A thought-provoking challenge to our ideas about philanthropy, marking it as a deeply political activity that allows the wealthy to dictate more than we think. Philanthropy plays a huge role in supporting the provision of many public goods in contemporary societies. As a result, decisions that affect public outcomes and people’s diverse interests are often dependent on the preferences and judgments of the rich. Political theorist Emma Saunders-Hastings argues that philanthropy is a deeply political activity. She asks readers to look at how the power wielded by philanthropy impacts democracy and deepens political inequality by enabling the wealthy to exercise outsize influence in public life and by putting in place paternalistic relationships between donors and their intended beneficiaries. If philanthropy is to be made compatible with a democratic society of equals, it must be judged not simply on the benefits it brings but on its wider political consequences. Timely and thought-provoking, Private Virtues, Public Vices will challenge readers’ thoughts on what philanthropy is and how it truly affects us.
Aristotle offers a conception of the private and its relationship to the public that suggests a remedy to the limitations of liberalism today, according to Judith A. Swanson. In this fresh and lucid interpretation of Aristotle's political philosophy, Swanson challenges the dominant view that he regards the private as a mere precondition to the public. She argues, rather, that for Aristotle private activity develops virtue and is thus essential both to individual freedom and happiness and to the well-being of the political order. Swanson presents an innovative reading of The Politics which revises our understanding of Aristotle's political economy and his views on women and the family, slavery, and the relation between friendship and civic solidarity. She examines the private activities Aristotle considers necessary to a complete human life—maintaining a household, transacting business, sustaining friendships, and philosophizing. Focusing on ways Aristotle's public invests in the private through law, rule, and education, she shows how the public can foster a morally and intellectually virtuous citizenry. In contrast to classical liberal theory, which presents privacy as a shield of rights protecting individuals from one another and from the state, for Aristotle a regime can attain self-sufficiency only by bringing about a dynamic equilibrium between the public and the private. The Public and the Private in Aristotle's Political Philosophy will be essential reading for scholars and students of political philosophy, political theory, classics, intellectual history, and the history of women.
When In Search of the Republic was originally published in 1987, scholarly interpretations of the concept of virtue in the American founding were considered peripheral to mainstream political theory. Since then, the authors' arguments that public virtue, civic responsibility, and private morality were at the heart of the Founding Fathers' political thought is now accepted by a growing number of contemporary political theorists. This revised edition includes a new preface that places In Search of the Republic within the context of contemporary debates over the role of virtue and religion in early American political discourse. This is a superb introduction for students and scholars interested in learning about the moral, political, and constitutional theories of the Founding Fathers.
Many people have claimed that integrity requires sticking to one's convictions come what may. Greg Scherkoske challenges this claim, arguing that it creates problems in distinguishing integrity from fanaticism, close-mindedness or mere inertia. Rather, integrity requires sticking to one's convictions to the extent that they are justifiable and likely to be correct. In contrast to traditional views of integrity, Scherkoske contends that it is an epistemic virtue intimately connected to what we know and have reason to believe, rather than an essentially moral virtue connected to our values. He situates integrity in the context of shared cognitive and practical agency and shows that the relationship between integrity and impartial morality is not as antagonistic as many have thought - which has important implications for the 'integrity objection' to impartial moral theories. This original and provocative study will be of great interest to advanced students and scholars of ethics.
Virtue has been rediscovered in the United States as a subject of public debate and of philosophical inquiry. Politicians from both parties, leading intellectuals, and concerned citizens from diverse backgrounds are addressing questions about the content of our character. William Bennett's moral guide for children, A Book of Virtues, was a national bestseller. Yet many continue to associate virtue with a prudish, Victorian morality or with crude attempts by government to legislate morals. Peter Berkowitz clarifies the fundamental issues, arguing that a certain ambivalence toward virtue reflects the liberal spirit at its best. Drawing on recent scholarship as well as classical political philosophy, he makes his case with penetrating analyses of four central figures in the making of modern liberalism: Hobbes, Locke, Kant, and Mill. These thinkers are usually understood to have neglected or disparaged virtue. Yet Berkowitz shows that they all believed that government resting on the fundamental premise of liberalism--the natural freedom and equality of all human beings--could not work unless citizens and officeholders possess particular qualities of mind and character. These virtues, which include reflective judgment, sympathetic imagination, self-restraint, the ability to cooperate, and toleration do not arise spontaneously but must be cultivated. Berkowitz explores the various strategies the thinkers employ as they seek to give virtue its due while respecting individual liberty. Liberals, he argues, must combine energy and forbearance, finding public and private ways to support such nongovernmental institutions as the family and voluntary associations. For these institutions, the liberal tradition powerfully suggests, play an indispensable role not only in forming the virtues on which liberal democracy depends but in overcoming the vices that it tends to engender. Clearly written and vigorously argued, this is a provocative work of political theory that speaks directly to complex issues at the heart of contemporary philosophy and public discussion. New Forum Books makes available to general readers outstanding, original, interdisciplinary scholarship with a special focus on the juncture of culture, law, and politics. New Forum Books is guided by the conviction that law and politics not only reflect culture, but help to shape it. Authors include leading political scientists, sociologists, legal scholars, philosophers, theologians, historians, and economists writing for nonspecialist readers and scholars across a range of fields. Looking at questions such as political equality, the concept of rights, the problem of virtue in liberal politics, crime and punishment, population, poverty, economic development, and the international legal and political order, New Forum Books seeks to explain--not explain away--the difficult issues we face today.
According to conventional wisdom, government may intervene when private markets fail to provide goods and services that society values. This view has led to the passage of much legislation and the creation of a host of agencies that have attempted, by exquisitely detailed regulations, to compel legislatively defined behavior in a broad range of activities affecting society as a whole—health care, housing, pollution abatement, transportation, to name only a few. Far from achieving the goals of the legislators and regulators, these efforts have been largely ineffective; worse, they have spawned endless litigation and countless administrative proceedings as the individuals and firms on who the regulations fall seek to avoid, or at least soften, their impact. The result has been long delays in determining whether government programs work at all, thwarting of agreed-upon societal aims, and deep skepticism about the power of government to make any difference. Strangely enough in a nation that since its inception has valued both the means and the ends of the private market system, the United States has rarely tried to harness private interests to public goals. Whenever private markets fail to produce some desired good or service (or fail to deter undesirable activity), the remedies proposed have hardly ever involved creating a system of incentives similar to those of the market place so as to make private choice consonant with public virtue. In this revision of the Godkin Lectures presented at Harvard University in November and December 1976, Charles L. Schultze examines the sources of this paradox. He outlines a plan for government intervention that would turn away from the direct "command and control" regulating techniques of the past and rely instead on market-like incentives to encourage people indirectly to take publicly desired actions.
Religious crosses the spheres of both the private life and the public institution. In a liberal democracy, public and private interests and goals prove to be inseparable. Clarke Cochran’s interdisciplinary study brings political theory and the sociology of religion together in a fresh interpretation of liberal culture. First published in 1990, this analysis begins with a reassessment of the nature of the "public" and the "private" in relation to the political. The controversy over religion and politics is examined in light of such contested issues of political life as sexuality, abortion, and the changing nature of the family. Clarifying a number of debates central to contemporary society, this timely reissue will be of particular value to students with an interest in the relationship between religious, society, and politics.
Makes Mencius' and Xunzi's political thought accessible to political theorists, philosophers and scientists with no expertise in classical Chinese or sinology.
What is the good life? Posing this question today would likely elicit very different answers. Some might say that the good life means doing good - improving one's community and the lives of others. Others might respond that it means doing well - cultivating one's own abilities in a meaningful way. But for Aristotle these two distinct ideas - doi...
Recent years have seen the strengthening of a discourse that emphasises the virtues of markets, competition and private initiative, vis-à-vis the vices of public intervention in higher education. This volume presents a timely reflection about the effects this increasing marketization has been producing in many higher education systems worldwide. The various chapters of this volume analyse the impact of markets at the system level, with significant attention being devoted to the changes in modes of regulation, the strengthening of aspects such as privatization and inter-institutional competition in higher education systems, and the closer interaction between higher education and its economic environment. Several of the contributors devote attention as well to the implications of market forces for institutional change, notably regarding issues such as mission, organizational structure and governance and the way marketization is affecting the internal distribution of power and the definition of priorities. Finally, the volume includes several chapters focusing on the different markets of higher education, such as the academic labour market, undergraduate and postgraduate education, and research markets. Altogether these chapters provide important insights concerning the many national and institutional contexts in which the marketization of higher education has been taking place around the world.
