Despite the centralizing tendencies of the American national government in the twentieth century, there have been surprisingly few books defending the federal system. Felix Morley's "Freedom and Federalism, " which examines the root causes of the problem, was thus a pioneering achievement when it first appeared in 1959.No less relevant today, the book provides a perceptive diagnosis of the collapse of States' rights in modern America; and it seeks the restoration of a constitutional balance between central and state authorities.Is federalism worth saving? "Its outstanding virtue," which is "the distinctively American contribution to political art," argues Morley, "is its facility in combining two naturally antagonistic conditions--the social condition of order, and the more personal condition of freedom." In the end, he concludes, the American government will fail unless these two conditions are reconciled.Felix Morley (1894-1982), Pulitzer-Prize-winning author, journalist, and educator, was a Rhodes Scholar, editor of the "Washington Post" and "Human Events, " and President of Haverford College.

This book provides the first biographical study of Charles Pelham Villiers (1802-1898), whose long UK parliamentary career spanned numerous government administrations under twenty different prime ministers. An aristocrat from a privileged background, Villiers was elected to Parliament as a Radical in 1835 and subsequently served the constituency of Wolverhampton for sixty-three years until his death in 1898. A staunch Liberal free trader throughout his life, Villiers played a pre-eminent role in the Anti-Corn Law League as its parliamentary champion, introduced an important series of Poor Law reforms and later split with William Gladstone over the issue of Irish Home Rule, turning thereafter to Liberal Unionism. Hence Villiers, who remains the longest-serving MP in British parliamentary history, was intimately involved with many of the great issues of the Victorian Age in Britain.

Neoliberalism has been studied as a political ideology, an historical moment, an economic programme, an institutional model, and a totalising political project. Yet the role of law in the neoliberal story has been relatively neglected, and the idea of neoliberalism as a juridical project has yet to be considered. That is: neoliberal law and its interrelations with neoliberal politics and economics has remained almost entirely neglected as a subject of research and debate. This book provides a systematic attempt to develop a holistic and coherent understanding of the relationship between law and neoliberalism. It does not, however, examine law and neoliberalism as fixed entities or as philosophical categories. And neither is its objective to uncover or devise a 'law of neoliberalism'. Instead, it uses empirical evidence to explore and theorise the relationship between law and neoliberalism as dynamic and complex social phenomena. Developing a nuanced concept of 'neoliberal legality', neoliberalism, it is argued here, is as much a juridical project as a political and economic one. And it is only in understanding the juridical thrust of neoliberalism that we can hope to fully comprehend the specificities, and continuities, of the neoliberal period as a whole.

The abbe Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes (1748-1836) distinguished himself as the chief theoretician of the French Revolution--and as a revolutionary constitutional and social theorist in his own right--through his rigorously analytical theory of representative government and its corollary, the representative character of social life in general. He expressed the essence of his thought in a series of three pamphlets published in the months leading up to the meeting of the Estates-General in 1789. This volume presents all three essays-- Views of the Executive Means , An Essay on Privileges , and What Is the Third Estate? --in their entirety. The third essay, in a new translation by Michael Sonenscher, is followed by Sieyes's 1791 newspaper debate with Tom Paine on the merits of monarchy versus republicanism. Elucidated by Sonenscher's insightful Introduction, these texts will fascinate anyone interested in the history of the French Revolution, the history of social and political thought, or the origins and character of modern liberalism.

Drawing on perspectives from anthropology and social theory, this book explores the quotidian routines of debt collection in nineteenth-century capitalism. It focuses on Switzerland, an exemplary case of liberal rule. Debt collection and bankruptcy relied on received practices until they were standardized in a Swiss federal law in 1889. The vast array of these practices was summarized by the idiomatic Swiss legal term "Rechtstrieb" (literally, "law drive"). Analyzing these forms of summary justice opens a window to the makeshift economies and the contested political imaginaries of nineteenth-century everyday life. Ultimately, the book advances an empirically grounded and theoretically informed history of quotidian legal practices in the everyday economy; it is an argument for studying capitalism from the bottom up.

This book consists of two parts: "The Law of Peoples," a major reworking of a much shorter article by the same name published in 1993, and the essay "The Idea of Public Reason Revisited," first published in 1997. Taken together, they are the culmination of more than fifty years of reflection on liberalism and on some of the most pressing problems of our times by John Rawls. "The Law of Peoples" extends the idea of a social contract to the Society of Peoples and lays out the general principles that can and should be accepted by both liberal and non-liberal societies as the standard for regulating their behavior toward one another. In particular, it draws a crucial distinction between basic human rights and the rights of each citizen of a liberal constitutional democracy. It explores the terms under which such a society may appropriately wage war against an "outlaw society" and discusses the moral grounds for rendering assistance to non-liberal societies burdened by unfavorable political and economic conditions. "The Idea of Public Reason Revisited" explains why the constraints of public reason, a concept first discussed in Political Liberalism (1993), are ones that holders of both religious and non-religious comprehensive views can reasonably endorse. It is Rawls's most detailed account of how a modern constitutional democracy, based on a liberal political conception, could and would be viewed as legitimate by reasonable citizens who on religious, philosophical, or moral grounds do not themselves accept a liberal comprehensive doctrine-such as that of Kant, or Mill, or Rawls's own "Justice as Fairness," presented in A Theory of Justice (1971).

In this definitive historical investigation, Italian author and philosopher Domenico Losurdo argues that from the outset liberalism, as a philosophical position and ideology, has been bound up with the most illiberal of policies: slavery, colonialism, genocide, racism and snobbery. Narrating an intellectual history running from the eighteenth through to the twentieth centuries, Losurdo examines the thought of preeminent liberal writers such as Locke, Burke, Tocqueville, Constant, Bentham, and Sieyes, revealing the inner contradictions of an intellectual position that has exercised a formative influence on today's politics. Among the dominant strains of liberalism, he discerns the counter-currents of more radical positions, lost in the constitution of the modern world order.

The second edition of International Political Economy continues to be the perfect short introduction to the fundamental theories and issues of international political economy (IPE). Written in a concise, accessible style by an experienced teacher and scholar, it combines theoretical perspectives, real-world examples, and comparative policy analysis. The text offers students an in-depth, balanced understanding of the contrasting core perspectives in IPE, allowing them to critically evaluate and independently analyze major political-economic events. Having emerged from both the classical and modern schools of political economy, the book's unique structure is organized around the threefold world view classification of IPE that the author labels as free-market, institutionalist, and Marxist. The book: Compares, contrasts, and critiques the different approaches in the context of major global issues such as financial crises, free vs. fair trade, ecological degradation, growing inequality, gender, globalization, and multinational corporations; Explains key economic concepts such as financial markets, banking systems, monetary policy, foreign exchange, Keynesian economics, fiscal policy, comparative advantage, value theory, money, role of corporations, and ecological economics as well as their relationship to political concepts such as international regimes and governance; Contains 30 original figures and tables, review questions at the end of each chapter, and a detailed glossary to enhance student learning; Responds to the call from eminent IPE specialists Robert Keohane and Benjamin Cohen for textbooks that take a pluralistic approach. This thoroughly updated second edition is essential reading for students of international political economy, economics, political science and global governance.

What did democracy mean before liberalism? What are the consequences for our lives today? Combining history with political theory, this book restores the core meaning of democracy as collective and limited self-government by citizens. That, rather than majority tyranny, is what democracy meant in ancient Athens, before liberalism. Participatory self-government is the basis of political practice in 'Demopolis', a hypothetical modern state powerfully imagined by award-winning historian and political scientist Josiah Ober. Demopolis' residents aim to establish a secure, prosperous, and non-tyrannical community, where citizens govern as a collective, both directly and through representatives, and willingly assume the costs of self-government because doing so benefits them, both as a group and individually. Basic democracy, as exemplified in real Athens and imagined Demopolis, can provide a stable foundation for a liberal state. It also offers a possible way forward for religious societies seeking a realistic alternative to autocracy.

"A crucial warning for Americans about the left's never-ending lust to steal individual liberties - and the power of God to stop it." - Everett Piper, Bestselling Author of Grow Up!Lockdown is a terrifying story of not only the chaotic freefall of American freedoms during the opening stages of the COVID pandemic, but the dangerous growth of government power that continues today. Lockdown is a warning that the extraordinary powers invoked by left-wing Democrats and others, justified by claims of public health and safety, have begun the unravelling of America's constitutional order and our most cherished freedoms. Using COVID-19 as a cover, Democrat leaders and their bureaucratic health advisers seized powers the Constitution never gave them, and ordered citizens to stay off streets and out of public parks, banned them from their workplaces, closed down their schools, and made church attendance a crimes - even as these same leaders and their left-leaning cronies blithely, arrogantly, and outrageously allowed mass protests, kept open abortion clinics and did as they pleased. Relying on her trademark aggressive reporting style, Cheryl K. Chumley explains how the radical left is using pandemic policies as a template for increasing controls over the lives of citizens as they build a one-party, socialist state in America. A sequel to her bestselling book Socialists Don't Sleep, in Lockdown, Chumley exposes how hypocritical, elitist, and radical leftists are still using the coronavirus to score political points and steal individual rights - as the original pandemic served as dress rehearsal in the march toward the new fascism.

New in Paperback This innovative exploration of ways of thinking about and doing politics presents a challenge to liberal assumptions. The author tackles four key areas in contemporary politics which work at 'the edges of liberalism': difference, populism, revolution and agitation. Each of these phenomena is selected on the basis that they push the envelope of liberalism or seek to go against and beyond it. Each chapter takes on one of these ideas, discussing the intellectual background and considering its position in relation to liberalism. Difference is explored in the context of the politics of the culture wars and its celebration of particularism over universalism. Populism is seen as a spectre of liberal democracy, able to both accompany it and haunt it. Agitation is considered in tandem with emancipatory politics and in relation to revolutionary politics. The final chapter aims to vindicate the use of revolution for contemporary thought, challenging the existing liberal-democratic consensus. The argument is interspersed with many examples drawn from history and contemporary politics to illustrate the author's claims. Arditi's engagement with the main thinkers in the field leads him to develop a novel interpretation of contemporary politics.

During the past several decades, political philosophers have frequently clashed with one another over the question whether governments are morally required to remain neutral among reasonable conceptions of excellence and human flourishing. Whereas the numerous followers of John Rawls (and kindred philosophers such as Ronald Dworkin) have maintained that a requirement of neutrality is indeed incumbent on every system of governance, other philosophers - often designated as 'perfectionists' - have argued against the existence of such a requirement. Liberalism with Excellence enters these debates not by plighting itself unequivocally to one side or the other, but instead by reconceiving each of the sides and thus by redirecting the debates that have occurred between them. On the one hand, the book rejects the requirement of neutrality by contending that certain subsidies for the promotion of excellence in sundry areas of human endeavour can be proper and vital uses of resources by governments. Advocating such departures from the constraint of neutrality, the book presents a version of liberalism that can rightly be classified as 'perfectionist'. On the other hand, the species of perfectionism espoused in Liberalism with Excellence diverges markedly from the theories that have usually been so classified. Indeed, much of the book assails various aspects of those theories. What is more, the aspirational perfectionism elaborated in the closing chapters of the volume is reconcilable in most key respects with a suitably amplified version of Rawlsianism. Hence, by reconceiving both the perfectionist side and the neutralist side of the prevailing disputation, Liberalism with Excellence combines and transforms their respective insights.

This book charts the development of political thought within the British Liberal Party and its successor, the Liberal Democrats. Beginning with Jo Grimond's rise to the leadership in 1956, it follows the Liberal resurgence in the second half of the twentieth century through to the major setbacks of the 2015 general election and the 2016 referendum on UK membership of the European Union. Drawing on interviews with leading politicians and political thinkers, the book examines Liberal ideas against the background of key historical events and controversies, including the period of coalition government with the Conservatives. -- .

The question of toleration matters more than ever. The politics of the twenty-first century is replete with both the successes and, all too often, the failures of toleration. Yet a growing number of thinkers and practitioners have argued against toleration. Some believe that liberal democracies are better served by different principles, such as respect of, or recognition for, people's ways of life. Others argue that because the liberal state should be entirely neutral or indifferent towards people's ways of life, it can no longer be tolerant - it has no grounds on which it can object, and so there is nothing left to tolerate. Respecting Toleration provides a new, original, and provocative take on the question of toleration and its application to the politics of contemporary diversity. Peter Balint argues for both the conceptual coherence and normative desirability of toleration and neutrality. He argues that it is these principles which best realise the basic liberal good of people living their lives as they see fit, rather than appealing to principles of recognition or respect for difference. While those who criticised liberalism's failings in dealing with the claims of diversity had justification, it is the tenets of traditional liberalism that hold the answer. Respecting Toleration argues that if one cares about people living divergent lives, then it is liberal toleration that should be respected by legislators and policy makers, and not people's differences.

How does protest become criminalised? Applying an anthropological perspective to political and legal conflicts, Carolijn Terwindt urges us to critically question the underlying interests and logic of prosecuting protesters. The book draws upon ethnographic research in Chile, Spain, and the United States to trace prosecutorial narratives in three protracted contentious episodes in liberal democracies. Terwindt examines the conflict between Chilean landowners and the indigenous Mapuche people, the Spanish state and the Basque independence movement, and the United States' criminalisation of 'eco-terrorists.' Exploring how patterns and mechanisms of prosecutorial narrative emerge through distinct political, social and democratic contexts, Terwindt shines a light on how prosecutorial narratives in each episode changed significantly over time. Challenging the law and justice system and warning against relying on criminal law to deal with socio-political conflicts, Terwindt's observations have implications for a wide range of actors and constituencies, including social movement activists, scholars, and prosecutors.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! At one of the most chaotic periods in American history, in a time of national distrust and despair, one tanned TV host holds the key to the future. In How I Saved the World, Jesse Watters takes readers on a tour of his life from basement-dwelling Fox minion to pampered champion of right-thinking Americans. He has divined great truths about the nature of our country while stumbling across beaches asking oblivious college students basic political questions and while stumbling out of Air Force One with the President. Interspersed are his thoughtful suggestions for overcoming left-wing radicalism, maintaining American democracy, moving beyond aging hippies (like his long-suffering, loving parents), saving the world from social justice warriors and the deep state-all while smirking his way through life in only the nicest way. Watters outlines the stark choice ahead of us between all-American hamburgers and leftist Green New Deal breadlines (okay, maybe that one is a no-brainer) and shows the way for order and fairness to be restored. A manifesto and a call-to-arms from a man for all seasons, How I Saved the World is a hilarious, enlightening, entertaining book with a reasonable chance of winning a Nobel Prize in every category, even chemistry.

In the eyes of many, liberalism requires the aggressive secularization of social institutions, especially public media and public schools. The unfortunate result is that many Americans have become alienated from the liberal tradition because they believe it threatens their most sacred forms of life. This was not always the case: in American history, the relation between liberalism and religion has often been one of mutual respect and support. In Liberal Politics and Public Faith: Beyond Separation, Kevin Vallier attempts to reestablish mutual respect by developing a liberal political theory that avoids the standard liberal hostility to religious voices in public life. He claims that the dominant form of academic liberalism, public reason liberalism, is far friendlier to religious influences in public life than either its proponents or detractors suppose. The best interpretation of public reason, convergence liberalism, rejects the much-derided "privatization" of religious belief, instead viewing religious contributions to politics as a resource for liberal political institutions. Many books reject privatization, Liberal Politics and Public Faith: Beyond Separation is unique in doing so on liberal grounds.

This study addresses the complex and often fractious relationship between liberal political theory and difference by examining how distinctive liberalisms respond to human diversity. Drawing on published and unpublished writings, private correspondence and lecture notes, the study offers comprehensive reconstructions of Immanuel Kant's and John Stuart Mill's treatment of racial, cultural, gender-based and class-based difference to understand how two leading figures reacted to pluralism, and what contemporary readers might draw from them. The book mounts a qualified defence of Millian liberalism against Kantianism's predominance in contemporary liberal political philosophy, and resists liberalism's implicit association with imperialist domination by showing different divergent responses to diversity. Here are two distinctive liberal visions of moral and political life.

Michel Foucault's death in 1984 coincided with the fading away of the hopes for social transformation that characterized the postwar period. In the decades following his death, neoliberalism has triumphed and attacks on social rights have become increasingly bold. If Foucault was not a direct witness of these years, his work on neoliberalism is nonetheless prescient: the question of liberalism occupies an important place in his last works. Since his death, Foucault's conceptual apparatus has acquired a central, even dominant position for a substantial segment of the world's intellectual left. However, as the contributions to this volume demonstrate, Foucault's attitude towards neoliberalism was at least equivocal. Far from leading an intellectual struggle against free market orthodoxy, Foucault seems in many ways to endorse it. How is one to understand his radical critique of the welfare state, understood as an instrument of biopower? Or his support for the pandering anti-Marxism of the so-called 'new philosophers'? Is it possible that Foucault was seduced by neoliberalism? This question is not merely of biographical interest: it forces us to confront more generally the mutations of the left since May 1968, the disillusionment of the years that followed and the profound transformations in the French intellectual field over the past thirty years. To understand the 1980s and the neoliberal triumph is to explore the most ambiguous corners of the intellectual left through one of its most important figures.

Presents the theoretical and practical arguments for liberalism. The term comes from the Latin word 'liber' (free). Mises defines liberalism as 'the liberal doctrine of the harmony of the rightly understood interests of all members of a free society, founded on the principle of private ownership of the means of production'. The foundation of liberalism, Mises says, rests on an understanding and appreciation of the institution of private property, social cooperation, the freedom idea, ethics and morality, democracy and the legitimate role of government. Liberalism is not a political party. The liberal program offers no special privileges to anyone; it aims at securing equality under law for everyone, so as to allow equal opportunity to all human beings to make their own choices and decisions. The role of government should be limited to protecting the lives, property, and freedom of its citizens to pursue their own ends and goals. Hardback editions are also available.

England's Discontents unpacks the genealogy of British identities over the last two hundred years as they have been shaped by the main political cultures and their interactions with cultural politics. Conservatism, social liberalism, economic liberalism, social democracy and socialism in partnership and conflict, have forged different models of national belonging and identity. Wayne draws on Gramsci's work to reassess debates about Britishness and renew Gramsci's relevance to understanding our contemporary discontents. In doing so, he reveals that England's enduring attachment to economic liberalism is in danger of eroding all other political cultures, even conservatism, liberalism and the British state.

The Liberal Party and the Economy, 1929-1964 explores the reception, generation, and use of economic ideas in the British Liberal Party between its electoral decline in the 1920s and 1930s, and its post-war revival under Jo Grimond. Drawing on archival sources, party publications, and the press, this volume analyses the diverse intellectual influences which shaped British Liberals' economic thought up to the mid-twentieth century, and highlights the ways in which the party sought to reconcile its progressive identity with its longstanding commitment to free trade and competitive markets. Peter Sloman shows that Liberals' enthusiasm for public works and Keynesian economic management - which David Lloyd George launched onto the political agenda at the 1929 general election - was only intermittently matched by support for more detailed forms of state intervention and planning. Likewise, the party's support for redistributive taxation and social welfare provision was frequently qualified by the insistence that the ultimate Liberal aim was not the expansion of the functions of the state but the pursuit of 'ownership for all'. Liberal policy was thus shaped not only by the ideas of reformist intellectuals such as John Maynard Keynes and William Beveridge, but also by the libertarian and distributist concerns of Liberal activists and by interactions with the early neoliberal movement. This study concludes that it was ideological and generational changes in the early 1960s that cut the party's links with the New Right, opened up common ground with revisionist social democrats, and re-established its progressive credentials.

From the theory of 'deliberative democracy' to the politics of the 'third way', the present Zeitgeist is characterized by attempts to deny what Chantal Mouffe contends is the inherently conflictual nature of democratic politics. Far from being signs of progress, such ideas constitute a serious threat to democratic institutions. Taking issue with John Rawls and Jurgen Habermas on one side, and the political tenets of Blair, Clinton and Schroeder on the other, Mouffe brings to the fore the paradoxical nature of modern liberal democracy in which the category of the 'adversary' plays a central role. She draws on the work of Wittgenstein, Derrida, and the provocative theses of Carl Schmitt, to propose a new understanding of democracy which acknowledges the ineradicability of antagonism in its workings.

With this book, Richard A. Epstein provides a spirited and systematic defense of classical liberalism against the critiques mounted against it over the past thirty years. One of the most distinguished and provocative legal scholars writing today, Epstein here explains his controversial ideas in what will quickly come to be considered one of his cornerstone works.
He begins by laying out his own vision of the key principles of classical liberalism: respect for the autonomy of the individual, a strong system of private property rights, the voluntary exchange of labor and possessions, and prohibitions against force or fraud. Nonetheless, he not only recognizes but insists that state coercion is crucial to safeguarding these principles of private ordering and supplying the social infrastructure on which they depend. Within this framework, Epstein then shows why limited government is much to be preferred over the modern interventionist welfare state.
Many of the modern attacks on the classical liberal system seek to undermine the moral, conceptual, cognitive, and psychological foundations on which it rests. Epstein rises to this challenge by carefully rebutting each of these objections in turn. For instance, Epstein demonstrates how our inability to judge the preferences of others means we should respect their liberty of choice regarding their own lives. And he points out the flaws in behavioral economic arguments which, overlooking strong evolutionary pressures, claim that individual preferences are unstable and that people are unable to adopt rational means to achieve their own ends. Freedom, Epstein ultimately shows, depends upon a skepticism that rightly shuns making judgmentsabout what is best for individuals, but that also avoids the relativistic trap that all judgments about our political institutions have equal worth.
A brilliant defense of classical liberalism, "Skepticism and Freedom will rightly be seen as an intellectual landmark.

The postcommunist countries were amongst the most fervent and committed adopters of neoliberal economic reforms. Not only did they manage to overcome the anticipated domestic opposition to 'shock therapy' and Washington Consensus reforms, but many fulfilled the membership requirements of the European Union and even adopted avant-garde neoliberal reforms like the flat tax and pension privatization. Neoliberalism in the postcommunist countries went farther and lasted longer than expected, but why? Unlike pre-existing theories based on domestic political-economic struggles, this book focuses on the imperatives of re-insertion into the international economy. Appel and Orenstein show how countries engaged in 'competitive signaling', enacting reforms in order to attract foreign investment. This signaling process explains the endurance and intensification of neoliberal reform in these countries for almost two decades, from 1989-2008, and its decline thereafter, when inflows of capital into the region suddenly dried up. This book will interest students of political economy and Eastern European and Eurasian politics.