European Christian Democracy presents a series of essays by leading experts that analyze the importance of Christian Democracy in European politics. This interdisciplinary volume features contributions from American and European historians and political scientists. In this book, scholars explore the historical roots of the European Christian Democratic movement in Catholic social doctrine and political practice, and use Christian Democracy as a means to analyze the relationship between religion and politics, church and state. Essays in this important collection include both case studies and comparative analyses. They offer a comprehensive assessment of Christian Democracy and the key role it played in establishing constitutional government and social policy in western Europe. Contributors: Winfried Becker, Martin Conway, Michael Gehler, Raymond Grew, Wolfram Kaiser, Stathis Kalyvas, Emiel Lamberts, Paul Misner, Maria Mitchell, Antonio Santucci, Carl Strikwerda, Carolyn Warner, and Steven White.

John Gray is the bestselling author of such books as Straw Dogs and Al Qaeda and What it Means to be Modern whichbrought a mainstream readership to a man who was already one of the UK's most well respected thinkers and political theorists.

Gray wrote Enlightenment’s Wake in 1995 – six years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and six years before the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. Turning his back on neoliberalism at exactly the moment that its advocates were in their pomp, trumpeting 'the end of history' and the supposedly unstoppable spread of liberal values across the globe, Gray’s was a lone voice of scepticism. The thinking he criticised here would lead ultimately to the invasion of Iraq. Today, its folly might seem obvious to all, but as this edition of Enlightenment’s Wake shows, John Gray has been trying to warn us for some fifteen years – the rest of us are only now catching up with him.

Table of Contents

Introduction to the Routledge Classics Edition Preface Acknowledgements 1. Against the new liberalism 2. Notes toward a definition of the political thought of Tlon 3. Toleration: a post-liberal perspective 4. Enlightenment, illusion and the fall of the Soviet state 5. The post-communist societies in transition 6. Agnostic liberalism 7. The undoing of conservatism 8. After the new liberalism 9. From post-liberalism to pluralism 10. Enlightenment's Wake Notes Index

The Future of the Disabled in Liberal Society questions developments in human genetic research from the perspective of persons with mental disabilities and their families. Hans S. Reinders argues that when we use terms such as “disease” and “defect” to describe conditions that genetic engineering might well eliminate, we may also be assuming that disabled lives are deplorable and horrific. Reinders points out that the possibility of preventing disabled lives is at odds with our commitment to the full inclusion of disabled citizens in society. The tension between these different perspectives is of concern to all of us as genetic testing procedures proliferate. Reinders warns that preventative uses of human genetics might even become a threat to the social security and welfare benefits that help support disabled persons and their families. Reinders also argues that this conflict cannot be resolved or controlled on the level of public morality. Because a liberal society makes a commitment to individual freedom and choice, its members can consider the diagnostic and therapeutic uses of human genetics as options available to individual citizens. A liberal society will defend reproductive freedom as a matter of principle. Citizens may select their offspring in accord with their own personal values. Reinders concludes that the future of the mentally disabled in liberal society will depend on the strength of our moral convictions about the value of human life, rather than on the protective force of liberal morality. One of the most important aspects of this book is Reinder’s attention to parents who have come to see the task of raising a disabled child as an enriching experience. These are people who change their conceptions of success and control and, therefore, their conceptions of themselves. They come to value their disabled children for what they have to give. Even though disabled children and disabled adults present parents and society with real challenges, the rewards are just as real. This powerful critique of contemporary bioethics is sure to become required reading for those interested in human development, special education, ethics, philosophy, and theology.

Liberal Democracy and its Critics examines the contribution of eleven contemporary political social theorists to understanding democracy today. The theorists are prominent in political and philosophical debates in the 1990s, for example between neo--liberalism (Hayek) and social liberalism (Rawls), and between liberalism and republicanism (Arendt), communitarianism (Taylor and Walzer), a anti--political politicsa (Havel) and feminism (Pateman and Young). The book also explores how the philosophical defence of universalism (Habermas) or critiques of it (Foucault and Rorty) impinge on assessments of liberal democracy. The eleven theorists reflect varying approaches to key issues in democratic thought since 1945: liberal constitutionalism or popular sovereignty, elitism or participation and parliamentary or council democracy. Many also engage with more recent themes such as civil society, the politics of difference, deliberative democracy, and the nature of cosmopolitan democracy. Some focus on the justification of democracy, others make specific institutional proposals. The chapters set the thinkers within their intellectual and political contexts and explore the relationship between their philosophical positions and explicit or implicit views on democracy. They will be of interest both to students of contemporary social thought and of democracy. Contributors to the book include Margaret Canovan, April Carter, Don Fletcher, John Horton, Mark Kingwell, Chandran Kukathas, Martin Leet, Lois McNay, Barbara Sullivan, Katherine Welton and Jonathan Wolff.

Tom Waldman's lively and sweeping assessment of the state of American liberalism begins with the political turbulence of 1968 and culminates with the 2006 takeover of Congress by the Democratic Party. "Not Much Left: The Fate of Liberalism in America" vividly demonstrates how the progressive and liberal wing of the Democratic Party helped end a war, won the civil rights battle, and paved the way for blacks, women, gays, and other minorities to achieve full citizenship.Through reportage, anecdotes, and analysis - particularly of the disastrous defeat of Democrat George McGovern in 1972 - Waldman chronicles how the grand coalition that achieved so much in the 1960s began to self-destruct in the early 1970s. Citing the Republican recovery from Barry Goldwater's 1964 defeat, Waldman demonstrates how the two parties' very different reactions to electoral debacle account for recent Republican dominance and Democratic impotence. Assessing liberalism's fate through the Carter and Reagan presidencies, the defeat of Michael Dukakis in the 1988 presidential election, and the on-again, off-again liberalism of the Clinton years, Waldman then brings the discussion up to date with analysis of the 2008 presidential campaign.

Liberalism is doomed to failure, John Kekes argues in this penetrating criticism of its basic assumptions. Liberals favor individual autonomy, a wide plurality of choices, and equal rights and resources, seeing them as essential for good lives. They oppose such evils as selfishness, intolerance, cruelty, and greed. Yet the more autonomy, equality, and pluralism there is, Kekes contends, the greater is the scope for evil. According to Kekes, liberalism is inconsistent because the conditions liberals regard as essential for good lives actually foster the very evils liberals want to avoid, and avoiding those evils depends on conditions contrary to the ones liberals favor. Kekes argues further that the liberal conceptions of equality, justice, and pluralism require treating good and evil people with equal respect, distributing resources without regard to what recipients deserve, and restricting choices to those that conform to liberal preconceptions. All these policies are detrimental to good lives. Kekes concludes that liberalism cannot cope with the prevalence of evil, that it is vitiated by inconsistent commitments, and that—contrary to its aim—liberalism is an obstacle to good lives.

Williams explores the crisis of liberalism through a critique of recent political thought, showing how despite change it remains our most enduring public philosophy. He outlines different approaches to ideological change and sets each in the context of theories of change drawn from such disciplines as political science, sociology, history, and the philosophy of science.

Political philosophy in the English-speaking world has been dominated for more than two decades by various versions of liberal theory, which holds that political inquiry should proceed without reference to religious views. Although a number of philosophers have contested this stance, no one has succeeded in dislodging liberalism from its position of dominance. The most interesting challenges to liberalism have come from those outside of the discipline of philosophy. Sociologists, legal scholars, and religious ethicists have attacked liberalism's embodiment in practice, arguing that liberal practice-particularly in the United States-has produced a culture which trivializes religion. This culture, they argue, is at odds with the beliefs and practices of large numbers of citizens. In the past, disciplinary barriers have limited scholarly exchange among philosophical liberals and their critics in theology. Religion and Contemporary Liberalism makes an important step towards increased dialogue among these scholars. A collection of original papers by philosophers, sociologists, theologians, and legal theorists, this volume will spark considerable debate in philosophy-debate which will be significant for all of those concerned with the place of religion within a liberal society.

This is the first focused study on the relationship between the use of national courts to pursue retrospective justice and the construction of viable democracies. Included in this interdisciplinary volume are fascinating, detailed essays on the experiences of eight countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Poland, and South Africa. According to the contributors, the most important lesson for leaders of new democracies, who are wrestling with the human rights abuses of past dictatorships, is that they have many options.

Democratizing regimes are well-advised to be attentive to the significant political, ethical, and legal constraints that may limit their ability to achieve retribution for past wrongs. On prudential ground alone, some fledgling regimes will have no choice but to restrain their desire for punishment in the interest of political survival. However, it would be incorrect to think that all new democracies are therefore bereft of the political and legal resources needed to bring the perpetrators of egregious human rights violations to justice. In many instances, governments have overcome the obstacles before them and, by appealing to both national and international legal standards, have brought their former dictators to trial. When these judicial proceedings have been properly conducted and insulated from partisan political pressures, they have provided tangible evidence of the guiding principles -- equality, fairness, and the rule of law -- that are essential to the post-authoritarian order.

This collection shows that the quest for transitional justice has amounted to something more than merely a break with the past -- it constitutes a formative actwhich directly affects the quality and credibility of democratic institutions.

Justificatory Liberalism advances a theory of personal, public and political justification. Drawing on current work in epistemology and cognitive psychology, the book develops a theory of personally justified belief. Building on this account, it then advances an account of public justification that is more normative and less "populist" than that of "political liberals". Following the social contract theories of Hobbes, Locke, and Kant, Gaus argues that citizens have inconclusive public justification. The rule of law, liberal democracy and limited judicial review are defended as elements of a publicly justified umpiring procedure.

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.

Well before her untimely death in 1992, Judith Shklar was widely recognized as one of the outstanding political theorists of our time. A pivotal figure in the reinvigoration of liberal theory during the past two decades, Shklar brought to life a complex world in which every vice has distinct political consequences and every virtue unavoidable costs. Her unique and unusually realistic approach to the study of liberal practices and institutions added psychological depth as well as a bracing pragmatism to the liberal political imagination.
In this tightly organized collection of essays, sixteen distinguished political theorists explore Shklar's intellectual legacy, focussing on both her own ideas and the broad range of issues that most intrigued her. The volume opens with a series of varied and illuminating assessments of Shklar's conception of liberal politics. The second section, with essays on Descartes and Racine, Hobbes, Rousseau, and Laski, emphasizes the relation between individual freedom and moral psychology in modern political thought. The third section addresses contemporary issues, such as the role of hypocrisy, offensive speech, and constitutional courts in liberal democracies. The book concludes with an autobiographical essay by Shklar that provides a vivid sense of her singular voice and personality.
The contributors to this volume are Bruce Ackerman, Seyla Benhabib, John Dunn, Amy Gutmann, Stanley Hoffmann, Stephen Holmes, George Kateb, Isaac Kramnick, Patrick Riley, Nancy Rosenblum, Quentin Skinner, Rogers M. Smith, Tracy B. Strong, Dennis F. Thompson, Michael Walzer, and Bernard Yack.

What does Walter Mondale's career reveal about the dilemma of the modern Democtratic party and the crisis of postwar American liberalism? Steven M. Gillon 's answer is that Mondale's frustration as Jimmy Carter's vice president and his failure to unseat the immensely popular President Reagan in 1984 reveal the beleaguered state of a party torn apart by generational and ideological disputes.

"The Democrats' Dilemma" begins with Mondale's early career in Minnesota politics, from his involvement with Hubert Humphrey to his election to the United States Senate in 1964. Like many liberals of his generation, Mondale traveled to Washington hopeful that government power could correct social wrongs. By 1968, urban unrest, a potent white backlash, and America's involvement in the Vietnam war dimmed much of his optimisim. In the years after 1972, as senator, as vice president, and as presidential candidate, Mondale self-conciously attempted to fill the void after the death of Robert Kennedy. Mondale attempted to create a new Democratic party by finding common ground between the party's competeing factions. Gillon contends that Mondale's failure to create that consensus underscored the deep divisions within the Democratic Party.

Using previously classified documents, unpublished private papers, and dozens of interviews -including extensive conversations with Mondale himself- Gillon paints a vivid portrait of the innerworkings of the Carter administration. "The Democrats' Dilemma" captures Mondale's frustration as he attempted to mediate between the demands of liberals intent upon increased spending for social programs and the fiscal conservatism of a president unskilled in the art of congressional diplomacy. Gillon discloses the secret revelation that Mondale nearly resigned as vice president. Gillon also chronicles Mondale's sometimes stormy relationships with Jesse Jackson, Gary Hart, and Geraldine Ferraro.

Eminently readable and a means of access to a major twentieth-century political figure, "The Democrats' Dilemma" is a fascinating look at the travail of American liberalism.

In this work, Ruth W. Grant presents a new approach to John Locke's familiar works. Taking the unusual step of relating Locke's Two Treatises to his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Grant establishes the unity and coherence of Locke's political arguments. She analyzes the Two Treatises as a systematic demonstration of liberal principles of right and power and grounds it in the epistemology set forth in the Essay.

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.

Examining the relationship between sedition and liberal democracies, particularly in India, this book looks at the biography of sedition laws, its contradictory position against free speech, and democratic ethics. Recent sedition cases registered in India show that the law in its wide and diverse deployment was used against agitators in a community-based pro-reservation movement, group of university students for their alleged 'anti-national' statements, anti-liquor activists, and anti-nuclear movement, to name a few. Set against its contemporary use, this book has used sedition as a lens to probe the fate of political speech in liberal democracy. The lived reality of the law of sedition in changing anthropological sites is juxtaposed with its positivist existence. Anushka Singh uses a comparative framework keeping in focus the Indian experience backed by fieldwork in Haryana, Maharashtra, and Delhi, and includes a comparative perspective from England, the USA, and Australia to contribute to debates on sedition within liberal democracies at large, especially in the wake of the proliferation of counter-terror legislations.

This is a book for our political moment. As Doug Schoen (The End of Authority, Rowman & Littlefield, 2013) warned us nearly a decade ago, we are facing a wholesale lack of trust in our institutions. This problem has deep roots within liberalism, and it cannot be solved by tweaking the liberal paradigm, in which different conceptions of the good exclude each other as well as a nonexclusive common good. The essence of liberalism is contained in the language of "values," which in politics serves as wedges to divide people, as Jo Renee Formicola has shown (The Politics of Values, Rowman & Littlefield, 2008). Scholars are beginning to imagine a postliberal paradigm, preeminently John Milbank and Adrian Pabst in their Politics of Virtue (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016). The liberal approach is nearing its end, yet at the moment its tentacles seem impossible to escape. In no small part this because its assumptions are embedded in our political language, in the language of "values," as well as terms like "morality," "sovereignty," and "secular." Only a thoroughgoing survey, reaching back to the early modern era, can uncover the nature of liberalism's basic assumptions and diagnose its breakdown. This book therefore complements and grounds critiques of liberalism such as Patrick Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed (2018). This book does so by questioning values language, building on Edward Andrew's The Genealogy of Values (Rowman & Littlefield, 1995), the only monograph on the topic in English. Central to liberalism is a denial of a good that is qualitatively superior to individual interest: individuals disagree about the good - they have different values - and the state protects us from fighting each other. By contrast, a postliberal political philosophy is able to understand the common good as friendship and social trust, which are built up by loyalty. The pursuit of "values" and of "morality" in liberalism actually distorts and harms the common good as friendship: if I am loyal to certain impersonal "values," that means I am not loyal to you. Political thinkers have, however, systematically ignored the phenomenon of friendship over the past five hundred years. No other book on liberalism connects so many dots. The target audience is graduate students and scholars. Topics covered along the way in this work include the shortcomings of the concept of "sovereignty" and the invention of "morality" as its supplement, the inappropriateness of the distinction between the empirical and the transcendental, the true nature of the secular and the sacred, the necessarily symbolic expression of the common good, and the false conceptualization of "religion" and politics.

The authors discuss how democracies engage in foreign policies that are vastly different from those of other regimes; the comparison of transitional or liberalizing democracies in Spain, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and sub-Saharan Africa to established democracies like the United States; the noteworthy outcome of economic liberalization; and the strategies of collaboration within international institutions such as the European Community and NATO.

The Liberal Unionist party was one of the shortest-lived political parties in British history. It was formed in 1886 by a faction of the Liberal party, led by Lord Hartington, which opposed Irish home rule. In 1895, it entered into a coalition government with the Conservative party and in 1912, now under the leadership of Joseph Chamberlain, it amalgamated with the Conservatives. Ian Cawood here uses previously unpublished archival material to provide the first complete study of the Liberal Unionist party. He argues that the party was a genuinely successful political movement with widespread activist and popular support which resulted in the development of an authentic Liberal Unionist culture across Britain in the mid-1890s. The issues which this book explores are central to an understanding of the development of the twentieth century Conservative party, the emergence of a 'national' political culture, and the problems, both organisational and ideological, of a sustained period of coalition in the British parliamentary system.

The election of Donald Trump as President of the United States in November 2016 was a political earthquake, one supporters and detractors alike agree has changed the course of history. The policy implications have been stark and will continue well beyond his presidency. The political implications have been perhaps even more drastic—for both political parties. Trump has shaken the 40-year-old coalition of traditional conservatives, orthodox religious voters, and free-market libertarians that has long-composed the Republican Party. The Republican Resistance: #NeverTrump Conservatives and the Future of the GOP explores the members of that coalition, especially traditional, establishment-oriented Republicans and conservative intellectuals who opposed his candidacy, who generally still oppose his presidency, and who represent the elite-in-waiting that believes it will have to rebuild the GOP when the Trump coalition implodes. In the end, The Republican Resistance argues that the Trump presidency and the #NeverTrump countermovement reflect key features of modern American politics which both major political parties must contend: the rise of a populist insurgency intent on overtaking the parties from within and challenges of embracing demographic and structural realities on the one hand while catering to a political base often built to oppose those trends on the other.

After decades on the social and political margins, far-right groups and movements are enjoying increasing success, and even claiming a place in mainstream electoral politics in many Western political systems. Research shows that new media like Twitter, YouTube, and community sites likes 4chan and Reddit are increasingly involved with the mobilization of popular support for far-right electoral campaigns, and even organized political violence. These technologies - including other social media, discussion websites, certain online games, chat servers, talk radio, cable news, and print media - are making contemporary far-right ideologies possible in diverse ways, altering methods of recruitment to the extent that they become unrecognizable from far-right movements of the past, and thus, more dangerous. The results of these new technological processes can be seen in the increasing normalization of far-right values within mainstream culture, politics, and media ecosystems within countries from the United States, Britain, Australia, Germany, and Hungary. This book brings together recent academic research exploring how far-right groups use new media to recruit followers to extremist beliefs and mobilize political action. In doing so, the book reveals the complex ways that evolving technologies are used both purposively, subtly, and in some cases incidentally, to recruit and mobilize far-right support.

Continuing a R&L tradition now entering its fourth decade, this book provides the most comprehensive and authoritative account of the national 2020 election, including the presidential nomination process and general election, and congressional and state elections. Andrew E. Busch and John J. Pitney Jr. revisit the campaigns and results through the short lens of politics today and the long lens of American political history. With its keen insights into the issues and events that drove the 2020 elections, Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics will be an invaluable resource for students and all political observers seeking to understand a historic election that will continue to resonate throughout American politics for many years to come.

The Soweto crisis of 1976 marked a watershed in South African political and social history. It focused the attention of the world on the injustice of South African society and started the long and tortuous process that has led to the dismantling of Apartheid. This book examines the role and increasing impotence of English-speaking intellectuals and liberals in South African politics from the 19th century until the Soweto crisis.

This book investigates the relationship between liberal democracies and ontology, that is, philosophical claims about the constitution of agents and the social world. Many philosophers argue that ontology needs to be avoided in political and legal philosophy. In fact, political liberalism, a highly influential paradigm founded by the philosopher John Rawls, makes the avoidance of ontology a core ambition of its 'political, non-metaphysical' programme. In contrast to political liberalism, this book argues that attending to ontological disputes is essential to political and legal philosophy. Illuminating, criticising and developing ontological arguments does not only enhance our understanding of justice, but also highlights key features of democratic citizenship. The argument is built up by bringing together three traditions of thought that have so far not been confronted with one another: political liberalism, the work of Michel Foucault, and the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud and Donald Winnicott. The book also investigates more concrete implications of ontological disputes by drawing on several case studies: a Dutch political-legal debate about greeting rituals; an American conflict about the legalisation of religious freedom; and the struggles for resilience of two American social movement groups.