Liberal Moments: Reading Liberal Texts

by Alan S. Kahan (Editor), Ewa Atanassow (Editor), J. C. Davis (Editor), John Morrow (Editor)

Overview

Liberalism today has perhaps more supporters and adversaries than any other political movement. This volume traces liberalism's global ascent through essays about some of the thinkers and actors who participated in its rise and spread. The essays included here present for the first time in one place the geographic and ideological diversity of liberal thought and practice as it developed since the eighteenth century. By exploring thinkers as diverse as Montesquieu, Abraham Lincoln, Jacob Burckhardt, Khayr al-Din, Hu Shih, John Rawls, and Czeslaw Milosz, this volume contributes toward a better understanding of liberalisms past and present.

Each chapter opens with a critical passage from the author under consideration and explores the author's significance for liberalism. By facilitating a direct encounter with influential authors and texts, the volume serves as an introduction both to the multiple dimensions of liberalism and to reading texts in political thought. By engaging with particular liberal moments, the essays allow readers to create and explore conversations among liberalisms across time and space. It thus encourages a broader and more nuanced understanding of the nature and history of liberalism. Stimulating, accessible and interdisciplinary, Liberal Moments will appeal to students and scholars in the history of political thought, intellectual history and beyond.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781474251044
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	09/07/2017
Series:	Textual Moments in the History of Political Thought
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.56(d)

About the Author

Ewa Atanassow is Junior Professor at Bard College Berlin. She is the co-editor of Tocqueville and the Frontiers of Democracy (2013).

Alan S. Kahan is Professor of British Civilization at the Université de Versailles/St. Quentin-en-Yvelines, and a member of the faculty at Sciences Po St. Germain-en-Laye, France. He is the author of Mind versus Money: The War Betwen Intellectuals and Capitalism (2010), Alexis de Tocqueville (2010) in Bloomsbury's Major Conservative and Libertarian Thinkers series, Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century Europe (2003) and Aristocratic Liberalism (1992).

Table of Contents

Contributors
Series Editors' Preface
Acknowledgements

Introduction – Ewa Atanassow and Alan S. Kahan

Liberal Beginnings
1. Montesquieu – Catherine Larrère
2. In Praise of Liberty: Madame de Staël's Considerations – Aurelian Craiutu
3. Benjamin Constant on the Liberty of the Ancients and the Moderns – Jeremy Jennings
4. Jeremy Bentham – Emmanuelle de Champs
5. James Madison – Michael P. Zuckert
6. Tocqueville's New Liberalism – Ewa Atanassow

Liberalism Confronts the World
7. Abraham Lincoln's Commentary on the “plain unmistakable language” of the Declaration of Independence - Diana Schaub
8. John Stuart Mill – Nicholas Capaldi
9. Alexander Herzen – Robert Harris
10. T. H. Green – John Morrow
11. Sarmiento: Liberalism Between Civilization and Barbarism – Iván Jaksic
12. Namik Kemal's Constitutional Liberalism: Sovereignty, Justice and the Critique of the Tanzimat – H. Ozan Ozavci
13. Khayr al-Din Basha – Nouh El Harmouzi
14. Jacob Burckhardt's Dystopic Liberalism – Alan S. Kahan

Liberalism Confront the Twentieth Century
15. Max Weber – Joshua Derman
16. Was Keynes a Liberal – Reinhard Blomert
17. John Dewey and Liberal Democracy – James T. Kloppenberg
18. Public Ownership and Totalitarianism: Hu Shih's reflections – Lei Yi
19. Hannah Arendt: Power, Action, and the Foundation of Freedom – Roger Berkowitz
20. Reading F. A. Hayek – Edwige Kacenelenbogen
21. Maruyama and Liberalism in Japan - Reiji Matsumoto
22. Liberty and Value Pluralism: Isaiah Berlin's Two Concepts of Freedom – George Crowder
23. Czeslaw Milosz – Michel Maslowski
24. John Rawls – Chad Van Schoelandt

Notes
Index