Liberalisms, a work first published in 1991, provides a coherent and comprehensive analytical guide to liberal thinking over the past century and considers the dominance of liberal thought in Anglo-American political philosophy over the past 20 years. John Gray assesses the work of all the major liberal political philosophers including J. S. Mill, Herbert Spencer, Karl Popper, F. A Hayek, John Rawls and Robert Nozick, and explores their mutual connections and differences.

A new understanding of political philosophy from one of its leading thinkers What is political philosophy? What are its fundamental problems? And how should it be distinguished from moral philosophy? In this book, Charles Larmore redefines the distinctive aims of political philosophy, reformulating in this light the basis of a liberal understanding of politics. Because political life is characterized by deep and enduring conflict between rival interests and differing moral ideals, the core problems of political philosophy are the regulation of conflict and the conditions under which the members of society may thus be made subject to political authority. We cannot assume that reason will lead to unanimity about these matters because individuals hold different moral convictions. Larmore therefore analyzes the concept of reasonable disagreement and investigates the ways we can adjudicate conflicts among people who reasonably disagree about the nature of the human good and the proper basis of political society. Challenging both the classical liberalism of Locke, Kant, and Mill, and more recent theories of political realism proposed by Bernard Williams and others, Larmore argues for a version of political liberalism that is centered on political legitimacy rather than on social justice, and that aims to be well suited to our times rather than universally valid. Forceful and thorough yet concise, What Is Political Philosophy? proposes a new definition of political philosophy and demonstrates the profound implications of that definition. The result is a compelling and distinctive intervention from a major political philosopher.

Despite rich archives of work on race and the global economy, most notably by scholars of colour and Global South intellectuals, the discipline of Political Economy has largely avoided an honest confrontation with how race works within the domains it studies, not least within markets. By way of corrective, this book draws together scholarship on the material function of race at various scales in the global political economy. The collective provocation of the contributors to this volume is that race has been integral to the formation of capitalism - as extensively laid out by the racial capitalism literature - and takes on new forms in the novel market spaces of neoliberalism. The chapters within this volume also reinforce that the current political conjuncture, marked by the ascension of neo-fascist power, cannot be defined by an exceptional intrusion of racism, nor can its racism be dismissed as epiphenomenal. Raced Markets will be of great value to scholars, students, and researchers interested in political economy and racial capitalism as well as those willing to explore how race takes on new forms in the novel market spaces of contemporary neoliberalism. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the New Political Economy.

This edited volume addresses the set of politically challenging issues that the advent of populist movements raised for individual nation states and the whole Europe. Based on critical engagements with the extant scholarship in comparative politics, political philosophy, international relations, regional studies and critical geopolitics, this collection of chapters offers the interpretation of the contemporary populism as illiberal nationalism, and underscores its deeply political challenge to the post-political core of the EU project. The contributors discuss the deep transformations within the fabric of contemporary European societies that makes scholars rethink the post-Cold War hegemonic understanding of liberal democracy as the dominant paradigm destined to expand from its traditional hotbed in the West to other regions. This edited volume intends to stretch analysis beyond the conventional accounts of populism as an anti-elite and extra-institutional appeal to the general public for the sake of its mobilization against incumbent power holders, and look for more nuanced meanings inherent to this term. The chapters in this book were originally published in European Politics and Society and the Journal of Contemporary European Studies.

This book explores the complex issue of international ethics in the two dominant schools of thought in international relations; Liberalism and Realism. Both theories suffer from an inability to integrate the ethical and pragmatic dimensions of foreign policy. Liberal policy makers often suffer from moral blindness and a tendency toward coercion in the international arena, whilst realists tend to be epistemic sceptics, incorporating Nietzsche's thought, directly or indirectly, into their theories. Mark Gismondi seeks to resolve the issues in these two approaches by adopting a covenant based approach, as described by Daniel Elazar's work on the covenant tradition in politics, to international relations theory. The covenant approach has three essential principles: policy makers must have a sense of realism about the existence of evil and its political consequences power must be shared and limited liberty requires a basis in shared values. Ethics, Realism and Liberalism in International Relations will be of interest to students and researchers of politics, philosophy, ethics and international relations.

"Toward a Global 'Thin' Community re-examines aspects of the liberal-communitarian debate. While critical of both traditions, this book argues that a coherent form of communitarianism is the only plausible option for citizens today. Using the theories of Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault, Olssen shows how we can overcome traditional problems with communitarianism by using an ethic of survival that he identifies in the writings of Nietzsche and others to provide a normative framework for twenty-first century politics at both national and global levels. "Thin" communitarianism seeks to surmount traditional objections associated with Hegel and Marx, and to safeguard liberty and difference by applying a robust idea of democracy."

According to received wisdom parties have played a mainly destructive role in French political development. Of questionable legitimacy, pursuing narrow sectarian goals, often corruptly, they have brought about division, weakness and the collapse of regimes. A proper reading of history suggests differently. By combining historical research and contemporary political science theory about party, the author shows that for over a century party has irrigated French democracy in often invisible ways, brokering working compromises between groups divided strongly along social, political and cultural lines. The key to this success is the party system, which allowed for a high degree of collusion and cooptation between political elites, rhetoric notwithstanding. This hidden logic has persisted to this day despite the advent of presidentialism and remains the key to the continuing prosperity of French democracy.

This book contributes to the literature on the change of governance in the context of its European multilevel organization. The integration of Europe is a process of fundamental social change: a process of constructing a European society and of deconstructing the national societies.

M?nch demonstrates that there is a movement away from republican and representative features of a democracy and towards liberal and pluralistic features. The book illustrates this change in the nature of European political regulation, European jurisdiction and the intellectual debates in France, Germany and Britain on legitimising the emerging system of multilevel governance. He discusses how far the new European regime of liberal governmentality converges with the US-American type of constitutional liberalism. Following a sociological approach, the book focuses on identifying the causes, features and consequences of the fundamental social change taking place in the process of European integration.

This book will be of interest to scholars and graduate students from political science, sociology, law and philosophy interested in political theory, comparative politics, international relations and political communication as well as practitioners of policy-making in governments, administration, parties, associations and the media.

Obligations: New Trajectories in Law provides a critical analysis of the role of obligations in contemporary legal and social practices. As rights have become the preeminent feature of modern political and legal discourse, the work of obligations has been overshadowed. Questioning and correcting this dominant image of our time, this book brings obligations back into view in a way that fits better with the realities of contemporary social life. Following a historical account of the changing place and priorities of obligations in modernity, the book analyses how obligations and practices of obedience are core to understanding how law sustains conditions of inequality. But it also explores the enduring role obligations play in furthering individual and collective well-being, highlighting their significance in practices that prioritize human and environmental needs, common goods, and solidarity. In doing so, it also offers an alternative and cogent assessment of the force, and the potential, of obligations in contemporary societies. This original jurisprudential contribution will appeal to an academic and student readership in law, politics, and the social sciences.

Neoliberalism is based on the systematic use of state power to impose, under the veil of ?non-intervention?, a hegemonic project of recomposition of capitalist rule in most areas of social life. The tensions and displacements embedded within global neoliberalism are nowhere more evident than in the middle-income countries. At the domestic level, the neoliberal transitions have transformed significantly the material basis of social reproduction in these countries. These transformations include, but they are not limited to, shifts in economic and social policy. They also encompass the structure of property, the modality of insertion of the country into the international economy, and the domestic forms of exploitation and social domination. The political counterpart of these processes is the limitation of the domestic political sphere through the insulation of ?markets? and investors from social accountability and the imposition of a stronger imperative of labour control, allegedly in order to secure international competitiveness.

These economic and political shifts have reduced the scope for universal welfare provision and led to regressive distributive shifts and higher unemployment and job insecurity in most countries. They have also created an income-concentrating dynamics of accumulation that has proven immune to Keynesian and reformist interventions. This book examines these challenges and dilemmas analytically, and empirically in different national contexts.

This edited collection offers a theoretical critique of neoliberalism and a review of the contrasting experiences of eight middle-income countries (Brazil, China, India, Mexico, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey and Venezuela). The studies included are interdisciplinary, ranging across economics, sociology, anthropology, international relations, political science and related social sciences. The book focuses on a materialist understanding of the workings of neoliberalism as a modality of social and economic reproduction, and its everyday practices of dispossession and exploitation. It will therefore be of particular interest to scholars in industrial policy, neoliberalism and development strategy.

This work examines ideas about the role of law and legal reform in the creation of market economies, focusing on the process of post communist transition in Russia. Processes of transition in Russia were guided by a set of very specific neoliberal ideas about the nature of markets and capitalism, about the role of law and the primacy of the economic over the legal and political. These ideas however have come under fire as a result of the Russian experience of transition and the serious problems encountered by reforms. This led to a revision of the original neoliberal ideas, not least concerning the role of law and its relationship to the economic and the political. The result has been the emergence of a much more complex body of ideas about the role law plays in economic transformation.

This book aims to close a gap in the literature on post communist transition by offering a theoretical interpretation of Russia's experience which makes transition reform models comparable to development reform models. Focusing on the role of law and the relationship of economic priorities to law reform, this work offers a critical evaluation of currently dominant theories of economic and legal reform put to use in varied transition and development scenarios. In looking at the ideas which directed and animated reform in Russia, an enquiry is thus made into the wider relationship between democracy, regulation and the market in contemporary capitalism.

Neoliberalism and the Law in Post Communist Transition will equip scholars and students of development studies, law, political economy and international economics with a critical guide to transition focused on the often neglected legal aspect of the reforms.

Taking a chronological approach, this book challenges established economistic and ideologistic narratives of neoliberalism in Britain by charting the gradual diffusion of an increasingly interventionist neoliberal governmental rationality in British politics since the late 1970s, and the various means by which the project has furnished itself with a hegemonic basis for its popular support. Spanning five decades of British political history and drawing on rich empirical evidence to bring conceptual clarity to, and chart the effects of, a style of government bound up with a host of epochal changes, it concludes by considering Brexit and the rise of Corbynism as the final act in the neoliberal saga. It then poses the question, Is British politics on the verge of a major reconstruction representing a decisive rejection of neoliberalism? This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of British politics and neoliberalism, liberalism and, more broadly to political theory, political economy and public policy.

Liberal democracy is in trouble. This volume considers the crosscutting causes and manifestations of the current crisis facing the liberal order. Over the last decade, liberal democracy has come under mounting pressure in many unanticipated ways. In response to seemingly endless crisis conditions, governments have turned with alarming frequency to extraordinary emergency powers derogating the rule of law and democratic processes. The shifting interconnections between new technologies and public power have raised questions about threats posed to democratic values and norms. Finally, the liberal order has been challenged by authoritarian and populist forces promoting anti- pluralist agendas. Adopting a synoptic perspective that puts liberal disorder at the center of its investigation, this book uses multiple sources to build a common historical and conceptual framework for understanding major contemporary political currents. The contributions weave together historical studies and conceptual analyses of states of exception, emergency powers, and their links with technological innovations, as well as the tension-ridden relationship between populism and democracy and its theoretical, ideological, and practical implications. The book will be of interest to scholars and students of a number of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences: history, political science, philosophy, constitutional and international law, sociology, cultural studies, anthropology, and economics.

This pioneering work is the basic and largely unmatched study of the single transatlantic community of thought shared by nineteenth century British and Canadian Liberals and American Democrats. The result of more than tens years of comparative research, The Transatlantic Persuasion explores the roots of those ideas hat comprise a coherent Liberal-Democratic worldview: ideas about society, human relations, the economy, equality, liberty, the ethnocultural dimension of life, the proper role and nature of government, and the world community. In Britain, Canada, and the United States, Liberal-Democrats saw themselves as battlers against social evils caused by corrupt, self-seeking aristocracies. This was true whether their power was based on business wealth, land, or vested religious privilege; and in all three countries they developed practically identical public policy agendas.Widely praised for its graceful narrative style, its intriguing political and cultural analysis, and its sensitive feeling for the nuances of personality and the human condition, The Transatlantic Persuasion finds that cultural forces such as ethnicity, religion, and style of life have played an astonishingly central role in politics. Kelley sees a similar confrontation within each of the three countries between the core culture, including the Establishment and its institutions, and the outgroups, the culturally, socially, and often economically peripheral peoples. In Britain, for example, the Tories (Conservatives) were the aggressively dominant English, who look down on such minorities as the Scots and the Irish. These outgroups gathered within Gladstone's Liberal party, and from this base fought for equal status and treatment against prejudices. Similar patterns in Canada and the United States led to Kelley to conclude that these cultural facts of life were as important and powerful in public life as those that were purely economic in nature.Greeted with praise on its original publication in the general media as well as in major scholarly journals, The Transatlantic Persuasion performs history's highest office: It explains the present by placing it in the deep perspective of time, thus demonstrating how the past prefigures and shapes current events.

The rise of the US as a hegemonic power during the twentieth century first pursuing a liberal project of globalization under Clinton and then moving towards greater unilateralism after the election of George W. Bush, is comprehensively described in this much-needed study. Following the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration became increasingly unpopular at home and abroad. America's power to impose its will declined and rivals were able to take advantage of its weakened state and pursue their own agendas with considerable success. This indispensable book looks at whether policy failure in Iraq and declining US soft and hard power mark the beginning of the end of US hegemony or whether the resilience of America's military and economic foundations will once again prove observers wrong.

This volume examines what the concept of ideology can add to our understanding of the European Union, and the way in which the process of European integration has inflected the ideological battles that define contemporary European politics, both nationally and transnationally. Contemporary debates on the nature and value of the European Union often touch on the notion of ideology. The EU's critics routinely describe it as an ideologically-motivated project, associating it from the left with a form of 'neo-liberal capitalism' or from the right with 'liberal multiculturalism'. Its defenders often praise it in explicitly post- or anti-ideological terms, as a regulatory body focused on the production of output legitimacy, or as a bulwark against dangerous ideological revivals in the form of nationalism and populism. Yet the existing academic literature linking the study of the EU with that of ideologies is surprisingly thin. This volume brings together a number of original contributions by leading international scholars and takes an approach that is both historical and conceptual, probing the EU's ideological roots, while also laying the grounds for a reappraisal of its contemporary ideological make-up. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of European Public Policy.

In recent years the concepts of individual autonomy and political liberalism have been the subjects of intense debate, but these discussions have occurred largely within separate academic disciplines. Autonomy and the Challenges to Liberalism contains for the first time new essays devoted to foundational questions regarding both the notion of the autonomous self and the nature and justification of liberalism. Written by leading figures in moral, legal and political theory, the volume covers inter alia the following topics: the nature of the self and its relation to autonomy, the social dimensions of autonomy and the political dynamics of respect and recognition, and the concept of autonomy underlying the principles of liberalism.

On the one hand, inclusion constitutes a powerful framework of political agency, as people can gain access to forms of recognition granting legal protection and social visibility. On the other hand, inclusion requires their adherence to fixed matrices incorporating specific and limited forms of life. This opposition reflects a similar division within the academic field: between liberal advocates of inclusion and those who regard it as a form of assimilation, where differences are absorbed and tempered. Uncovering the deficiencies in both viewpoints, this book analyzes inclusion by attending to the active role of subjects looking for inclusion, and mobilizing inclusive processes. Inclusion is thus reconceived as an ongoing, engaging movement of category-production, according to which there is no straightforward opposition between effective inclusion and assimilation. The book thus draws the idea of inclusion out of this opposition in order to delineate a form of political connectedness based on smaller social networks of solidarity that, although entailing some sort of normativity, are nevertheless characterized by fluidity and proximity. In this way, inclusion comes to be more productively, and more plausibly, reframed: as a web in which inclusive processes appear as moments of the renegotiation and rearticulation of a subjectivity in constant flux.

Toward a Global Thin Community reexamines aspects of the liberal-communitarian debate. While critical of both traditions, this book argues that a coherent form of communitarianism is the only plausible option for citizens today. Using the theories of Frederich Nietzsche and Michael Foucault, Olssen shows how we can overcome traditional problems with communitarianism by using an ethic of survival that he identifies in the writings of Nietzsche and others to provide a normative framework for twenty-first century politics at both national and global levels. Thin communitarianism seeks to surmount traditional liberal objections associated with Hegel and Marx, and to safeguard liberty and difference by applying a robust idea of democracy. This work examines many different themes within the debate, including liberal autonomy, totalitarianism, and multiculturalism. It also considers the work of liberal writers such as Frederic Hayek, Karl Popper, and Isaiah Berlin.

The American national debt stands at $20.49 trillion as of January 2018, or roughly $63,000 for every person in the United States. The national debt has grown six-fold in the past 25 years, and borrowing only has accelerated in recent administrations. What are the factors driving such unrestrained borrowing? Is American fiscal policy different now than in an earlier era? Is there a moral dimension to public debt and, if so, how can that dimension be measured? Public Debt and the Common Good addresses these and other questions by looking to the fiscal policy of the American states. Drawing on classical themes and the longest quantitative review of state debt in the literature, James Odom expertly integrates institutional analysis with dimensions of culture to define the parameters of political freedom in a theoretically coherent way. In doing so, Odom argues that centralization and injustice, or the incapacity for the common good, can help explain state indebtedness. Contributing to ongoing scholarly debates on public debt theory, this book will be of interest to students, scholars, and practitioners who work at the intersection of political philosophy and economics, as well as those who specialize in state public policy, state politics, and federalism more generally.

This book on Relationality addresses our growing "crisis of connection" by foregrounding the multi-faceted ways in which we are interconnected with each other and the world in which we live. When Niobe Way and her collaborators first proclaimed such a "crisis" in their 2018 book The Crisis of Connection: Roots, Consequences, and Solutions, they could not have foreseen the extremes of isolation and disconnection that Covid-19 would unleash just a couple of years later. Importantly, what such experiences of impaired and compromised relationality impress upon us-now more powerfully than ever-is just how fundamentally we are intertwined with each other and the world we inhabit. The ten scholarly chapters assembled here, combined with ten specially commissioned poems, emphasise the significance of these relational entanglements. They draw on a range of thinkers (with Emmanuel Levinas playing a particularly prominent role) to bring relationality into conversation with an array of contemporary paradigms and areas of political concern: the Anthropocene, post-humanism, neoliberalism, disability studies, and postcolonialism (to name but a few). Tracing the various challenges and opportunities associated with our relational existence, they collectively consider the role relationality plays, or might play, in our increasingly less-than-relational lives. The chapters and poems in this book were originally published as a special issue of Angelaki.

Neoliberalism has had a major impact on schooling and education in the Developing World, with social repercussions that have affected the salaries of teachers, the number and type of potential students, the availability of education, the cost of education, and more. This edited collection argues that the privatization of public services and the capitalization and commodification of education have resulted in the establishment of competitive markets that are marked by selection, exclusion and inequality.

The contributors - academics and organization/social movement activists - examine aspects of neoliberal arguments focusing on low- and middle-income countries (including Chile, Mexico, Argentina, Venezuela, China, Pakistan, India, Turkey, Burkina Faso, Mozambique and South Africa), and suggest where they fall short. Their arguments center around the assumption that education is not a commodity to be bought and sold, as education and the capitalist market hold opposing goals, motivations, methods, and standards of excellence.

The first true intellectual biography of Thomas Paine, this book establishes the origins of his beliefs and their influence on his activism. For the past century, scholars have been studying Paine in piecemeal fashion; studies of limited scope focused on the minutiae of Paine's life and career, but no clear portrait had existed to know how the pieces fitted together. This "is" the complete picture. Who he was, what he believed, why he believed, and how his beliefs and personal history are reflected in his political activism - not just in the American Revolution, but also the French Revolution.

Thomas Paine, defender of freedom, independence, and rational common sense during America's turbulent revolutionary period, offers insights into religion which ring sharply true more than two centuries later. This unabridged edition of "The Age of Reason" sets forth Paine's provocative observations on the place of religion in society.

This ambitious work provides a history and critique of neoliberalism, both as a body of ideas and as a political practice. It is an original and compelling contribution to the neoliberalism debate. The Neoliberal Paradox challenges the standard interpretations of neoliberalism that focus on limited government and free markets. Instead, Ray Kiely reveals the ways in which the neoliberal project is reliant on state power. The history and application of neoliberalism is discussed from the Austrian and ordo-liberal schools in the 1930s and the Chicago School after 1945, through to developments such as the New Right and the third way, before finally considering the impacts of the financial crisis of 2008, the rise of Trump and Brexit. By exploring the full breadth of neoliberal theory and practice, in addition to the arguments of key thinkers, Kiely explores how neoliberalism has renewed itself in times of crises and turns his gaze towards the future. This book will provide a stimulating read for academics and advanced students in the fields of politics, human geography and sociology, in addition to those working in the public sector.