This book critically examines the relationship between civility, citizenship and democracy. It engages with the oft-neglected idea of civility (as a Western concept) to explore the paradox of high democracy and low civility that plagues India. This concept helps analyse why democratic consolidation translates into limited justice and minimal equality, along with increased exclusion and performative violence against marginal groups in India. The volume brings together key themes such as minority citizens and the incivility of caste, civility and urbanity, the struggles for 'dignity' and equality pursued by subaltern groups along with feminism and queer politics, and the exclusionary politics of the Citizenship Amendment Act, to argue that civility provides crucial insights into the functioning and social life of a democracy. In doing so, the book illustrates how a successful democracy may also harbour illiberal values and normalised violence and civil societies may have uncivil tendencies. Enriched with case studies from various states in India, this book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of political science, political philosophy, South Asian studies, minority and exclusion studies, political sociology and social anthropology.

A growing number of political philosophers favor a view called liberal perfectionism. According to this view, liberal political morality is characterized by a commitment to helping individuals lead autonomous lives and making other valuable choices. In this book Jonathan Quong rejects this widely held view and offers an alternative account of liberal political morality. Quong argues that the liberal state should not be engaged in determining what constitutes a valuable or worthwhile life nor trying to make sure that individuals live up to this ideal. Instead, it should remain neutral on the issue of the good life, and restrict itself to establishing the fair terms within which individuals can pursue their own beliefs about what gives value to their lives. Liberalism without Perfection thus defends a position known as political liberalism.
In the first part of the book, Quong subjects the liberal perfectionist position to critical scrutiny, advancing three major objections that raise serious doubts about the liberal perfectionist position with regard to autonomy, paternalism, and political legitimacy. In the second part of the book, Quong presents and defends a distinctive version of political liberalism. In particular, he clarifies and develops political liberalism's central thesis: that political principles, in order to be legitimate, must be publicly justifiable to reasonable people. Drawing on the work of John Rawls, Liberalism without Perfection offers its own interpretation of this idea, and rebuts some of the main objections that have been pressed against it. In doing so, it provides novel arguments regarding the nature of an overlapping consensus, the structure of political justification, the idea of public reason, and the status of unreasonable persons.

The Anatomy of the New Poland examines the nature and scope of political change in the first years of post-communist politics in Poland. Poland is significant not only because events there triggered the downfall of Communism throughout the region, but also because of the bold economic experiments of the new Polish leadership. Covering the period from the Round table negotiations of 1989 to the second free parliamentary elections in September 1993, the book blends an examination of the general features of communist systems and the challenges for democratic development in Eastern Europe with a specific analysis of the situation in Poland. In an authoritative analysis, Frances Millard discusses the shaping of the new constitutional framework and the interplay of political institutions in Poland while highlighting the influences upon the development of political parties and the emergence of a new party system. The dilemmas and achievements of post-communist politics are illustrated with reference to topical issues of decommunization and privatization. Written in a clear, accessible style, this book links developments in Poland to general themes in political science. As an assessment of the factors that undermine, and those that further, the emergence of democratic politics, it will be welcomed by scholars and students of the development and transformation of post-communist societies.

Russian democracy in the post-totalitarian era is intimately bound up with the fate of its representative institutions. In Russia's Road to Democracy, Victor Sergeyev and Nikolai Biryukov assess why the Congress of People's Deputies, and the other newly elected institutions founded under perestroika, not only failed to prevent, but also seemed to speed up and provoke, the disintegration of the Soviet Union. By studying the early history of the Congress, the book seeks insights on the prospects for democracy in Russia.Following an inquiry into the roots of Soviet political culture and the implications for future representative institutions, the book then examines the genesis of the Congress of People's Deputies and attempts a hermeneutical reconstruction of the deputies' models of social reality, as expressed in the texts of their parliamentary debates. The authors argue that the adoption of the concept of sobornost - a belief in society's organic unity - as the basic model for this institution proved utterly inadequate to the challenges the country faced. Including substantial new source material which is being made available in English for the first time, Russia's Road to Democracy presents an in-depth analysis with conclusions that contradict the hitherto prevailing theoretical assumptions.

This book situates the origins of American political science in relation to the transatlantic history of liberalism. In a corrective to earlier accounts, it argues that, as political science took shape in the nineteenth century American academy, it did more than express a pre-existing American liberalism. The pioneers of American political science participated in transatlantic networks of intellectual and political elites that connected them directly to the vicissitudes of liberalism in Europe. The book shows how these figures adapted multiple contemporary European liberal arguments to speak to particular challenges of mass democratic politics and large-scale industry as they developed in America. Political science's pioneers in the American academy were thus active agents of the Americanization of liberalism. When political science first secured a niche in the American academy during the antebellum era, it advanced a democratized classical liberal political vision overlapping with the contemporary European liberalism of Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill. As political science expanded during the dramatic growth of university ideals and institutions in the Gilded Age, divergence within its liberalism came to the fore in the area of political economy. In the late-nineteenth century, this divergence was fleshed out into two alternative liberal political visions-progressive liberal and disenchanted classical liberal-with different analyses of democracy and the administrative state. During the early twentieth-century, both visions found expression among early presidents of the new American Political Science Association, and subsequently, within contests over the meaning of 'liberalism' as this term acquired salience in American political discourse. In sum, this book showcases how the history of American political science offers a venue in which we see how a distinct current of mid-nineteenth-century European liberalism was divergently transformed into alternative twentieth-century American liberalisms.

What ever happened with that liberal intellectual "boom" of the 1980s and 1990s? In The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual , Eric Lott- author of the prizewinning Love and Theft - shows that the charter members of the "new left" are suffering from a condition that he has dubbed "boomeritis." Too secure in their university appointments, lecture tours, and book deals, the once rising stars of the liberal elite- including Richard Rorty, Todd Gitlin, Michael Lind, Paul Berman, Greil Marcus, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.- have drifted away from their radical moorings toward the political centre. At once a chronicle of recent intellectual life and a polemic against contemporary liberalism's accommodations of the conservative status quo, The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual eviscerates the complacency that has seeped into the politics of the would-be vanguard of American intellectual thought. Lott issues a wake-up call to the great public intellectuals of our day and challenges them to reinvigorate political debate on campus, in their writing, and on the airwaves.

Liberalism is the dominant ideology of our time, yet its character remains the subject of intense scholarly and political controversy. Debates about the liberal political tradition - about its history, its central philosophical commitments, its implications for political practice - lie at the very heart of the discipline of political theory. Many outstanding political theorists have contributed to the growing sophistication of these debates in recent years, but the original voice of Michael Freeden deserves particular attention. In the course of a body of work that spans over thirty years, Freeden's iconoclastic contributions have posed important challenges to the dominant understandings of liberal ideology, history, and theory. Such work has sought to redefine the very essence of what it is to be a liberal. This book brings together an international group of historians, philosophers, and political scientists to evaluate the impact of Freeden's work and to reassess its central claims.

This important new study presents a systematic and definitive critique of the work of Ronald Dworkin, America's leading public philosopher. Focusing on Dworkin's brilliant and highly influential theory of liberal equality, the study reveals the hazards and limitations of basing the central ideals of liberalism on the logic of the market.

An illuminating examination of contemporary liberalism. -Times Literary Supplement Neal does a fine job of showing the flaws in leading academic theories and accounts of liberalism. He shows the amazing vigor of Thomas Hobbes's ideas, now more than three centuries old and still in many ways the clearest and best expression of the liberal order. And he provides a salutary cold shower for those grand dreamers among us who want liberalism not only to order our lives, but also to inspire, to shape, to teach us: 'A liberal order cannot even nearly fulfill the longings of the heart and soul which move us.' -Michael Harvey, H-Net Should the state be neutral with regard to the moral practices of its citizens? Can a liberal state legitimately create a distinctively liberal character in its citizens? Can liberal ideals constitute a point of consensus in a diverse society? In Liberalism and Its Discontents, Patrick Neal answers these questions and discusses them in light of contemporary liberal theory. Approaching the topic of liberalism from a sympathetic and yet immanently critical point of view, Patrick Neal argues that the political liberalism of theorists like John Rawls and the perfectionist liberalism of theorists like Joseph Raz fail to fully express the generosity of spirit which is liberalism at its best. Instead, Neal finds resources for the expression of such a spirit in the much maligned tradition of Hobbesian, or vulgar, liberalism. He argues that a turn in this direction is necessary for the articulation of a liberalism more genuinely responsive to the diversity of modes of life in the twenty-first century.

This is a noted systematic survey of the Liberal Party for the key period 1867 to 1905, when the party was in its prime. It is particularly strong on the career of W.E. Gladstone after 1868. It explores key policy themes, and it is an important work placed alongside J.R. Vincent's classic The Formation of The Liberal Party 1857-1868. The book examines the question of what leading Liberal politicians understood the purpose of the Liberal Party to be, and what were their reasons and assumptions which led to their supporting or promoting particular policies. Professor Hamer examines at length the philosophies and strategies of Joseph Chamberlain, Gladstone, Sir William Harcourt, Lord Rosebery and Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman. He also highlights the major organizing and controlling themes, both in relation to their own ideas and in relation to their Conservative opponents.

Baumann examines the recurring efforts to establish fraternal relations in modern societies by political, and in particular, radical means. He proceeds by examining a series of related examples, beginning with a brief discussion of the metaphor for fraternity itself, and then he turns to a consideration of the historical development of the quest for fraternity.

He first examines the quest for fraternity among the Students for a Democratic Society in the 1960s. Baumann then turns to the "sans-culottes" before and during the period of the French Revolution. The third analysis is philosophical, rather than historical, and treats Jean-Paul Sartre's attempt to understand radically and thus justify the relation of fraternity to terror. His conclusion sums up the argument about the necessary self-contradiction and failure of the pursuit of political fraternity and points to the long-discarded concept of aesthetic education developed as an alternative to the political pursuit of fraternity by the poet and philospher Friedrich Schiller.

The experience of exiles was fundamental for shaping Italian national identity. Risorgimento in Exile investigates the contribution to Italian nationalism made by the numerous patriots who were forced to live in exile following failed revolutions in the Italian states.
Examining the writings of such exiles, Maurizio Isabella challenges recent historiography regarding the lack of genuine liberal culture in the Risorgimento. He argues that these emigres' involvement in debates with British, continental, and American intellectuals points to the emergence of Liberalism and Romanticism as international ideologies shared by a community of patriots that stretched from Europe to Latin America.
Risorgimento in Exile represents the first effort to place Italian patriotism in a broad international framework, revealing the importance and originality of the Italian contribution to European Anglophilia and Philhellenism, and to transatlantic debates on federalism. In doing so, it demonstrates that the Risorgimento first developed as a variation upon such global trends."

Democracy is emerging as the political system of choice throughout the world. Peoples now freed from the shackles of totalitarian systems seek to share the benefits made possible by democracy in its "home bases" in North America and Western Europe. Yet, paradoxically, in the last decade liberal democracy has been subjected to an onslaught of criticism from thinkers at its "home bases". Criticisms of democracy have been informed by scholarship in feminism, postmodernism and communitarianism as well as the revived interest in applying ethics to public policy. These criticisms raise important questions about the traditional values - liberalism, neutrality or equality, autonomy, and human rights - thought to justify democracy. They also raise questions about the success of democratic systems in promoting alternative values and in protecting lifestyles not desired by majorities. This anthology contains essays by authors at the forefront of the controversy as well as by acute observers of the processes by which "democratic" public policy is formed. The essays include criticisms of democratic theory and practice, defences of liberalism (the set of values often thought to ground democracy), calls for major revisions of democratic institutions and practices, and recommendations for new ways of understanding our rights and responsibilities as members of democratic communities.

This book comes out of a conference in April of 1999 at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University on the topic of 'Gender Parity and the Liberal Tradition: Proposals and Debates in Europe and the United States.' It is a collection of short essays that attempt to capture the theoretical arguments and policy changes presented at the conference. The essays are divided into three sections, each of which approaches from a different angle the central question of whether liberalism has failed women. The first section aims to frame the discussion by outlining the theoretical arguments for the amendments or revisions implied by the proponents of the Parity Movement in Europe and for the concerns raised by critics. The second describes recent changes in party rules, European legal framework, and national constitutions, as well as the gains made by women in response to rule change. The third section provides American perspectives on the lessons that parity advocates might draw from affirmative action policies and speculations about how parity rules would work in the American context. The essays are drawn from top European and American scholars.

A study of the clash of two traditions, British liberalism and African nationalism, and an examination of how Michael Blundell in Kenya and Garfield Todd in Zimbabwe used their liberal backgrounds to further the future of their adopted countries, despite threats and detention. Both Blundell and Todd believed that political leaders had a responsibility to serve the needs of the people as a condition of national development. By the time each came to power, European colonization had had a profoundly negative effect on the lives of Africans; Blundell and Todd sought to correct this by putting their positive views of Africans into practice.

While colonial governments designed strategies for controlling Africans to serve political and economic interests at home in Europe, Africans themselves established their own effective strategy, not only to ensure their survival in the colonial setting, but also to initiate a process for the restoration of their sense of self. Michael Blundell and Garfield Todd, with their liberal beliefs, served as excellent allies in this period of a rising African consciousness. Using sources obtained in Kenya and Zimbabwe over the past 15 years, this work examines democratic traditions that have survived tumultuous times in recent years.

This book focuses on urban crime and policing in Turkey since the steady economic decline of the 1990s. Concentrating on the attempts to 'modernize' the policing of Izmir, Zeynep Gonen highlights how the police force expanded their territorial control over the urban space, specifically targeting the poor and racialized segments of the city. Through in-depth interviews and ethnographic observations of these 'targeted' populations, as well as rare ethnographic data from the Turkish police, surveys of the media and politicians' rhetoric, Gonen shows how Kurdish migrants have been criminalized as dangerous 'enemies' of the order. In studying the ideological and material processes of criminalization, The Politics of Crime in Turkey makes the case for the neoliberal politics of crime that uses the notion of 'security' to legitimize violence and authoritarianism. The book will be of interest to criminologists, as well as those investigating the modern Turkish state and its relationship to the Kurds in the wider region. The multilayered methodology and conceptual approach sheds light on parallel developments in penal and security systems across the globe.

This book brings together in one place the liberal and conservative arguments that face the Republican and Democratic parties in the run-up to the 2008 election. In each chapter, David Coates lays out the popular conservative case and then presents a point-by-point liberal response. Each chapter challenges right-wing ways of framing the issue and pulls discussion back into the civilized center of American politics. The sources and evidence sustaining both conservative and liberal arguments are listed in endnotes and developed more fully on an associated blog site. A Liberal Tool Kit helps to redress the conservative bias in the way news and arguments are generally reported. Coates argues that conservative media outlets are currently more powerful and numerous than liberal ones, contending that conservative arguments tend to be presented more clearly than their less simplistic, more nuanced liberal alternatives. In this book, he presents the complexities of the conservative arguments while at the same time clarifying liberal positions in straightforward, everyday language, so leveling the playing field.

In settler societies, some conflicts have roots that are both ethnic and colonial in nature. These are conflicts between an indigenous ethnic group and groups and between an ethnic group and groups of settlers who have been transplanted to a territory by a colonial power as part of a colonizing effort. This study examines the role that liberal parties have played and can play in recent conflicts in Israel/Palestine, Northern Ireland, and South Africa. Typically, such parties reject the conventional wisdom of the settler population regarding the nature of the conflict. They also reject the radical thinking of the liberation movements and offer, instead, a third alternative. Mitchell hopes that this study will provide useful information for current liberal parties in Central and Eastern Europe and Israel.

Ultimately, many of the liberal party's ideas are adopted by the main settler parties, allowing for a resolution of the conflict, generally through a compromise between the liberal and indigenous positions. However, before such resolution can occur, the liberals must achieve an electoral breakthrough that gives them a minimum of between five and ten percent of votes; they must also obtain significant stable representation in parliament. Liberal leadership must be innovative, offering new solutions that depart from the conventional wisdom of both sides. Mitchell provides the most detailed account yet published on the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland. He also includes extensive information on the KwaZulu/Natal Indaba of 1986 and analysis of the electoral fortunes of the Progressive Federal Party in South Africa.

In this sequel to his prize-winning book,AThe Eyes of the People, Jeffrey Edward Green draws on philosophy, history, social science, and literature to ask what democracy can mean in a world where it is understood that socioeconomic status to some degree will always determine opportunities for civic engagement and career advancement. Under this shadow of unfairness, Green argues that the most advantaged class are rightly subjected to compulsory public burdens. And just as provocatively, he urges ordinary citizens living in polities permanently darkened by plutocracy to acknowledge their second-class status and the uncomfortable civic ethics that come with it - specifically an ethics whereby the pursuit of egalitarianism is informed, at least in part, by indignation, envy, uncivil modes of discourse, and even the occasional suspension of political care. Deeply engaged in the history of political thought,AThe Shadow of UnfairnessAis still first and foremost an effort to illuminate present-day politics. With the plebeians of ancient Rome as his muse, Green develops a plebeian conception of contemporary liberal democracy, at once disenchanted yet idealistic in its insistence that the Few-Many distinction might be enlisted for progressive purpose. Green's analysis is likely to unsettle all sides of the political spectrum, but its focus looks beyond narrow partisan concerns and aims instead to understand what the ongoing quest for free and equal citizenship might require once it is accepted that our political and educational systems will always be tainted by socioeconomic inequality.

Many German historians regard Emperor Frederick III (1831-1888) as a liberal sovereign who could have saved German history from its tragic course. Recent historians, however, have challenged the long-held view that liberalism's failure in 19th century Germany presaged Hitler's triumph, claiming that earlier scholars have overlooked liberalism's positive contributions to German history. This book reassesses Frederick III's contribution to the liberal movement. Using documents recently made available from the Hessische Hausstiftung, the author considers the question of whether Frederick abetted the liberal movement's successes or was part of its tragic history. As crown prince, Frederick maintained ties with prominent liberals and rejected Otto von Bismarck's conservative domestic and foreign policies. His liberal impulses were strengthened by his marriage to the Queen of England's daughter, Princess Victoria. But when Frederick came to the throne in 1888, he died after only 99 days. Many historians consider his untimely death the swan song of German liberalism. Kollander finds that the documents show Frederick to be a constitutional liberal who fought to preserve the constitution-the basis of liberal political power-from subversion by the conservatives. However, he only condoned liberal reform on the basis of the constitutional status quo, rejecting his wife's wish to see British political institutions adopted in Germany. Although Frederick contributed to the survival of liberalism as a political force, the author concludes, the extent of his liberal views have been exaggerated by many historians.

Populism is a genuine 'third way' in politics, a middle path between the extremes of corporate anarchy and collective authoritarianism. This is a trenchant and timely study.Populism is distinguished from other political movements by its insistence on two things conspicuously missing from modern systems of political economy: genuine democracy based on local citizen assemblies, and the widespread distribution among the population of privately-owned economic capital. Adrian Kuzminski's book, in offering a comprehensive historical account of populism. He shows that populism, now largely overlooked, has in fact had a consistent and distinct history since ancient times. Kuzminski demonstrates that populism is a tradition of practice as well as thought, ranging from ancient city states to the frontier communities of colonial America - all places where widely distributed private property and democratic decision-making combined to foster material prosperity and cultural innovation.The political economy of populism was first articulated by the ancient Greek philosopher Phaleas of Chalcedon and variously developed by thinkers as diverse as Aristotle, James Harrington, George Berkeley, Thomas Jefferson, Edward Kellogg and Frederick Soddy. Only where none are rich enough to dominate others economically nor poor enough to be so dominated, populists argue, can the public interest be served. By democracy-for-all, populists mean full and direct participation in empowered local citizen assemblies. This vision of a decentralised, 'bottom-up' democracy was developed in his later years by Thomas Jefferson, who called for completing the American revolution by rooting broader levels of government in such local assemblies, which he called 'ward republics.' The book includes extensive extracts from Jefferson's writings on the matter.In calling for a wide distribution of both property and democracy, populism opposes the political and economic system found today in the United States and other Western countries, where property remains highly concentrated in private hands and where representatives chosen in impersonal mass elections frustrate democracy by serving private monied interests rather than the public good. As one of very few systematic alternatives to our current political and economic system, populism offers a pragmatic program for fundamental social reform which deserves wide and serious consideration.