar and, in varying degrees, sympathetic. As argued here, the arguments Mill employs are not, on his own terms and especially with respect to liberty, adequate to justify his general contention that given the inadequate moral and intellectual development of citizens, it is better to gamble on a private property economy than a socialist alternative. (shrink)

Socialism has long been thought by many to be the enemy of freedom. Here, I argue that in order to understand the relationship between socialism and freedom, we must have a better idea both of what socialism is and of what it is to have a right to freedom. To start, I argue that the right to freedom is best understood as a right to direct one’s own will in the world consistently with the rights of others (...) to do the same. This Kantian conception of the right to freedom is importantly different from the ubiquitous conception of freedom as negative liberty: with this Kantian conception, one’s right to freedom is limited to directing one’s own will and does not include a right to direct the wills of others. I then argue that socialism, like the right to freedom, is often misunderstood: today, socialists often argue for robustly democratic forms of socialism that are far from the autocratic so-called “socialist” regimes of the last century. With a better understanding of both socialism and the right to freedom, we can see that the right to freedom is indeed compatible with a robustly democratic form of socialism. (shrink)

Most people will need an introduction to the life and thought of Aurel Kolnai. Born into a liberal Jewish family in Hungary he converted to Catholicism in his mid-twenties, studied with Husserl, and fought against Hitler with his pen in the Austrian press and with a mammoth study of National Socialist ideology, The War Against the West, which did much to educate Western opinion. The war was spent in the United States. Between 1945 and 1955 he taught at Laval University (...) in Quebec, alternately suffering from the Canadian winter and from what he took to be a fetishistic attitude toward St. Thomas. From 1955 until his death he taught at Bedford College in England. In England he encountered and assimilated the best of English philosophical thought, both analytic and moral. He particularly was impressed by the “intuitionist school,” which reminded him of phenomenology and the “material values” ethics he had studied on the Continent. (shrink)

The object of this research is gentleness, a construct maybe not treated enough in the literature, but just in the area of the so called Positive Psychology. And precisely from his representative Martin Seligman, the inspiration for the construction of a questionnaire and of a specific hypothesis has been born, including the use of a precise terminology. In general terms, maybe the most interesting result lies in the fact of having found a correlation between the various items, therefore between the (...) various constructs, in accordance with the idea of gentleness proposed as a synergy of “quality”. This idea has also been supported from recent research in which has emerged a very tight bond between optimism and a particular character trait that is extroversion. Being placed at a higher, transcendental level, the “gift of oneself” could become the “jump of quality” to fulfil ourselves in the relation with the other. (shrink)

The paper identifies the rule of law, the carriers of institutional restructuring, and the prevailing informal rules in the community as three critical determinants of the outcome of institutional restructuring in the community. The paper demonstrates that the analysis of the interaction among these three determinants – a claim I call the interaction thesis – explains why the transition from socialism to the market economy in postwar West Germany was a success, why the transition to capitalism in Eastern Europe (...) is still uncertain, and why the use of economic policies based on neoclassical economics have produced the rising strength of pro-socialist parties. The conclusion is that the interaction thesis is a powerful and perhaps necessary method for the analysis of institutional changes and their causes, directions and consequences.Cet article identifie l’état de droit, les supports des réformes institutionnelles, et les règles communautaires informelles qui y sont prévalent comme les trois facteurs explicatifs majeurs du succès ou de l’échec de la réforme institutionnelle dans un pays. Cet article démontre que l’analyse de l’interaction entre ces trois facteurs explicatifs – ce que j’appelle la thèse de l’interaction – explique, en premier lieu, le succès de la transition du socialisme vers l’économie de marché en Allemagne de l’Ouest de l’aprèsguerre, ensuite pourquoi la transition vers le capitalisme en Europe de l’Est demeure incertaine, et, enfin, pourquoi le recours à des politiques économiques fondées sur la science économique néoclassique a revigoré les partis politiques à orientation socialiste. La conclusion est que la thèse de l’interaction est une méthode féconde et peut-être nécessaire pour analyser les changements institutionnels ainsi que leurs causes, leurs directions et leurs conséquences. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:594 Feminist Studies 41, no. 3. © 2015 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Liberty Walther Barnes and Christin L. Munsch The Paradoxical Privilege of Men and Masculinity in Institutional Review Boards In the 1939 Hollywood classic The Wizard of Oz, the great wizard admonishes Dorothy and her friends to “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.” Dorothy and company turn to see a man standing before a (...) large control panel operating the smoke, holographic image, and voice of the great wizard. Realizing he has been discovered, the man gives up manipulating the switches and the nebulous wizard vanishes.1 Hegemonic masculinity is analogous to the “all-powerful” wizard.2 In order to maintain its grandeur, power, and mystique, the mechanics of masculine ideology—as well as the social actors who participate in its reproduction —must be kept hidden.3 A crucial aim of feminist research is to 1. The Wizard of Oz, directed by Victor Fleming (Culver City, CA: Metro-Goldwyn -Mayer, 1939). 2. See R. W. Connell, Masculinities: Knowledge, Power and Social Change (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1995); R. W. Connell and James W. Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept,” Gender & Society 19 (2005): 829–61; Michael Kaufman, “Me, Feminism, and Men’s Contradictory Experiences of Power,” in Theorizing Masculinities, ed. Harry Brod and Michael Kaufman (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1994), 142– 63; and Michael S. Kimmel, “Masculinity as Homophobia: Fear, Shame, and Silence in the Construction of Gender Identity” in Brod and Kaufman, Theorizing Masculinities, 119–42. 3. Michael Flood and Bob Pease, “Undoing Men’s Privilege and Advancing Gender Equality in Public Sector Institutions,” Policy and Society 24, no. 4 (2005): 119–38; Allan G. Johnson, The Gender Knot: Unraveling Liberty Walther Barnes and Christin L. Munsch 595 pull back the curtain on men’s lives and masculine institutions in order to demystify socially constructed masculinities, particularly in their most powerful forms. As early feminist scholars note, male privilege renders women’s lives invisible.4 But male privilege renders aspects of men’s lives invisible, too. In this article we highlight how institutional review boards (IRBs) in universities and hospitals erect barriers to research that render particular aspects of men’s lives invisible. We draw on our experiences of submitting ten applications for a series of methodologically diverse studies of masculinity to eight IRBs. First, we argue that, despite their original function of protecting subordinated groups, IRBs are gendered institutions in which members base their decisions on culturally dominant, normative images of women and men. We show how this results in the stringent protection of male research participants, the safeguarding of participants’ personal masculinity, and the shielding of men’s lives from social inquiry. Second, we argue that IRBs are gendering institutions. Our experiences reveal how the privileging and protection of masculinity results in mandatory protocol modifications that idealize hegemonic masculinity. These modifications require researcher-participant interactions that socialize men to engage in gender “appropriate” behavior and reify gendered expectations. Third, our experiences reveal the ways in which IRBs protect the institution itself and privilege the universities, hospitals, and (predominantly male) medical doctors they represent. Consequently, the ways they reproduce social inequality remain impervious to academic inquiry. IRBS AS GENDERED AND GENDERING INSTITUTIONS Every university and hospital in the United States where human research is conducted houses a human research protections program, or IRB, to oversee academic research. Universities with hospitals typically our Patriarchal Legacy (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1997); Michael Kimmel, Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men (New York: Harper Collins, 2008). 4. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Howard M. Parshley (New York: Knopf, 1951); Sandra Harding, The Science Question in Feminism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986); Dorothy E. Smith, “Women’s Perspective as a Radical Critique of Sociology,” in Feminist Perspectives on Social Research, ed. Sharlene N. Hesse-Biber and Michelle L. Yaiser (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 84–96. 596 Liberty Walther Barnes and Christin L. Munsch maintain two types of IRB committees: a social-behavioral committee that oversees studies in the social sciences, and a biomedical committee to supervise clinical drug trials, experimental medical treatments, and tissue and blood research. The duty of the... (shrink)

The thrust of Berger's defense of capitalism and rejection of socialism appears in two 1981 articles in the Harvard Business Review by Podhoretz and Berger. The latter is the basis of chapter 9 in The Capitalist Revolution. Both pieces look like classified advertisements, offering the services of neoconservative intellectuals as the “new defenders of capitalism.” The 1980 election returns, Berger wrote, have shown that “the recent political isolation of business might be at an end, and with its passing American (...) society might come again to understand the value of its capitalist heritage.” Yet, Berger warned, the complete restoration of the legitimacy of the business community “will depend as much on successful competition over ideas as on successful performance in the market.”. (shrink)

We study the two model-theoretic concepts of weak saturation and weak amalgamation property in the context of accessible categories. We relate these two concepts providing sufficient conditions for existence and uniqueness of weakly saturated objects of an accessible category ${\cal K}$. We discuss the implications of this fact in classical model theory.

Those who vote intelligently vote for principles as much as they do for policy. The problem is that bodies of principle tend to be incompatible with each other. In fact, they normally conflict, head-on. Conservatism and socialism are two obvious examples here. My point, therefore, is that, with this type of incompatibility, it is difficult to see how any coalition could be maintained for long without a considerable sacrifice of principle – not to say integrity – by at least (...) one of the parties to it. (shrink)

The visibility of environmental problems and the increasing awareness of associated consequences have made environmental issues salient in Zambia. The purpose of this study was to investigate correlations between the social and psychological influences affecting college students in Zambia, and the behaviours perceived by them to be appropriately environmentally friendly. The underlying social and psychological factors that would determine individuals' attitudinal responses toward appropriate environmental behaviour were assessed. The study attempted to measure behavioural tendencies towards environmental conservation. Behaviour involving energy (...) and water conservation (EW) was consistently rated as the most important, and appropriate category of environmental behaviour, whereas social and political action (SP) was viewed as the least favourable behaviour according to the respondents in Zambia. The respondents who were older in the graduate level of the study and had frequently contact with environmental education activities and courses were more likely to hold positive behavioural tendencies toward environmental conservation in general. (shrink)

I. Accompanying the rise of professed socialists to political prominence in the United States and Britain, a growing academic literature, spearheaded by French economist Thomas Piketty’s bestsellin...

While both men and women work out in contemporary gyms, popular conceptions of the gym as a masculine institution continue. The authors examine organizational processes within a chain of women-only gyms to explore whether and how these processes have feminized the historically masculine gym. They examine the physical setting and equipment, the established procedures for customers' use of machines, and the interactional styles of employees as components of the organization's structure. They argue that the organization's use of technology and labor (...) mobilizes customers' participation in a feminized organizational culture of nonjudgmental and noncompetitive sociability. Organizational processes create a context that fosters gendered interactions and identities among customers. The organizational context calls gendered behavior into play such that the performance is naturalized. The processes outlined may occur in other cases of organizational recoding and suggest ways that transposable gender practices may change the gender coding of an institution yet leave gender hierarchies intact. (shrink)

If one values freedom, what sort of regime of property should one favor: libertarianism, socialism, or something else again? Debate on this topic has been hampered by a failure to distinguish freedom and liberty, which are both of great value, but can come into conflict. Furthermore there are many similar concepts—distinct from both liberty and freedom, yet each representing something we rightly value—which may also come into conflict with each other and with freedom and liberty. Consequently (...) the question posed above has no easy answer. (shrink)

Socialist republicans advocate public ownership and control of the means of production in order to achieve the republican goal of a society without endemic domination. While civic republicanism is often attacked for its conservatism, the relatively neglected radical history of the tradition shows how a republican form of socialism provides powerful conceptual resources to critique capitalism for leaving workers and citizens dominated. This analysis supports a programme of public ownership and economic democracy intended to reduce domination in the workplace (...) and wider society. I defend this socialist republicanism from both the Marxist objection that it overlooks the impersonal nature of domination under capitalism and the left-liberal objections that property-owning democracy or worker codetermination are sufficient to suppress dominating relationships. The resulting position identifies the need for more ambitious institutional grounds for republican liberty than is often supposed, while offering us a distinctive emancipatory justification for socialism. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article examines Oscar Wilde’s liberal socialist tract, ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’. It posits three discrete arguments. It argues, firstly, that in ‘The Soul of Man’ Wilde was deeply engaged with the socialist theory of William Morris. It claims that Wilde not only repudiated Morris’s aesthetic philosophy, rejecting Morris’s views about co-operation, usefulness, and tradition, and pouring scorn on the notion of dignity in manual labour, but that Wilde also echoed Morris’s utopian romance, News from Nowhere, (...) in two important respects: namely, in his account of crime and punishment on the one hand, and in his treatment of the notion of human nature on the other. Secondly, this article argues that, in ‘The Soul of Man’, Wilde drew on both Ralph Waldo Emerson and John Stuart Mill. It shows how Wilde plagiarised and repurposed ideas drawn from Emerson’s essay, ‘Self-Reliance’. But, in addition, it demonstrates how Wilde duplicated Mill’s view of democracy, individuality, and progress as set out in On Liberty. Finally, then, this article argues that, in his treatment of thrift, gratitude, discontent, and rebellion, Wilde was strongly influenced by Charles Baudelaire’s dramatisation of ‘true philanthropy’ in the narrative prose poem, ‘Let’s Beat Up The Poor!’. (shrink)

Liberal Socialism exposes false ideas of justice behind neo-liberal capitalism and combines Rawls's ideas on justice and Marx's views on capitalism to make a plausible case for the alternative social ideal of liberal socialism. A fixed social structure gives equal weight to all competing claims for rights, liberties, and shares of the burdens and benefits of social cooperation, while allowing a democratic majority vote for liberal socialism.

Socialists believe that equality, community, and economic democracy can only be achieved by a system of joint ownership in the means of production. These property rights do not, as such, pass judgment as to what rights individuals have to their own person. Libertarians believe that individual liberty and autonomy are only coextensive with a set of stringent rights to the person and its powers. These property rights do not, as such, pass judgment as to what rights individuals have to (...) the external world. Bringing libertarianism and socialism together is therefore, in principle, possible. This paper takes this further step, by sketching a constituiton that reconciles individual autonomy with radical equality of condition. To those libertarians drawn to socialist values (such as the pioneers of nineteenth-century anarchism), the paper offers a reconciliation that is arguably more true to these values than left-libertarianism. To those socialists drawn to libertarian values, it offers an alternative to left-libertarianism that avoids the pitfalls of statism. (shrink)

I reconstruct the civic republican foundations of Eugene Debs’s socialist critique of capitalism, demonstrating how he uses a neo-roman conception of freedom to condemn waged labour. Debs is also shown to build upon this neo-roman liberty in his socialist republican objections to the plutocratic capture of the law and threats of violence faced by the labour movement. This Debsian socialist republicanism can be seen to rest on an ambitious understanding of the demands of citizen sovereignty and civic solidarity. While (...) Debs shares some of the commitments of earlier American labour republican critics of capitalism, he departs from them in his thoroughgoing commitment to common democratic ownership of productive property. His socialist republicanism remains valuable today for its ability to illuminate features of plutocratic control, judicial autocracy, and the regime of property best suited to suppressing economic domination. I conclude that Debs not only deserves a prominent place in an emerging radical republican canon but presents a distinctive contrast with many of his Marxist contemporaries and offers a compelling challenge to recent liberal, plebeian, and socialist forms of republicanism. (shrink)

According to conventional wisdom, the causes of economic inequality under capitalism are different in kind from those operating in a socialist system. In socialist societies today the distribution of wealth and income is determined by political authority, whereas in capitalism it is thought to arise mainly from the choices of individuals freely transferring goods and services in the competitive market. Robert Nozick's account of the workings of a ‘free society’ expresses this view clearly:There is no central distribution, no person or (...) group entitled to control all the resources, jointly deciding how they are to be doled out. What each person gets, he gets from others who give to him in exchange for something, or as a gift. In a free society, diverse persons control different resources, and new holdings arise out of the voluntary exchange and actions of persons … The total result is the product of many individual decisions which the different individuals involved are entitled to make. (shrink)

Economic liberty is best understood in opposition to economic domination. This article develops a radical republican conception of such domination. In particular, I argue that radical republicanism provides a more satisfactory account of individual economic freedom than the market-friendly liberties of working, transacting, holding, and using championed by Nickel and Tomasi. So too, it avoids the pitfalls of other conceptions of economic liberty which emphasize real freedom, alternatives to immiserating work, or unalienated labor. The resulting theory holds that (...) economic domination occurs when someone’s access to civic capabilities is contingent on the arbitrary economic power of others. Socialist institutions—suitably configured—can deliver on this individual economic freedom, allowing the dominating power of proprietors, shareholders, landlords, and managers to be kept in check, and providing an unconditional minimum that allows individual citizens to be less beholden to others in meeting many of their most fundamental civic needs. Thus, I conclude that socialism can be championed as a politics of individual economic liberty. (shrink)

John Rawls observes that "a theory of justice is . . . a theory of the moral sentiments." His analysis of moral attitudes as defined by rationally chosen principles is controversial, however, and distinguishes his liberal conception of justice from one which understands such attitudes as constituted by verifiable beliefs about social realities. The socialist conception suggested by the latter analysis is at least as plausible as individualist alternatives.

Political philosophy provides the basis for political praxis; it requires a functional understanding of society in which the economy is an extraordinarily significant component. This is no less true of Marxism than it is of liberalism: it is all at once a political philosophy and an analysis of political economy, both of which are oriented toward and motivated by an agenda of human engagement. Often obscured by the complexities of Marxian analysis is the nature of its critique of liberalism, which (...) preceded it and to which it was intended as both a theoretical and practical response. Beyond Liberalism offers a detailed elaboration of that critique, restoring to a central position the long history of imperialism that has been at the heart of capitalism since its inception and explicating Marxism's relevance to the contemporary era of globalization, in particular financial globalization. The dramatic opposition between the two political theories turns heavily on their differential perspectives on individual freedom. The book provides a corrective to the common misperception that, while liberalism is concerned with such freedom, Marxism and the socialist agenda it advances emphasize instead a contrasting sphere of the collective. Prabhat Patnaik argues that liberalism and Marxism give very different analyses of the status of the individual within capitalism and that the Marxist alternative leads to the conclusion that the freedom of the individual can be realized only by means of an upheaval of capitalism through collective action. It is as relevant to Keynesian social democracy, marked by state intervention to alleviate conditions of unemployment, poverty, and inequality, as it is to classical liberalism. In the latter the functioning of the capitalist system constrains individual freedom; in the former, on the capacity of the state to intervene, which is especially apparent in our era in which finance is globalized but states remain national. Capitalism requires a degree of unemployment, for example, to limit wages and maintain the accrual of surplus value. The system also tends toward the centralization of capital, augmenting the power imbalance of global corporations over nation-states and the coercion of individual agency. It is only through the overturning of the system and the adoption of a socialist system that individual freedom and economic equality can be fostered. (shrink)

An attempt to answer in some detail the questions and criticism brought up in a colloquium on my book on ‘Socialism’.

Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia is in large measure an ingenious elaboration of an argument for capitalism adumbrated by Plekhanov. The capitalism Nozick advocates is more pure than the one we know today. It lacks taxation for social welfare, and it permits degrees of inequality far greater than most apologists for contemporary bourgeois society would countenance. The present paper paper is only indirectly a critique of Nozick's defense of capitalism. Its immediate aim is to refute Nozick's major argument against (...) a rival of capitalism, socialism. The refutation vindicates socialism against that argument, but no one opposed to socialism on other grounds should expect to be converted by this paper. (shrink)

Opens up new histories of freedom and republicanism by building on Quentin Skinner's ground-breaking Liberty before Liberalism nearly twenty five years after its initial publication. Leading historians and philosophers reveal the neo-Roman conception of liberty that Skinner unearthed as a normative and historical hermeneutic tool of enormous, ongoing power. The volume thinks with neo-Romanism to offer reinterpretations of individual thinkers, such as Montaigne, Grotius and Locke. It probes the role of neo-Roman liberty within hierarchies and structures beyond (...) that of citizen and state – namely, gender, slavery, and democracy. Finally, it reassesses the relationships between neo-Romanism and other languages in the history of political thought: liberalism, conservatism, socialism, and the human rights tradition. The volume concludes with a major reappraisal by Skinner himself. (shrink)

Hailed as the most influential book ever written in favor of freedom, John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty is a contradictory and imprecise work. Mill’s notion of liberty coexists with anti-liberal ideas. He defended the private property of capitalists, but not of landowners. He criticized protectionism, but made an exception for infant industries. He defended competition, but set limits on it. He criticized general public education, but allowed the State to force citizens to study. He defended women and men’s (...) freedom, but not the freedom to choose the number of children they wanted to have, or decide about their education, or bequeath goods to them. He said parting from laissez faire was bad unless it produced some good. This admired friend of liberty could not find the logic in family, marriage, religion, tradition, morality, custom; he saw them only as repressive obstacles to freedom. A book supposedly upholding liberty ignores or disdains natural or pre-legal rights, and directs the bulk of its criticism not against the legal or political power of the State but against the tyranny of public opinion. (shrink)

Despite a recent wave in global recognition of the rights of transgender and gender-diverse populations, referred to in this text by the umbrella label of trans*, international law continues to presume a cisgender binary definition of gender — dismissing the lived realities of trans* individuals throughout the world. This gap in international legal recognition and protection has fundamental implications for health, where trans* persons have been and continue to be subjected to widespread discrimination in health care, longstanding neglect of health (...) needs, and significant violations of bodily autonomy. (shrink)

A MAJOR THESIS OF CONTEMPORARY LIBERAL PHILOSOPHY is that its theory of justice, which incorporates strong rights to negative liberty, must be prior to and independent of a theory of the good. This priority is necessary, according to liberal theorists, in view of the requirement that any adequate theory accommodate a plurality of contending views of the good, no one of which is capable of eliciting public assent to it. Recent critics of liberalism have disputed this thesis, maintaining instead (...) that there is indeed an objective good, rather than a plurality of contending goods, which at least seriously compromises and possibly undermines the negative liberty with which liberals traditionally associated their theories. Variously called communitarians, virtue theorists, or republicans, these critics have presented an important challenge to contemporary liberalism whether of the individualist or welfare state variety. (shrink)

It is a commonplace of academic conventional wisdom that Marxian theory is not to be judged by the historical experience of actually existing socialist societies. The reasons given in support of this view are familiar enough, but let us rehearse them. Born in adversity, encircled by hostile powers, burdened with the necessity of defending themselves against foreign enemies and with the massive task of educating backward and reactionary populations, the revolutionary socialist governments of this century were each of them denied (...) any real opportunity to implement Marxian socialism in its authentic form. Nowhere has socialism come to power as Marx expected it would – on the back of the organized proletariat of an advanced capitalist society. For this reason, the historical experience of the past sixty years can have no final authority in the assessment of Marxian theory. The failings of Marxist regimes – their domination by bureaucratic elites, their economic crises, their repression of popular movements and of intellectual freedoms, and their dependency on imports of Western technology and capital – are all to be explained as historical contingencies which in no way threaten the validity of Marx's central conceptions. It is not that Marxian socialism has been tried and found wanting but, rather, that it has never been tried. (shrink)

Hayek, one of the key thinkers of the twentieth century, has also been much misunderstood. His work has crossed disciplines—economics, philosophy, and political science—as well as national boundaries. He was an early critic of Keynes and became famous in the 1940s for his warnings that the advance of collectivism in Western democracies was the road to serfdom. He was a key figure in the post-war revival of free market liberalism and achieved renewed notoriety and some political influence in the 1970s (...) and 1980s as one of the chief intellectual inspirations for the New Right in Britain and the United States.This book traces Hayek’s intellectual formation in Austrian economics and English liberalism. It analyzes the main themes of his thought such as the idea of market order, the nature of knowledge, the limits of government, and his critiques of socialism and conservatism; assesses the originality and internal coherence of his account of liberalism and modernity; and explores as his interventions in policy debates. Gamble argues that Hayek the social scientist must be disentangled from Hayek the ideologue before you can appreciate the importance and implications of some of his insights into the nature of modern societies.An excellent critical guide to one of the most influential thinkers of our times, this book will be of interest to students in politics, economics, and philosophy, as well as to all those interested in a comprehensive introduction to one of the most controversial thinkers of the twentieth century. (shrink)

Summary This article presents a comparative analysis of the concepts of totalitarian democracy and positive liberty in the work of Jacob Leib Talmon and Isaiah Berlin. Its main purpose is to show that a combined analysis of Talmon and Berlin's biographical relationship and their individual texts demonstrates that Talmon's idea of totalitarian democracy may have had a greater influence on Berlin's notion of positive liberty than Berlin seems to have ever acknowledged. The article first summarises the intellectual and (...) biographical relationships that tied these two authors together in a personal friendship and an intellectual fellowship that lasted for more than three decades. In the second part, the insights drawn from the investigation of the authors' intellectual and biographical relationships are linked to an analysis of their texts, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy and Two Concepts of Liberty. Finally, in the third part of the article, three crucial aspects of Talmon's definition of totalitarian democracy are considered: the interpretation of the Enlightenment and Rousseau's thought, the view of the French revolution, and the possible impact each of these has on subsequent Marxist and socialist reflection, to see how they are addressed in Berlin's idea of positive liberty. (shrink)

Contemporary democratic theorists have tended to assume that democracy is compatible with and even requires a capitalist economic system. Rosa Luxemburg offers a democratic criticism of this view, arguing that the dominating effects of a capitalist economy undermine the ability of liberal democracy to actualise its ideals of freedom and equality. Drawing on Luxemburg’s writings, this article theorises a model of socialist democracy which combines support for public ownership and control of the means of production with a plural multi-party electoral (...) system and a defence of civil liberties. It recovers Luxemburg’s conceptualisation of a socialist democracy as the extension of democratic principles to major social and economic institutions currently governed by nondemocratic authority structures. It defends this version of socialist democracy from the liberal objection that it violates citizens’ property rights and the Marxist objection that it retains the dominating structures of the state and a coercive legal system. (shrink)

Contemporary democratic theorists have tended to assume that democracy is compatible with and even requires a capitalist economic system. Rosa Luxemburg offers a democratic criticism of this view, arguing that the dominating effects of a capitalist economy undermine the ability of liberal democracy to actualise its ideals of freedom and equality. Drawing on Luxemburg’s writings, this article theorises a model of socialist democracy which combines support for public ownership and control of the means of production with a plural multi-party electoral (...) system and a defence of civil liberties. It recovers Luxemburg’s conceptualisation of a socialist democracy as the extension of democratic principles to major social and economic institutions currently governed by nondemocratic authority structures. It defends this version of socialist democracy from the liberal objection that it violates citizens’ property rights and the Marxist objection that it retains the dominating structures of the state and a coercive legal system. (shrink)

Drawing on recent work in the contemporary philosophy of economics, this book presents new ideas on liberalism, including the concept of 'growth-oriented liberalism'. Since the end of the Cold War, questions and definitions of liberalism have moved from the sphere of political systems (the socialism versus liberalism debates) to the sphere of ethics (what it means to live in a liberal society). The chapters in this work trace the trajectory of the concept of liberalism in the philosophy of economics (...) by exploring the ideological implications of the methodological debate between socialism and liberalism, the idea of liberty as real freedom, the ethical implications of Max Weber's methodology on autonomy and liberty, and new typological theories of ideologies in the context of contemporary economic ethics. This book marks a significant contribution to the literature on liberalism in the philosophy of economics and economic methodology, and is highly recommended for readers who seek updated ideas on liberal society in its ethical and philosophical contexts. Tsutomu Hashimoto is a Professor at Hokkaido University and the President of the Synodos Institute of International Studies in Japan. (shrink)