Liberalism Books - Page 15

Race and the Making of American Liberalism

Carol A. Horton

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Racism is the American way 5 out of 5 stars.
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Because our society publicly proclaims that all people have fair opportunity, and insists that the days of slavery and segregation are behind us, the thesis presented in Carol A. Horton's masterpiece is going to raise a couple of eyebrows.

The more rabid critics of this book are going to accuse her of living in the past. During the 1960's, new left activists from the Black Power movement formulated a civil rights analysis concluding the entire American system would have to be reformed, even with non-discrimination laws on the books, socioeconomic structure would effectively keep many people oppressed and equality an empty gesture.

Yet, to effectively have a non-racist future we must understand and the actually undo the past. That critique assumes new significance today when the gap between America's haves and have-nots is reaching unprecedented proportions. It is more relevant than ever.

An independent scholar and Research Associate at Erikson Institute, Chicago, Illinois, Horton postulates that race has more socioeconomic dimensions than we previously had admitted. Some African Americans (realizing their own stake) are going to actually support the maintenance of the status quo.

Such wide experience discrepancy explains how we get people like JC Watts, Condoleezza Rice, Barack Obama, and Jesse Jackson. They are all black, but each has a different opinion on how well the `American way' is working for everybody.

Horton gives civil rights movements their due credit for having implemented a more consistent practice of democracy than prior models, but questions if the current system is still the best that we can do. Our society presently uses those progress markers as justification that we now do not have to critique anything any more, and thus are stunting ourselves from realizing a truly equitable outcome for all members.

She also calls for a more elastic conceptualization of racial and class identity. Traditional categories are woefully inadequate for describing the contradictions of a 'democracy' where wealth and political power is concentrated in the hands of an elite few.

Editorial Review:

Race and the Making of American Liberalism traces the roots of the contemporary crisis of progressive liberalism deep into the nation's racial past. Horton argues that the contemporary conservative claim that the American liberal tradition has been rooted in a "color blind" conception of individual rights is innaccurate and misleading. In contrast, American liberalism has alternatively served both to support and oppose racial hierarchy, as well as socioeconomic inequality more broadly. Racial politics in the United States have repeatedly made it exceedingly difficult to establish powerful constituencies that understand socioeconomic equity as vital to American democracy and aspire to limit gross disparities of wealth, power, and status. Revitalizing such equalitarian conceptions of American liberalism, Horton suggests, will require developing new forms of racial and class identity that support, rather than sabotage this fundamental political commitment.

Richard Rorty: Pragmatism and Political Liberalism

Michael Bacon

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A Quick Introduction to American Pragmatism 4 out of 5 stars.
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A slight and easy-to-read introduction to Rorty's work. It is organized around his main themes of: anti-representationalsim and American pragmatism. It also focuses on Rorty's critics.

Rorty, like the majority of modern philsophers, tangle with the consequences of David Hume's belief that we don't know causes, only correlations. This leaves us with the question, "Well, if we don't have absolute truth, which would come with direct contact with reality, what do we have?"

The American answer to this, coming from pragmatists Peirce, William James, and Dewey, is, "Truth is what works." The goal of liberalism, accordingly, is the elimination of suffering.

Along with the romantics and today's psycho-neurologists, Rorty holds that emotion and imagination have as much to do with right choices as rationality. He puts literature and literary criticism at the forefront of social progress.

Following John Stuart Mill, Rorty states that the liberal society should permit any behavior that does not harm others. This is a quick introduction to the pragmatic insights that grounded and shaped American education and politics for over a century.

Editorial Review:

Michael Bacon gives a critical presentation of Rorty's writings on pragmatism and political theory, comparing and contrasting him with pragmatists such as Hilary Putnam and Susan Haack, and liberals such as John Rawls and Brian Barry. The result is an imaginative presentation of one of contemporary philosophy's most innovative and important thinkers.

Toleration and Its Limits: NOMOS XLVIII

Melissa Williams, Jeremy Waldron

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Toleration has a rich tradition in Western political philosophy. It is, after all, one of the defining topics of political philosophy—historically pivotal in the development of modern liberalism, prominent in the writings of such canonical figures as John Locke and John Stuart Mill, and central to our understanding of the idea of a society in which individuals have the right to live their own lives by their own values, left alone by the state so long as they respect the similar interests of others.

Toleration and Its Limits, the latest addition to the NOMOS series, explores the philosophical nuances of the concept of toleration and its scope in contemporary liberal democratic societies. Editors Melissa S. Williams and Jeremy Waldron carefully compiled essays that address the tradition’s key historical figures; its role in the development and evolution of Western political theory; its relation to morality, liberalism, and identity; and its limits and dangers.

Contributors: Lawrence A. Alexander, Kathryn Abrams, Wendy Brown, Ingrid Creppell, Noah Feldman, Rainer Forst, David Heyd, Glyn Morgan, Glen Newey, Michael A. Rosenthal, Andrew Sabl, Steven D. Smith, and Alex Tuckness.

The Real World of Liberalism

David Spitz

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Working Together: How Workplace Bonds Strengthen a Diverse Democracy

Cynthia Estlund

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Editorial Review:

At a time when communal ties in American society are increasingly frayed and segregation persists, the workplace is more than ever the site where Americans from different ethnic, religious, and racial backgrounds meet and forge serviceable and sometimes lasting bonds. What do these highly structured workplace relationships mean for a society still divided by gender and race? The involuntariness of workplace interactions--prescribed by both external law and internal constraints--helps ensure that the often-troubled and often-failed project of racial integration succeeds at work. People can be forced to get along--not without friction, but with surprising success.
This highly original exploration of the paradoxical nature--and the paramount importance--of workplace bonds concludes with concrete suggestions for how law can further realize the democratic possibilities of working together. In linking workplace integration and connectedness beyond work, Estlund suggests a novel and promising strategy for addressing the most profound challenges facing American society.

The Good Life as a Public Good (LIBRARY OF ETHICS AND APPLIED PHILOSOPHY Volume 6)

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Editorial Review:

According to the neutrality thesis, in designing state policies governments should not allow themselves to be informed by any particular conceptions of the good life. The aim of this book is to contribute to the debate about this thesis in two specific ways. Firstly, the limits of acceptable state perfectionism are examined, not on a general level but by reference to some particular concerns of government policy; transgenic animals, future generations, the promotion of the arts, minority cultures, the allocation of scarce health care resources, the integration of mentally handicapped people into the community, and the expression of national identities. Secondly, the book as a whole evaluates the argument that the government has a special task to produce or to maintain intrinsically collective aspects of the good life, because these are to be seen as public goods.

The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt

Gopal Balakrishnan, Carl Schmitt

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Carl Schmitt: The Political As Friend-Foe Distinction. 5 out of 5 stars.
48 of 53 people found this review helpful.

_The Enemy_ provides an excellent and thorough introducion to the life and thinking of the German political philosopher and jurist Carl Schmitt. The book traces the developments in his thoughts from his earliest days as a Catholic schoolchild in the Rhineland to his eventual professorship in constitutional law and his involvement with the Third Reich regime and the subsequent developments in his thought after the Third Reich had fallen. Schmitt is normally considered to belong with the "conservative revolutionaries" such as Ernst Junger, Oswald Spengler, Martin Heidegger, and several other important figures in the Weimar republic prior to the advent of the Third Reich. These thinkers were important for their political and philosophical thought which was firmly opposed to liberalism, bolshevism, and modernism. An important aspect behind Schmitt's thought was his Catholicism (however tenuous that link may have become for him at various moments in his life). Certain interpreters of Schmitt have made the claim that Schmitt's writings can be understood on the basis of a "fundamentalist" Catholicism , in which the crisis in the modern world is perceived in apocalyptic terms involving an encounter between Christ and Antichrist. Schmitt became a jurist and a professor of constitutional law and a great deal of his writing is concerned with the application of his political principles to the legal status of the constitution. Schmitt's thinking is heavily influenced by the German Romantics such as Schlegel and Hegelianism, but also has a Latin character influenced by such Catholic counter-revolutionaries as Joseph de Maistre and Donoso Cortes, as well as the writings of Thomas Hobbes in his _Leviathan_, and the writings of Machiavelli. Perhaps Schmitt is most famous for his understanding of the political in terms of the "friend-enemy" distinction. He outlined this distinction in his famous work _The Concept of the Political_. Schmitt came to occupy a central place in the Third Reich regime and was often regarded as the "Crown Jurist" of that regime. The particular problematic of Schmitt's involvement with the Third Reich and his adherence to certain anti-Semitic beliefs is firmly covered in this book. After the defeat of the Third Reich, Schmitt would come to partially renounce some of his earlier alignment with it; however, he would also come to regard the process of denazification which involved him spending several years in captivity as equally abominable. Much of Schmitt's work focused on a particular interpretation of Thomas Hobbes in hiw book _Leviathan_. Schmitt may have believed in an apocalyptic myth involving an obscure quasi-Messianic figure, the Katechon (see the discussion in the book; but also see Paul's epistle to the Thessalonians where it is explained that the Katechon refers to a "restrainer" who is to come). The book also discusses Schmitt's relationship with the new international order subsequent to the Nazi regime. The importance of Schmitt's thought here in regards to our modern era which is closely coming to approximate a New World Order and a system of international law based in the United Nations (i.e. the League of Nations in Schmitt's time) cannot be overestimated. Schmitt's later works include a book entitled _Land and Sea_ which outlines the differences between land and sea powers and a work entitled _The Law of the Earth_. The relationship between a landlocked continental German power and a seafaring English power rooted in the Calvinistic religion plays an important role in Schmitt's writings. Schmitt's later days were spent in relative obscurity as a figure who was considered anathema by the new intellectuals; however, he continued to write and work and gather a group of students around him. Carl Schmitt is a fascinating figure who encountered the dark side and whose thinking still poses interesting questions for the modern world. His distinction between friend and enemy continues to occupy an important place in the role of political theory and although some on the Left have attempted to usurp his ideas, his ideas remain firmly grounded in the tradition of right wing intellectuals of the conservative revolution. This book provides an excellent introduction and outline of his life and thought and is to be highly recommended to all those interested in this figure.

Editorial Review:

The writings of Carl Schmitt form what is arguably the most disconcerting, original, and yet still unfamiliar body of twentieth-century political thought. In the English speaking world, he is terra incognita, a name associated with Nazism, the author of a largely untranslated oeuvre forming no recognizable system, coming to us from a disturbing place and time in the form of fragments. The Enemy is a comprehensive inter-textual reconstruction and analysis of all of Schmitt's major works presented in an arresting narrative form. The format reveals the complex ways in which his ideas took shape in the intertwining timelines of civil and world wars.

Willful Liberalism: Voluntarism and Individuality in Political Theory and Practice

Richard E. Flathman

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American Democracy in Peril: Seven Challenges to America's Future (Chatham House Studies in Political Thinking)

William E. Hudson

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Critical Examination of the Fundamentals of US Government 5 out of 5 stars.
8 of 12 people found this review helpful.

William E. Hudson has written an eloquent, insightful, and well-thought critique of the United States system of representative democracy. Hudson confronts the challenges to American democracy raised by campaign finance, the media, radical individualism, and the national security state. Hudson does not shy away from full fledged confrontation with the complacent stereotypes of American politics; instead, he utilizes his sharp wit and insight to cut through the layers of tacit consent which usually shield and protect our system of government to write a book about government as it really is. In an era when understandings about government are shrouded in assumptions and soporifisms, Hudson peels back the layers to expose the American political system and the central problems it carries with it.

Editorial Review:

Provocative and clearly written, this book challenges the reader to reflect on the problems of American democracy. This new and updated third edition expands exploration of what Hudson considers are the major challenges to American democracy: the separation of power: radical individualism: citizen participation: trivialized elections: the privileged position of business: inequality; and the national security system.

The book emphasizes such critical and topical political issues as the persistence of economic inequality despite the economic prosperity of the late 1990s; the Clinton scandals and the impeachment controversy; the impact of globalization on business; the role of soft money in the 1996, 1998, and 2000 election campaigns; the post-Cold War national security state; and the consequences of the Gulf War and Kosovo interventions.

Disenchanted Realists: Political Science and the American Crisis, 1884-1984 (Suny Serien in Political Theroy : Contemporary Issues)

Raymond Seidelman

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