Equality and Tradition
Equality and Tradition

Author: Samuel Scheffler

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2010-07-01

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 0199889627

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This collection of essays by noted philosopher Samuel Scheffler combines discussion of abstract questions in moral and political theory with attention to the normative dimension of current social and political controversies. In addition to chapters on more abstract issues such as the nature of human valuing, the role of partiality in ethics, and the significance of the distinction between doing and allowing, the volume also includes essays on immigration, terrorism, toleration, political equality, and the normative significance of tradition. Uniting the essays is a shared preoccupation with questions about human value and values. The volume opens with an essay that considers the general question of what it is to value something - as opposed, say, to wanting it, wanting to want it, or thinking that it is valuable. Other essays explore particular values, such as equality, whose meaning and content are contested. Still others consider the tensions that arise, both within and among individuals, in consequence of the diversity of human values. One of the overarching aims of the book is to illuminate the different ways in which liberal political theory attempts to resolve conflicts of both of these kinds.

Equality and Tradition
Equality and Tradition

Author: Samuel Scheffler

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2012-01-12

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 0199899576

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This collection of essays by noted philosopher Samuel Scheffler combines discussion of abstract questions in moral and political theory with attention to the normative dimension of current social and political controversies. In addition to chapters on more abstract issues such as the nature of human valuing, the role of partiality in ethics, and the significance of the distinction between doing and allowing, the volume also includes essays on immigration, terrorism, toleration, political equality, and the normative significance of tradition. Uniting the essays is a shared preoccupation with questions about human value and values. The volume opens with an essay that considers the general question of what it is to value something - as opposed, say, to wanting it, wanting to want it, or thinking that it is valuable. Other essays explore particular values, such as equality, whose meaning and content are contested. Still others consider the tensions that arise, both within and among individuals, in consequence of the diversity of human values. One of the overarching aims of the book is to illuminate the different ways in which liberal political theory attempts to resolve conflicts of both of these kinds.

The Lost Tradition of Economic Equality in America, 1600–1870
The Lost Tradition of Economic Equality in America, 1600–1870

Author: Daniel R. Mandell

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2020-04-07

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 1421437120

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An important examination of the foundational American ideal of economic equality—and how we lost it. Winner of the Missouri Conference on History Book Award for 2021 The United States has some of the highest levels of both wealth and income inequality in the world. Although modern-day Americans are increasingly concerned about this growing inequality, many nonetheless believe that the country was founded on a person's right to acquire and control property. But in The Lost Tradition of Economic Equality in America, 1600–1870, Daniel R. Mandell argues that, in fact, the United States was originally deeply influenced by the belief that maintaining a "rough" or relative equality of wealth is essential to the cultivation of a successful republican government. Mandell explores the origins and evolution of this ideal. He shows how, during the Revolutionary War, concerns about economic equality helped drive wage and price controls, while after its end Americans sought ways to maintain their beloved "rough" equality against the danger of individuals amassing excessive wealth. He also examines how, after 1800, this tradition was increasingly marginalized by the growth of the liberal ideal of individual property ownership without limits. This politically evenhanded book takes a sweeping, detailed view of economic, social, and cultural developments up to the time of Reconstruction, when Congress refused to redistribute plantation lands to the former slaves who had worked it, insisting instead that they required only civil and political rights. Informing current discussions about the growing gap between rich and poor in the United States, The Lost Tradition of Economic Equality in America is surprising and enlightening.

Liberty of Conscience
Liberty of Conscience

Author: Martha Nussbaum

Publisher: Basic Books

Published: 2008-02-05

Total Pages: 418

ISBN-13: 0786721944

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In one of the great triumphs of the colonial and Revolutionary periods, the founders of the future United States overcame religious intolerance in favor of a constitutional order dedicated to fair treatment for people's deeply held conscientious beliefs. It granted equal liberty of conscience to all and took a firm stand against religious establishment. This respect for religious difference, acclaimed scholar Martha Nussbaum writes, formed our democracy. Yet today there are signs that this legacy is misunderstood. The prominence of a particular type of Christianity in our public life suggests the unequal worth of citizens who hold different religious beliefs, or no beliefs. Other people, meanwhile, seek to curtail the influence of religion in public life in a way that is itself unbalanced and unfair. Such partisan efforts, Nussbaum argues, violate the spirit of our Constitution. Liberty of Conscience is a historical and conceptual study of the American tradition of religious freedom. Weaving together political history, philosophical ideas, and key constitutional cases, this is a rich chronicle of an ideal of equality that has always been central to our history but is now in serious danger.

Women and Spiritual Equality in Christian Tradition
Women and Spiritual Equality in Christian Tradition

Author: Patricia Ranft

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 307

ISBN-13: 9780312159115

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Women and Spiritual Equality in the Christian Tradition challenges the common assumption in contemporary discourse that Christianity is exclusively misogynist by documenting the presence of a long, strong, and positive tradition based on women’s spiritual equality. In chronological order, references and images of women in church writings and lay culture are explored, as well as the actual lives of women and their vitae. Patricia Ranft shows how the accumulated evidence provides persuasive data that this positive tradition coexisted with the more notorious misogynist tradition. For a millennium and a half, Ranft reveals, Christianity possessed the lone voice in society that posited women’s equality in any aspect. She argues that without knowledge of this tradition, our understanding of the history of Western women is significantly incomplete. Women and Spiritual Equality in the Christian Tradition is the first lengthy study to document such a tradition and it gives long overdue life to the previously muted voices of women’s equality in Western society’s discourse on women. Well-written and engaging, it fills a significant gap in the areas of ecclesiastical and women’s history.

The Political Thought of Jacques Rancière
The Political Thought of Jacques Rancière

Author: Todd May

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 214

ISBN-13: 9780271034492

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This book examines the political perspective of French thinker and historian Jacques Ranci&ère. Ranci&ère argues that a democratic politics emerges out of people&’s acting under the presupposition of their own equality with those better situated in the social hierarchy. Todd May examines and extends this presupposition, offering a normative framework for understanding it, placing it in the current political context, and showing how it challenges traditional political philosophy and opens up neglected political paths. He demonstrates that the presupposition of equality orients political action around those who act on their own behalf&—and those who act in solidarity with them&—rather than, as with the political theories of John Rawls, Robert Nozick, and Amartya Sen, those who distribute the social goods. As May argues, Ranci&ère&’s view offers both hope and perspective for those who seek to think about and engage in progressive political action.

Tradition and Equality in Jewish Marriage
Tradition and Equality in Jewish Marriage

Author: Melanie Malka Landau

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2012-03-29

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 1441139338

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Often when people have become alienated from their religious backgrounds, they access their traditions through lifecycle events such as marriage. At times, modern values such as gender equality may be at odds with some of the traditions; many of which have always been in a state of flux in relationship to changing social, economic and political realities. Traditional Jewish marriage is based on the man acquiring the woman, which has symbolic and actual ramifications. Grounded in the traditional texts yet accessible, this book shows how the marriage is an acquisition and contextualises the gender hierarchy of marriage within the rabbinic exclusion of women from Torah study, the highest cultural practice and women's exemption from positive commandments. Melanie Landau offers two alternative models of partnership that partially or fully bypass the non-reciprocity of traditional Jewish marriage and that have their basis in the ancient rabbinic texts.