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Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Topics in philosophy > Social & political philosophy
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Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R1,787
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Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom (Hardcover)
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Intermediate groups-- voluntary associations, churches,
ethnocultural groups, universities, and more--can both protect
threaten individual liberty. The same is true for centralized state
action against such groups. This wide-ranging book argues that,
both normatively and historically, liberal political thought rests
on a deep tension between a rationalist suspicion of intermediate
and local group power, and a pluralism favorable toward
intermediate group life, and preserving the bulk of its suspicion
for the centralizing state.
The book studies this tension using tools from the history of
political thought, normative political philosophy, law, and social
theory. In the process, it retells the history of liberal thought
and practice in a way that moves from the birth of intermediacy in
the High Middle Ages to the British Pluralists of the twentieth
century. In particular it restores centrality to the tradition of
ancient constitutionalism and to Montesquieu, arguing that social
contract theory's contributions to the development of liberal
thought have been mistaken for the whole tradition.
It discusses the real threats to freedom posed both by local group
life and by state centralization, the ways in which those threats
aggravate each other. Though the state and intermediate groups can
check and balance each other in ways that protect freedom, they may
also aggravate each other's worst tendencies. Likewise, the
elements of liberal thought concerned with the threats from each
cannot necessarily be combined into a single satisfactory theory of
freedom. While the book frequently reconstructs and defends
pluralism, it ultimately argues that the tension is irreconcilable
and not susceptible of harmonization or synthesis; it must be lived
with, not overcome.
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