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A Free Society Reader rises to the challenge of freedom in the
twenty-first century, offering thoughts and insights with
significant implications for citizens of today's brand new world.
Our era's most prominent figures in the fields of Christianity and
liberty speak about Pope John Paul II's vision of a free society,
conceptualize Christianity and political economy, debate issues of
democracy and the free society, and question the role of culture.
Together for the first time in one volume, these preeminent
thinkers provide inspiration and insight to scholars, students, and
general readers charting the enormous changes the new millennium
has seen.
In Society as a Department Store Ryszard Legutko wrestles with the
emancipatory ideology promulgated by postmodernists, libertarians,
and liberal thinkers. Legutko argues that modern Western liberals
have embraced a revolutionary ethic; they have turned their backs
on their own cultural heritage, and used its political and
ideological apparatus to destroy classical metaphysics and
epistemology. The book considers the paradoxical implications of
this state of affairs for Eastern European intellectuals arguing
that, with the triumph of liberalism over communism, these
intellectuals feel compelled to digest an ideology that shares many
elements with the oppressive system from which they just liberated
themselves. Based on hubris rather than genuine humane concerns,
Legutko mourns not simply the loss of faith in classical Western
culture, but the way in which that loss is becoming a central point
of identity.
This book has two currents. The first is an analysis of the three
concepts of freedom that are called, respectively, negative,
positive, and inner. Negative freedom is defined as an absence of
coercion, positive freedom as an ability to rule oneself and
others, inner freedom as being oneself; that is, being the author
of one's decisions. Each concept is analyzed both in terms of its
development in the history of ideas and in terms of its internal
logic. The major problem of negative freedom is to find widely
accepted rules according to which this freedom can be distributed.
Positive freedom's major difficulty is to define what constitutes a
free person. The greatest dilemma with inner freedom is how to
correlate it with the proper interpretation of the human self. The
book advances the thesis, and this constitutes the other current of
its narrative-that we have been witnessing the advent of a new form
of despotism, much of it being the effect of liberalism's dominant
position. Precisely because it took a reductionist position,
liberalism has impoverished our view of freedom and, consequently,
our notion of human nature with its political, moral, and
metaphysical dimensions.
What is the man who cannot be known apart from his socio-political
environment? As Zbigniew Janowski asserts, one does not ask who
this man is, for he does not even know himself. This man is
suppressed and separated, and not by Fascism or Communism. In
present-day America this has been accomplished by democracy. "Only
someone shortsighted, or someone who values equality more than
freedom, would deny that today's citizens enjoy little or no
freedom, particularly freedom of speech, and even less the ability
to express openly or publicly the opinions that are not in
conformity with what the majority considers acceptable at a given
moment. It may sound paradoxical to contemporary ears, but a fight
against totalitarianism must also mean a fight against the
expansion of democracy." Janowski all at once brazen and out of
bounds states what he calls the obvious and unthinkable truth: In
the United States, we are already living in a totalitarian reality.
The American citizen, the Homo Americanus, is an ideological being
who is no longer good or bad, reasonable or irrational, proper or
improper except when measured against the objectives of the
dominating egalitarian mentality that American democracy has
successfully incubated. American democracy has done what other
despotic regimes have likewise achieved--namely, taken hold of the
individual and forced him to renounce (or forget) his greatness,
pursuit of virtue and his orientation toward history and Tradition.
Homo Americanus, Janowski argues, has no mind or soul and he cannot
tolerate diversity and indeed he now censors himself. Democracy is
not benign, and we should fear its principles come by and applied
ad hoc. It is deeply troublesome that in the way democracy moves
today it gives critics no real insight into any trajectory of
reason behind its motion, which is erratic and unmappable. The Homo
Americanus is an ideological entity whose thought and even morality
are forbidden from universal abstraction. Janowski mounts the
offensive against what the American holds most sacred, and he does
so in order to save him. After exposing the danger and the damage
done, Janowski makes another startling proposal. It is a "diseased
collective mind" that is the source of this ideology, the liberal
anti-perspective that presses man into the image of the Homo
Americanus, and its grip can only be broken through the recovery of
instinct. Homo Americanus cannot be free again until he is himself
again. That is, until the shadow that belongs only to him is
restored, and he is thereby no longer alienated from others.
Despite the condemnation Janowski seems to be levying on the
citizen of the United States, he betrays a great hope and
confidence that the means to shake ourselves awake from the bad
dream are nevertheless in hand. Janowski's work is the next title
in St. Augustine's Press Dissident American Thought Today Series.
It occupies a controversial overlapping terrain between the
philosophical descriptions of liberalism as a tradition, psychology
and the fundamentally influential critiques of democracy offered by
Thucydides, Jefferson, Franklin, Tocqueville, Mill, Burke and more.
More anecdotal than analytical, Janowski offers the contemporary
proof that the reader is right to be scandalized by democracy and
his or her own likeness of the Homo Americanus. Once upon a time it
was the despicable Homo Sovieticus fruit of tyranny, but now we
fear democratic society too might fall and all its citizens never
be found again.
In addition to "On Liberty" and "On Representative Government,"
this new selection of Mill's writings includes, among others, a
number of less known of his writings, such as: "Civilization,"
"Perfectibility," "The Negro Question," "On Education," "On
Aristocracy," "On Marriage," "On Free Press," "Socialism," Mill's
review of Tocqueville's "Democracy in America," his letters to
Tocqueville, and several other writings. If one can use a somewhat
exaggerated language, Mill's writings are to liberal-democracy what
Marx and Engels' writings were to Communism. Both systems gave
expression to 19th century man's longing for equality and justice,
both promised to liberate him from the shackles of oppression,
authority and tradition. Instead of liberating man, Communism
created the most brutal system in human history, and its
spectacular fall in 1989 is one of history's greatest events.
Western world today shows that liberal-democracy is no longer a
benign doctrine, which advocates free market, minimum state and
individual liberties, but, like Communism, is an all-encompassing
ideology which forces an individual to abdicate his freedom and
soul in favor of a Communist-like collective. As many critics of
real Socialism could see the seeds of totalitarianism in the
writings of Marx and Engels, so one can see the seeds of liberal
totalitarianism in Mill's writings. This new edition is intended to
help readers to understand why democratic-liberalism came so close
to its 19th century ideological rival.
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