The Propriety of Liberty
The Propriety of Liberty

Author: Duncan Kelly

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2010-10-18

Total Pages: 367

ISBN-13: 1400836840

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In this book, Duncan Kelly excavates, from the history of modern political thought, a largely forgotten claim about liberty as a form of propriety. By rethinking the intellectual and historical foundations of modern accounts of freedom, he brings into focus how this major vision of liberty developed between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries. In his framework, celebrated political writers, including John Locke, Montesquieu, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Thomas Hill Green pursue the claim that freedom is best understood as a form of responsible agency or propriety, and they do so by reconciling key moral and philosophical claims with classical and contemporary political theory. Their approach broadly assumes that only those persons who appropriately regulate their conduct can be thought of as free and responsible. At the same time, however, they recognize that such internal forms of self-propriety must be judged within the wider context of social and political life. Kelly shows how the intellectual and practical demands of such a synthesis require these great writers to consider freedom as part of a broader set of arguments about the nature of personhood, the potentially irrational impact of the passions, and the obstinate problems of individual and political judgement. By exploring these relationships, The Propriety of Liberty not only revises the intellectual history of modern political thought, but also sheds light on contemporary debates about freedom and agency.

Restoring the Lost Constitution
Restoring the Lost Constitution

Author: Randy E. Barnett

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2013-11-24

Total Pages: 448

ISBN-13: 0691159734

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The U.S. Constitution found in school textbooks and under glass in Washington is not the one enforced today by the Supreme Court. In Restoring the Lost Constitution, Randy Barnett argues that since the nation's founding, but especially since the 1930s, the courts have been cutting holes in the original Constitution and its amendments to eliminate the parts that protect liberty from the power of government. From the Commerce Clause, to the Necessary and Proper Clause, to the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, to the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Supreme Court has rendered each of these provisions toothless. In the process, the written Constitution has been lost. Barnett establishes the original meaning of these lost clauses and offers a practical way to restore them to their central role in constraining government: adopting a "presumption of liberty" to give the benefit of the doubt to citizens when laws restrict their rightful exercises of liberty. He also provides a new, realistic and philosophically rigorous theory of constitutional legitimacy that justifies both interpreting the Constitution according to its original meaning and, where that meaning is vague or open-ended, construing it so as to better protect the rights retained by the people. As clearly argued as it is insightful and provocative, Restoring the Lost Constitution forcefully disputes the conventional wisdom, posing a powerful challenge to which others must now respond. This updated edition features an afterword with further reflections on individual popular sovereignty, originalist interpretation, judicial engagement, and the gravitational force that original meaning has exerted on the Supreme Court in several recent cases.

The State
The State

Author: Anthony De Jasay

Publisher: Collected Papers of Anthony de

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780865971714

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The State is a brilliant analysis of some of the fundamental issues of modern political thought from the perspective, not of individuals or subjects, but of the state itself. The author poses the query, "What would you do if you were the state?" The state usually is understood as an instrument, not a personality, and it is presumed to exist so that people can achieve their common ends. However, Jasay asks, what if we suppose the state to have a will and ends of its own? To answer these questions, the author traces the logical and historical progression of the state from a modest-sized protector of life and property through its development into an "agile seducer of democratic majorities, to the welfare-dispensing drudge that it is in many countries today ... Is the rational next step a totalitarian enhancement of its power?" The State presents what has been termed "a disturbingly logical 'agenda' for the state in pursuit of its 'self-fulfillment.'"--Inside jacket flap.

Freedom of Expression
Freedom of Expression

Author: Stephen A. Smith

Publisher: Lulu.com

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 706

ISBN-13: 0999728393

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"The texts in this volume represent earlier contributions to the ongoing conversation about the meaning of "the freedom of speech, and of the press," collected and selected to help the reader situate and understand what has gone on before and to advance the contemporary argument in a more informed way."--Introduction, page v.

Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform
Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform

Author: Eugenio F. Biagini

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 508

ISBN-13: 9780521548861

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In common with republicanism or socialism in continental Europe, Liberalism in nineteenth-century Britain was a mass movement. By focussing on the period between the 1860s and the 1880s, this book sets out to explain why and how that happened, and to examine the people who supported it, their beliefs, and the way in which the latter related to one another and to reality. Popular suport for the Liberal party was not irrational in either its objectives or its motivations: on the contrary, its dissemination was due to the fact that the programme of reforms proposed by the party leaders offered convincing solutions to some of the problems perceived as being the most urgent at the time. This is a revealing, innovative synthesis of the history of popular support for the Liberal party, which emphasises the extent to which Liberalism stood in the common heritage of European and American democracy.

The Myth of American Individualism
The Myth of American Individualism

Author: Barry Alan Shain

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2021-02-09

Total Pages: 415

ISBN-13: 0691224994

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Sharpening the debate over the values that formed America's founding political philosophy, Barry Alan Shain challenges us to reconsider what early Americans meant when they used such basic political concepts as the public good, liberty, and slavery. We have too readily assumed, he argues, that eighteenth-century Americans understood these and other terms in an individualistic manner. However, by exploring how these core elements of their political thought were employed in Revolutionary-era sermons, public documents, newspaper editorials, and political pamphlets, Shain reveals a very different understanding--one based on a reformed Protestant communalism. In this context, individual liberty was the freedom to order one's life in accord with the demanding ethical standards found in Scripture and confirmed by reason. This was in keeping with Americans' widespread acceptance of original sin and the related assumption that a well-lived life was only possible in a tightly knit, intrusive community made up of families, congregations, and local government bodies. Shain concludes that Revolutionary-era Americans defended a Protestant communal vision of human flourishing that stands in stark opposition to contemporary liberal individualism. This overlooked component of the American political inheritance, he further suggests, demands examination because it alters the historical ground upon which contemporary political alternatives often seek legitimation, and it facilitates our understanding of much of American history and of the foundational language still used in authoritative political documents.

Freedom's Progress?
Freedom's Progress?

Author: Gerard Casey

Publisher: Andrews UK Limited

Published: 2021-10-04

Total Pages: 969

ISBN-13: 1845409612

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In Freedom's Progress?, Gerard Casey argues that the progress of freedom has largely consisted in an intermittent and imperfect transition from tribalism to individualism, from the primacy of the collective to the fragile centrality of the individual person and of freedom. Such a transition is, he argues, neither automatic nor complete, nor are relapses to tribalism impossible. The reason for the fragility of freedom is simple: the importance of individual freedom is simply not obvious to everyone. Most people want security in this world, not liberty. 'Libertarians,' writes Max Eastman, 'used to tell us that "the love of freedom is the strongest of political motives," but recent events have taught us the extravagance of this opinion. The "herd-instinct" and the yearning for paternal authority are often as strong. Indeed the tendency of men to gang up under a leader and submit to his will is of all political traits the best attested by history.' The charm of the collective exercises a perennial magnetic attraction for the human spirit. In the 20th century, Fascism, Bolshevism and National Socialism were, Casey argues, each of them a return to tribalism in one form or another and many aspects of our current Western welfare states continue to embody tribalist impulses. Thinkers you would expect to feature in a history of political thought feature in this book - Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Locke, Mill and Marx - but you will also find thinkers treated in Freedom's Progress? who don't usually show up in standard accounts - Johannes Althusius, Immanuel Kant, William Godwin, Max Stirner, Joseph Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin, Pyotr Kropotkin, Josiah Warren, Benjamin Tucker and Auberon Herbert. Freedom's Progress? also contains discussions of the broader social and cultural contexts in which politics takes its place, with chapters on slavery, Christianity, the universities, cities, Feudalism, law, kingship, the Reformation, the English Revolution and what Casey calls Twentieth Century Tribalisms - Bolshevism, Fascism and National Socialism and an extensive chapter on human prehistory.