Liberal Beginnings

ISBN-13: 9780521899468 / Angielski / Twarda / 2008 / 200 str.

Ira Katznelson; Andreas Kalyvas

Opis

The book examines the origins and development of the modern liberal tradition and explores the relationship between republicanism and liberalism between 1750 and 1830. The authors consider the diverse settings of Scotland, the American colonies, the new United States, and France and examine the writings of six leading thinkers of this period: Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, James Madison, Thomas Paine, Germaine de Stael, and Benjamin Constant. The book traces the process by which these thinkers transformed and advanced the republican project, both from within and by introducing new elements from without. Without compromising civic principles or abandoning republican language, they came to see that unrevised, the republican tradition could not grapple successfully with the political problems of their time. By investing new meanings, arguments, and justifications into existing republican ideas and political forms, these innovators fashioned a doctrine for a modern republic, the core of which was surprisingly liberal."

Recenzje

“Ever-sharper contrasts drawn by political philosophers between the civic strengths of a lost classical republican tradition and the impoverishment of contemporary liberalism, shorn of all but a preoccupation with negative liberty and the furtherance of the self, have produced an apparent historical conundrum. Why did this republican tradition come to an end? When and how was it so easily displaced by liberalism? And why did so few apparently notice this momentous change? Liberal Beginnings argued that this conundrum is false. Republicanism and liberalism were not two distinct bodies of thought. Rather, the one was a development of the other. ‘Liberalism’ began not as a distinct creed, but as the sum of converging attempts to think out the problems confronting a modern republic. The crucial period in which these attempts were made was that of the era of late eighteenth century revolutions; and Liberal Beginnings supports its important argument by demonstrating the presence of both republican and liberal themes in the writings of six crucial political thinkers during the 1750-1830 period.”
-Gareth Stedman-Jones, King's College, University of Cambridge

Spis treści

1. Beginnings; 2. The rhetoric of the market: Adam Smith on recognition, speech, and exchange; 3. Adam Ferguson's agonistic liberalism: modern commercial society and the limits of classical republicanism; 4. After the king: Thomas Paine's and James Madison's institutional liberalism; 5. Embracing liberalism: Germaine de Stael's farewell to republicanism; 6. On the liberty of the moderns: Benjamin Constant and the discovery of an immanent liberalism; 7. After republicanism: a coda.