'Liberalism' tag archive

Raphaël Fèvre, A Political Economy of Power: Ordoliberalism in Context, 1932-1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021). 280pp., £64.00 hb., 978 0 19760 780 0 George Monbiot’s statement in a 2016 Guardian article that neoliberalism is the ‘ideology at the root of all our problems’ still resonates today. A huge body of literature has been dedicated […]

Interview Health without security? An interview with Mark Neocleous Mark Neocleous with Sam Kelly Health without security? An interview with Mark Neocleous health, security, biopolitics, COVID-19, immunology, medicine, liberalism, police 75 87 Mark Neocleous is Professor of the Critique of Political Economy at Brunel University London. He is the author of numerous books including War […]

As philosophy departments in the West come under greater pressure to provincialise themselves, calls to give ‘non-Western’ philosophical traditions their due have grown louder – and rightly so. But for all that is surely right about ‘diversifying the curriculum’ as a project driven by the relentless work of anti-racist and decolonial activists, the institutional co-optation […]

The future of post-socialism Michael Rustin This article discusses three contributions to new thinking on the Left. * Two of these, Anthony Giddens’ s Beyond Left and Right: The Future ofRadical Politics and David Miliband’s collection Reinventing the Left (to which Giddens contributes the first chapter), set out to provide the new thinking which the […]

Ilf I Goods and life-forms Relativism in Charles Taylor’s political philosophy Hartmut Rosa John Gunnell, in a recent paper in Political Theory. I want to turn first to Taylor’s ideas about the nature of argues that a concern with the problem or threat of human agency and identity and the central relativism is a, or […]

COMMENTARY The value of community Sean Savers W hether the policies of the Thatcher and Reagan years brought any overall economic benefits is doubtful; that they have had high social costs is now quite evident. The unfettered pursuit of self-interest has weakened social bonds and led to social decay and disintegration on a scale which […]

COMMENTARY Looking for the Good Life Bob Brecher It is almost impossible these days to stumble across anything like a vision of the good society lurking even in the background of a left position. From the intellectual void that is the Labour Party, to the labyrinthine morass of postmodern and postfeminist postponements that constitutes the […]

Active Citizenship as Political Obligation Tony Skiffen Rousseau says in The Social Contract: As soon as public service ceases to be the chief business of the citizens, and they would rather serve with their money than with their persons, the state is not far from its fall. When it is necessary to march out to […]

Timely Meditations Jonathan Ree Review Essay on Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989, 201pp. £25 hb, £7.95 pb, 0521353815 hb, o 521 36781 6 pb. It is now some years since Richard Rorty broke with American analytic philosophy, for reasons he spelt out in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature […]

John Rawls and Human Welfare John Watt INTRODUCTION John Rawls has been a dominant figure over the last generation of Western social philosophy. I know of four book-length studies of his thought – Barry (1973), WoIff (1977), Schaefer (1979) and Martin (1985) – and two volumes of collected essays: Daniels (1975) and Blocker and Smith […]

Feminism and the Logic of Morality A Consideration of Alternatives Susan F. Parsons As a feminist and a moral philosopher, I have for some time been interested in the understanding of morality which emerges from the great variety of feminist writing. It has, fIrst of all, been intriguing that the shift from liberal to radical […]

Ethics and Group Conflict: Between Marxism and Liberalism Carl Hedman Consider the following case: As Jones is driving home from a union meeting, he sees an injured motorist lyirYg in the ditch. He stops to help, but as he steps into the ditch he realizes that the person he is about the help is Smith, […]

Socialism and Democracy: Beyond State and Civil Society Roger Harris Introduction This article started life as a review of John Keane’s Public Life and Late Capitalism ..:. Towards ~ Socialist Thaor y of Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 1984), an Lt begins with a brief account of this important book. In the sections which follow I […]

Doctrinaire Liberalism Anthony Arblaster ••• the liberal rarely needs to be ashamed of the realities created in his name as the socialist has to be much of the time. (Ralf Dahrendorf <1» Liberal writers, at least in the last forty years, have made a speciality of claiming that, unlike almost all other doctrines, and certainly […]

EDITORIAL 1984 and all that Recent re-organisation of the Editorial Collective’s working practices, aimed at a more equitable distribution of the work-load, has given rise to the new position of ‘issue editor’. Although basically administrative in character (the Collective as a whole still takes editorial decisions), this position is enlivened by carrying with it the […]

15 with considerably more historical precision than Heidegger, who is more concerned with proving that reification is the permanent structure of the human mind. That not only this question but the whole book was largely conceived as a response to Luk§cs has been convincingly demonstrated by Goldmann, in Lukacs and Heidegger. But, as Lukacs has […]

Rawls’ Theory of Justice and ‘Market Socialism’ Carl G. Hedman 1 Market Socialism and Individualism One of the intuitions behind recent attempts to combine a socialist perspective with a limited reliance on market mechanisms is that a genuinely democratic socialism is incompatible with the bureaucratic tendencies of a command economy. David Schweickart has put this […]

ANARCHISM AND PRIVATI PROPERTY Derek Browne No more government of man by man, by means of the accumulation of powers; no more exploitation of man by man, by means of the accumulation of capital. Proudhon (1) The majority of anarchists have been dedicated opponents of capitalism, of those forms of society which arise on the […]

Liberals,fanalics and moral philosophers Aspects of R~M. Hare’s I have recently re-started work on a study of Tolerance and rummaging through my books for any which I might usefully read or re-read as background or foreground picked out R. M. Hare’s Freedom and Reason, chapter 9 of which has the title ‘Tolerance and Fanaticism’. I […]

Ma..xism and mo..alily Tony Skillen You just about need a pass to piss. Tha t a.in’ t no joke. You raise your little hand i f you want to go wee-wee. Then wait maybe half an hour ’till they find a relief-man. And they write it down every time too – cause you’re supposed to […]

REAson AnD UIOlEn[E A fragment of the ideology of liberal intellectuals Ray Edgley The antithesis between reason and violence: some contemporary examples I want to consider a version of the ic!ea that violence is contrary to reason, or to put another way what may seem to be the same point, that reason and violence are […]