"The purpose of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 is to offer opportunity, not an opiate. . . . We are not content to accept the endless growth of relief rolls or welfare rolls."--President Lyndon B. Johnson

"I would just provide that every person in this country is given a certain minimum income. If he wants to work in addition to that, he keeps what he earns."--Senator George S. McGovern

Between LBJ's statement in 1964 and McGovern's in 1972, American liberals radically transformed their welfare philosophy from one founded on opportunity and hard work to one advocating automatic entitlements. Gareth Davies' book shows us just how far-reaching that transformation was and how much it has to teach anyone engaged in the latest round of debates over welfare reform in America.

When Lyndon Johnson declared a "War on Poverty," he took great care to align his ambitious program with national attitudes toward work, worthiness, and dependency. Eight years later, however, American liberals were dominated by those who believed that all citizens enjoyed an unqualified right to income support with no strings or obligations attached. That shift, Davies argues, was part of a broader transformation in political values that had devastating consequences for the Democratic Party in particular and for the cause of liberalism generally.

Davies shows how policy failure, the war in Vietnam, domestic violence, and the struggle for black equality combined to create a crisis in national politics that destroyed the promise of the Great Society. He reevaluates LBJ's role, demonstrating that while detractors such as McGovern and Robert Kennedy embraced the "new politics of dissent," LBJ remained true throughout his career to the values that had sustained the New Deal coalition and that continued to retain their mass appeal.

Davies also explains in rich detail how the dominant strain of American liberalism came to abandon individualism, one of the nation's dogmas, thus shattering the New Deal liberal hegemony with consequences still affecting American politics in the mid 1990s. Placing today's welfare debates within this historical context, Davies shows that the current emphasis on work and personal responsibility is neither a liberal innovation nor distinctively conservative.

Based on a wide range of previously untapped archival sources and presented in a very accessible style, From Opportunity to Entitlement will be especially useful for courses concerned with the 1960s, the decline of the New Deal political order, the history of social welfare, the American reform tradition, and the influence of race upon American politics.

Despite the enormous influence of Michel Foucault in gender studies, social theory, and cultural studies, his work has been relatively neglected in the study of politics. Although he never published a book on the state, in the late 1970s Foucault examined the technologies of power used to regulate society and the ingenious recasting of power and agency that he saw as both consequence and condition of their operation.
These twelve essays provide a critical introduction to Foucault's work on politics, exploring its relevance to past and current thinking about liberal and neo-liberal forms of government. Moving away from the great texts of liberal political philosophy, this book looks closely at the technical means with which the ideals of liberal political rationalities have been put into practice in such areas as schools, welfare, and the insurance industry.
This fresh approach to one of the seminal thinkers of the twentieth century is essential reading for anyone interested in social and cultural theory, sociology, and politics.

Thomas Paine (1737-1809), the man who gave the name to the United States, became known as the Voice of the Revolution. Paine was one of the most radical and outspoken figures of the eighteenth century - an independent thinker on a level with Voltaire and Goethe. The self-educated former tax collector was famed for his fiery disposition and brilliant way with words in defense of liberty. A cabin boy on board a privateer, twice married, first an official and later a victim of the French revolutionary government, at odds with his fellow American rebels, and constantly beset by money problems, Paine lived a full and exciting life. In addition to his better known accomplishments, he designed bridges, a "smokeless candle" and a detailed plan for the invasion of Britain - and all this from a man who abruptly turned from being a craftsman to a statesman at the age of thirty-seven. Together with his colleagues Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, Paine provided the philosophical underpinnings for the new nation. He is best known for his radical works The Age of Reason, Rights of Man, and, above all, Common Sense.

This book presents the first modern overview of Liberal government during the period when the Liberals dominated British politics. Parry argues that Liberalism was a much more coherent force than has been generally recognised, and goes on to reinterpret the pattern of nineteenth-century political development. The Liberal tradition attached great importance to 'parliamentary government' as the means of reconciling the nation to the exercise of government power, and Parry concentrates on parliamentary politics, seeing it as the best way to understand the Liberals' coherence and success. After a review of the origins of Liberalism before 1830, the book examines in turn the strategies of successive Liberal leaders from Grey to Gladstone and Hartington. Nineteenth-century Liberalism was concerned to maintain the rule of a propertied but socially diverse, rational and civilised elite, in the belief that this was the best means to administer the state economically and equitably, and to promote an industrious and virtuous citizenship. Because of the widespread popularity of the economic, foreign and religious policies followed to this end, and because of the flexible, sometimes cynical, presentational skills of Liberal leaders, the Liberals became the most popular party for much of the century. After 1867 however, argues Parry, Gladstone's crusading politics outweighed the gains achieved by the organisational mobilisation of grass-roots groups and led directly to the break up of the party in 1886. This book therefore not only presents a clear and original introduction to nineteenth-century Liberal politics, but also explores the theory, practice and consequences of Liberal approaches to theconstitution and to religious, moral and social policy.

The issue of public morality, so often at the center of heated debates about pornography, narcotics, public indecency, violent entertainment, "family values," et cetera, is at once a continuing reality and a persistent dilemma in our liberal society. With Public Morality and Liberal Society, Harry M. Clor makes an important contribution to this perennial and intensely debated theme by considering how public morality can be justified in theory and accommodated in practice within a liberal society. Clor develops his argument in five parts. Chapter 1 provides an overview of the various controversies and ambiguities about public morality in American life and public opinion. In Chapter 2 Clor presents the case for a public standard of morality and defends it against the most persistent objections. Chapter 3 covers some of the themes prominent in recent treatments of the subject of public morality, and Chapter 4 critically analyzes the two theoretically dominant liberal orientations of recent decades, the libertarian and egalitarian views. In Chapter 5 Clor compares the traditional ethical indictment of pornography with the current feminist indictment.

This major new book reassesses the liberal political tradition in the light of recent intellectual and political developments.Featuring work by leading analysts of liberal thought, this volume examines the links between modern liberalism and earlier liberal variants, addresses contemporary challenges to liberalism, and considers prospects for the future. Anthony Arblaster, Norman Barry, Rodney Barker, Richard Bellamy, Michael Freeden, Elizabeth Frazer, Richard Flathan, Andrew Vincent and Hans Vorlander offer both analytical and historical approaches to understanding liberal thought. Engaging with topical questions and controversies, the authors cover issues including the structure of liberal argument, varieties of liberalism, economic liberalism, liberal constitutionalism, liberalism and feminism, liberalism and postmodernism, and the future of liberal political thought. The Liberal Political Tradition will be of great interest to students and researchers concerned with historical ideas, political ideologies and contemporary political philosophy.

Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal was a turning point in the role of the federal government and in the expectations of American citizens. Now, Alan Brinkley, whose Voices of Protest won the American Book Award for History, shows how New Deal liberalism was transformed into a new beast during and after World War II--and why it is faring so poorly in the 1990s.

Since 1989, the Cold War has ended, new nations have emerged in Eastern Europe, and revolutionary struggles to establish liberal ideals have been waged against repressive governments throughout the world. Will the promise of liberalism be realized? What can liberals do to make the most of their opportunities and construct enduring forms of political order? In this important and timely book, a leading political theorist discusses the possibility of liberal democracy in Western and Eastern Europe and offers practical suggestions for its realization. Bruce Ackerman begins by sketching the challenges faced a Western Europe free for the first time in half a century to determine its own fate without the constant intervention of the United States and the Soviet Union. Unless decisive steps are taken, this moment of promise can degenerate into a new cycle of nationalist power struggle. Revolutionary action is now required to build the foundations of a democratic federal Europe-a union strong enough to keep the peace and to combat the threat of local tyrannies. Ackerman next considers Eastern Europe and discusses fundamental problems overlooked in the rush to build market economies there. He points out that leading countries-including Poland, Hungary, and Russia-have yet to establish new constitutions, contenting themselves instead with hasty amendments to old Communist documents. This is a great mistake, says Ackerman, for there is an urgent need to constitutionalize liberal revolution, and the window of opportunity for doing this is far smaller than many people realize. Neither judicial efforts to punish collaborators with the old regimes and to redress wrongs done to their victims nor the judicial activism now sweeping Eastern Europe should take priority over the formulation of democratically legitimated constitutions. Ackerman concludes by considering the impact of 1989 on South Africa, Latin America, and the United States, exploring how decisive liberal action throughout the world can help to expand the range of functioning constitutional democracies and recover liberalism's lost revolutionary heritage. .

" What is the meaning of individualism in a modern democracy? In this rich and penetrating book, a major political theorist examines the nature of individualism-the concept of self it implies, the ethic it sustains, the personal connectedness it supports, and the politics it requires-and provides a challenging answer. George Kateb argues that democracy is founded on respect for the dignity of individuals as individuals, and that this respect transforms all human relations. Democratic individuality, in his view, is a way in which individuals whose rights are protected may dare to live their private lives and to conceive their roles as citizens. Kateb employs the concept of individuality not only to criticize communitarianism and to define the limits of the role of the state, but also to approach global concerns involving our relation to nature. The ten essays of this book explore democratic individuality in light of such topics as the power of political institutions to accommodate and express different values, the moral distinctiveness of representative democracy, the implications of the liberal social contract, and the possibility of human extinction. Eloquently addressing issues at the heart of democratic life, The Inner Ocean will be of vital interest to scholars and students in American studies, political theory, and moral philosophy.

In The Unvarnished Doctrine, Steven M. Dworetz addresses two critical issues in contemporary thinking on the American Revolution—the ideological character of this event, and, more specifically, the relevance of "America’s Philosopher, the Great Mr. Locke," in this experience. Recent interpretations of the American revolution, particularly those of Bailyn and Pocock, have incorporated an understanding of Locke as the moral apologist of unlimited accumulation and the original ideological crusader for the "spirit of capitalism," a view based largely on the work of theorists Leo Strauss and C. B. Macpherson. Drawing on an examination of sermons and tracts of the New England clergy, Dworetz argues that the colonists themselves did not hold this conception of Locke. Moreover, these ministers found an affinity with the principles of Locke’s theistic liberalism and derived a moral justification for revolution from those principles. The connection between Locke and colonial clergy, Dworetz maintains, constitutes a significant, radicalizing force in American revolutionary thought.

"This book is a highly valuable contribution to the current debate on how to achieve stabilization and structural adjustment programs in the Middle East presenting widely differing country profiles." Digest of Middle East Studies

"This book is an excellent collection of ten country case-studies by well-known Middle East political scientists... " MESA Bulletin

..". a highly original and valuable contribution on an important and most timely topic.... combines clarity of focus and breadth of geographic coverage." Robert Bianchi

International specialists take stock of the problems and prospects for privatization of state-run economies and other liberalization efforts throughout the Middle East and North Africa."

In this book Richard E. Flathman argues vigorously for a new understanding of the proper place of voluntarism, individuality, and plurality in the political and moral theory of liberalism. Giving close and sympathetic attention to thinkers who are seldom considered in debates about liberalism, he draws upon thinking within and outside the liberal canon to articulate a refashioned liberalism that gives a more secure prominence to plurality and a robust individuality. Flathman focuses on political philosophers whose work deals with willfulness and the will in human practice. He is concerned with the thinking of such nominalist medieval theologians as John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham; of Hobbes; and of Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and William James. He also explores the writings of such contemporary philosophical psychologists as Brian O'Shaughnessy and, in particular, Wittgenstein, and of such twentiethcentury political theorists as Isaiah Berlin, John Rawls, Hannah Arendt, and especially Michael Oakeshott. Appropriating ideas from widely disapproved thinkers and from theological sources commonly thought to be incompatible with liberalism, he formulates what is in many ways a strongly personal statement, one that is unorthodox and potentially disturbing. Sharply controversial, Willful Liberalism is certain to enliven and invigorate political and moral debate, and it may well help to revive liberalism as the dominant public philosophy of our culture, setting it on a new and better course.

Norman Geras's writings on Marxist thought are appreciated for their clarity of presentation and power of argument. In this new book, he responds to two challenges facing socialists today: to remedy areas of theoretical deficiency, and to resist at the same time the less salutary pressures of intellectual fashion and reaction. Discourses in Extremity first discusses the moral dimension of problems such as famine, injustice and tyranny, examining the balance of Marxism's strengths and weaknesses here by comparison with libertarian and liberal discourses. In a powerful new essay, Geras then exposes inadequacies in the socialist discussion of justifiable means of revolutionary change, suggesting as a remedy the need to learn from an alternative tradition of thought about human conflict. Geras engages both with classic statements of liberalism and socialism from Locke to Trotsky and with more recent argument by Steven Lukes, Robert Nozick, Peter Singer and Michael Walzer. The second part of the volume enters a debate-over the status of Marxism and so-called 'post-Marxism'-that has aroused widespread interest. In a painstaking critique of ideas of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Geras rebuts their account of the Marxist tradition and the discourse-based perspective they would have displace it, criticizing the arbitrariness and excess within their own discourse.

We tried as hard as we could to believe that politics might be idyl, only to discover that what we took to be a political pastoral was really a grim military campaign or a murderous betrayal of political allies. Thus Lionel Trilling summarized the experience of an entire generation of American liberal intellectuals who had watched with mounting disbelief and disillusion the rise of totalitarianism in the 1950s. In this book, the author makes it clear that Trilling's summary was in itself a mythic reconstruction, a prominent example of the way liberals came to terms with their own political past. Schaub's book analyzes their efforts to reshape an ""old"" liberalism alleged to hold naively optimistic views of human nature, scientific reason, and social progress into a ""new"", skeptical liberalism that recognized the persistence of human evil, the fragility of reason, and the ambiguity of moral decision. These liberal reassessments of history, politics, human nature, and distiny - what Schaub calls the ""liberal narrative"" - mediated the critical and imaginative production of the literary community after World War II. Schaub shows that the elements of this narrative in American history, political philosophy, and social criticism during the Cold War era. His analysis of the dominant critical communities of the '40s - led by critics such as Lionel Trilling and Irving Howe, Cleanth Brooks, and Allen Tates - recovers the political meanings embedded within their debates over the nature of literary realism, the definition of the novel, and speculations on its ""death"". In the second part of this study, Schaub turns to Ralph Ellison, Flannery O'Connor, Norman Mailer, and John Barth. His readings of their fictions isolate the political and cultural content of works often faulted for their apparent efforts to transcend social history.

Herbert Gladstone (1854-1930) was the only one of the sons of the renowned nineteenth-century Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone to enjoy a significant political career in his own right. Yet he has been generally relegated to the wings of history's stage, destined, it seems, to remain permanently in the shadow of his illustrious parent. Such an outcome would not have troubled him unduly, for his whole life was shaped by deep affection and respect for his father while as a political actor he was happiest operating in the political shadows rather than in the limelight - serving for 30 years as a Liberal MP for Leeds with short periods as Home Secretary (1905-1910) and, as Viscount Gladstone, Governor-General of South Africa (1910-1914). In exploring the intimate connection between Herbert Gladstone's public and private lives this new biography, the first for eighty years, reveals an unambitious, self-effacing man of faith and throws new light not only on his own career but also on significant episodes in British Victorian and early-twentieth century history.

Chile is widely known as the first experiment in neoliberalism in Latin America, carried out and made possible through state violence. Since the beginning of the transition in 1990, the state has pursued a national project of reconciliation construed as debts owed to the population. The state owed a "social debt" to the poor accrued through inequalities generated by economic liberalization, while society owed a "moral debt" to the victims of human rights violations. "Life in Debt" invites us into lives and world of a poor urban neighborhood in Santiago. Tracing relations and lives between 1999 and 2010, Clara Han explores how the moral and political subjects imagined and asserted by poverty and mental health policies and reparations for human rights violations are refracted through relational modes and their boundaries. Attending to intimate scenes and neighborhood life, Han reveals the force of relations in the making of selves in a world in which unstable work patterns, illness, and pervasive economic indebtedness are aspects of everyday life. Lucidly written, "Life in Debt" provides a unique meditation on both the past inhabiting actual life conditions but also on the difficulties of obligation and achievements of responsiveness.

The success of political efforts to create a more open economy in Brazil over the past decade has depended crucially on support from the industrial sector, which long enjoyed the benefits of protection by the state from economic competition. Why businesses previously so sheltered would back neoliberal reform, and why opposition arose at times from sectors least threatened by free trade, are the puzzles this book seeks to answer.

Drawing on more than one hundred interviews with industrialists and business association representatives, as well as a wide range of other sources, Peter Kingstone argues that the key to understanding the behavior of industrialists lies in the impact of four factors on their preferences for reform: the effect of economic crisis on industrialists' perception of the viability of the earlier development model; the sectoral location of their firms in the economy and the advantages historically accruing therefrom; the adjustment options available to them given their position in the market; and the credibility of the government's promises about reform and its tactical choices for getting them implemented through the political system.

The mix of these four factors, Kingstone shows, left business preferences relatively malleable and thus available for support of reform, even in the face of potentially high costs. Whether such support was forthcoming depended on industrialists' perceptions of the ability of government leaders to deliver on their promises. Widespread resistance to reform occurred when leaders lost their credibility. Under Fernando Collor's leadership, that credibility was never recovered; under Fernando Henrique Cardoso's, it was recovered through increasing concessions to industrialists on the character of the reform program.

In the presidential campaign of 1948, Henry Wallace set out to challenge the conventional wisdom of his time, blaming the United States, instead of the Soviet Union, for the Cold War, denouncing the popular Marshall Plan, and calling for an end to segregation. In addition, he argued that domestic fascism--rather than international communism--posed the primary threat to the nation. He even welcomed Communists into his campaign, admiring their commitment to peace. Focusing on what Wallace himself later considered his campaign's most important aspect, the troubled relationship between non-Communist progressives like himself and members of the American Communist Party, Thomas W. Devine demonstrates that such an alliance was not only untenable but, from the perspective of the American Communists, undesirable. Rather than romanticizing the political culture of the Popular Front, Devine provides a detailed account of the Communists' self-destructive behavior throughout the campaign and chronicles the frustrating challenges that non-Communist progressives faced in trying to sustain a movement that critiqued American Cold War policies and championed civil rights for African Americans without becoming a sounding board for pro-Soviet propaganda.

At the same time that dissatisfaction with the shape of church/state relations is on the rise, liberalism is witnessing ever-spreading postmodern skepticism regarding the theoretical soundness of its core principles. What doe these two tends have to do with each other? Potentially a great deal, according to J. Judd Owen, who contends that the liberal posture to religion cannot be divorced from, but rather lies at the deepest level of, the serious questions confronting liberalism's original rationalist basis.
Through a careful critique of Richard Rorty, John Rawls, and Stanely Fish, Owen argues that today's "post-rational" liberalisms can only evade or obscure, but cannot resolve, liberalism's perennial difficult with religion. Yet by politically fostering an indifference to question of religious truth, liberal rationalsim itself shares balme for its present crisis. Antifoundationalism is thus not a radical alternative to liberal rationalism, but its unintended byproduct.
Presenting an original map of the current landscape of political thought, Owen's provocative book cuts across politcal science, philosophy, religion, and constitutional theory.

Today neoliberals argue that we should let ourselves be guided by market forces and that there is little we can do to stem the flow of economic globalization. On the other hand, thinkers on the left continue to denounce domination and claim to speak in the name of victims who are powerless to change the circumstances of their lives. Despite the differences between these two political positions, they suffer from a common weakness: they underestimate the role of autonomous social actors who are capable of influencing political decision-making.

In this important new book Alain Touraine - the leading sociologist and social theorist - attacks the positions of the neoliberals and certain thinkers on the left and develops an alternative view of the tasks for political thought and action today. He argues that the globalization of the economy has not dissolved our capacity for political action, and that the actions of the most underprivileged sections of society are not restricted to rebellion against domination: they can also demand rights (in particular, cultural rights), and can therefore put forward an innovative and not merely critical conception of society and its future.

"Beyond Neoliberalism" is an original and timely contribution to current debates about the changing nature and goals of politics in our contemporary, globalized age. It will be of great interest to students of politics and sociology and will also appeal to a broader readership interested in contemporary politics and current affairs.