In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:594 Feminist Studies 41, no. 3. © 2015 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Liberty Walther Barnes and Christin L. Munsch The Paradoxical Privilege of Men and Masculinity in Institutional Review Boards In the 1939 Hollywood classic The Wizard of Oz, the great wizard admonishes Dorothy and her friends to “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.” Dorothy and company turn to see a man standing before a (...) large control panel operating the smoke, holographic image, and voice of the great wizard. Realizing he has been discovered, the man gives up manipulating the switches and the nebulous wizard vanishes.1 Hegemonic masculinity is analogous to the “all-powerful” wizard.2 In order to maintain its grandeur, power, and mystique, the mechanics of masculine ideology—as well as the social actors who participate in its reproduction —must be kept hidden.3 A crucial aim of feminist research is to 1. The Wizard of Oz, directed by Victor Fleming (Culver City, CA: Metro-Goldwyn -Mayer, 1939). 2. See R. W. Connell, Masculinities: Knowledge, Power and Social Change (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1995); R. W. Connell and James W. Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept,” Gender & Society 19 (2005): 829–61; Michael Kaufman, “Me, Feminism, and Men’s Contradictory Experiences of Power,” in Theorizing Masculinities, ed. Harry Brod and Michael Kaufman (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1994), 142– 63; and Michael S. Kimmel, “Masculinity as Homophobia: Fear, Shame, and Silence in the Construction of Gender Identity” in Brod and Kaufman, Theorizing Masculinities, 119–42. 3. Michael Flood and Bob Pease, “Undoing Men’s Privilege and Advancing Gender Equality in Public Sector Institutions,” Policy and Society 24, no. 4 (2005): 119–38; Allan G. Johnson, The Gender Knot: Unraveling Liberty Walther Barnes and Christin L. Munsch 595 pull back the curtain on men’s lives and masculine institutions in order to demystify socially constructed masculinities, particularly in their most powerful forms. As early feminist scholars note, male privilege renders women’s lives invisible.4 But male privilege renders aspects of men’s lives invisible, too. In this article we highlight how institutional review boards (IRBs) in universities and hospitals erect barriers to research that render particular aspects of men’s lives invisible. We draw on our experiences of submitting ten applications for a series of methodologically diverse studies of masculinity to eight IRBs. First, we argue that, despite their original function of protecting subordinated groups, IRBs are gendered institutions in which members base their decisions on culturally dominant, normative images of women and men. We show how this results in the stringent protection of male research participants, the safeguarding of participants’ personal masculinity, and the shielding of men’s lives from social inquiry. Second, we argue that IRBs are gendering institutions. Our experiences reveal how the privileging and protection of masculinity results in mandatory protocol modifications that idealize hegemonic masculinity. These modifications require researcher-participant interactions that socialize men to engage in gender “appropriate” behavior and reify gendered expectations. Third, our experiences reveal the ways in which IRBs protect the institution itself and privilege the universities, hospitals, and (predominantly male) medical doctors they represent. Consequently, the ways they reproduce social inequality remain impervious to academic inquiry. IRBS AS GENDERED AND GENDERING INSTITUTIONS Every university and hospital in the United States where human research is conducted houses a human research protections program, or IRB, to oversee academic research. Universities with hospitals typically our Patriarchal Legacy (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1997); Michael Kimmel, Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men (New York: Harper Collins, 2008). 4. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Howard M. Parshley (New York: Knopf, 1951); Sandra Harding, The Science Question in Feminism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986); Dorothy E. Smith, “Women’s Perspective as a Radical Critique of Sociology,” in Feminist Perspectives on Social Research, ed. Sharlene N. Hesse-Biber and Michelle L. Yaiser (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 84–96. 596 Liberty Walther Barnes and Christin L. Munsch maintain two types of IRB committees: a social-behavioral committee that oversees studies in the social sciences, and a biomedical committee to supervise clinical drug trials, experimental medical treatments, and tissue and blood research. The duty of the... (shrink)

While both men and women work out in contemporary gyms, popular conceptions of the gym as a masculine institution continue. The authors examine organizational processes within a chain of women-only gyms to explore whether and how these processes have feminized the historically masculine gym. They examine the physical setting and equipment, the established procedures for customers' use of machines, and the interactional styles of employees as components of the organization's structure. They argue that the organization's use of technology and labor (...) mobilizes customers' participation in a feminized organizational culture of nonjudgmental and noncompetitive sociability. Organizational processes create a context that fosters gendered interactions and identities among customers. The organizational context calls gendered behavior into play such that the performance is naturalized. The processes outlined may occur in other cases of organizational recoding and suggest ways that transposable gender practices may change the gender coding of an institution yet leave gender hierarchies intact. (shrink)

Libertarianism—and classical liberalism generally—entails (or presupposes) a specific, but implicit, conception of liberty. Imagine two lists of property-rights: one list is all those that currently appear to be libertarian (self-ownership, property acquired by use of natural resources, property acquired by consensual exchange, etc.); the other list is all those that currently appear not to be libertarian (aggressively imposed slavery, property acquired by theft or fraud, property acquired by coerced transfers due to welfare claims, etc.). What determines into which list (...) a property-right is to be assigned? If libertarianism is really about liberty, then the determining factor must be whether the property-right somehow fits what liberty is in a more abstract sense than property. It greatly clarifies matters to have an explicit theory of this entailed conception of abstract liberty and how it relates to its practical application and to morality. (shrink)

In their normative role in shaping the basic structure of a health care system, liberty and equality are often thought to conflict so sharply that health policy is condemned to remain an ideological battleground. In this paper, I will articulate my own view of why much of the apparently fundamental conflict between individual liberty and responsibility, on the one hand, and equality and equality's related concern for cost-efficiency, on the other hand, is less intractable than it is usually (...) assumed to be. The result will be to break the rigid and stereotypical association of liberty-emphasizing social philosophies with the pluralistic market paradigm for a health care system and egalitarian, equity-emphasizing social philosophies with the unitary public system paradigm. Understanding better the moral ingredients of liberty and equitable distribution as well as the complexity of how liberty and equality actually intersect in a health care system opens the door to seeing the possibility of significant reconciliation. I will conclude, among other things, that even semi-libertarian views of distributive justice should strongly embrace compulsory, universal coverage of health care for some significant level of care, and that egalitarian views ought not to regard different levels of coverage for people of different income levels as necessarily unjust. (shrink)

With respect to the phenomenal distinction that is conventionally made between ‘personal’ and ‘economic’ liberty, I do accept that “there is no logical incoherence in claiming that constraint of one can lead to an increase in the other.” Though, as Cole understands, I doubt the conceptual coherence of the distinction (let us call this view the ‘identity thesis’). So I assert that though the personal/economic distinction is conceptually dubious, it can stand unproblematically as illustrating the phenomenal distinctions that people (...) do make. I cannot see how “this inherent conceptual tension at two points of the compass does threaten it with collapse” as a phenomenal illustration as well, if that is what Cole means (as his “despite Lester’s protests” indicates). (shrink)

From widespread unemployment and mounting international hostilities, every day we are swept into more political chaos--so one brave man looks to the Star Wars universe for answers to our most urgent problems. "You can't stop the change -- anymore than you can stop the sun from setting." Anakin Skywalker was never able to live with this wisdom shared by his mother on the day he left home to train as a Jedi Knight. That failure led him to becoming the fearsome (...) villain we all know as Darth Vader. We're living in a time of unprecedented and rapid change. An age of chaos. Democracies are in decline worldwide. Dictators are ascendant. Civic organizations are crumbling. People feel lonelier and more rudderless than in any other time in recent history. We've tried to slow down, and in some cases we, like Anakin, have tried stop the change, but failed at every turn. The fears that come with living in an age of disruption have produced public anger, and that anger has swelled movements of hate. Author Stephen Kent believes part of the solution is hiding in plain sight. A story that binds together multiple generations with a common language, a moral framework, and a sense of wonder. It's Star Wars. What if we looked to Star Wars for more than just entertainment? How the Force Can Fix the World takes this challenge on by analyzing the core principles of the Star Wars franchise: HOPE, CHOICE, HUMILITY, EMPATHY, REDEMPTION, BALANCE and rejecting FEAR. Together, these are the Star Wars roadmap for living better lives, and maybe even fostering a better politics. The path that we're on -- where fear leads to anger, and anger to hatred -- will only end in suffering. But Star Wars shows us the way back from the brink. Shared stories of virtue that are beloved across cultures and political divides are hard to come by, but Star Wars is one such story. Turn on the news; things are pretty broken right now -- but the Force can fix the world. (shrink)

Many liberal philosophers claim that people are free to do as they will by default; any interference must be justified. This supposed presumption of liberty does a significant amount of theoretical work for public reason liberals such as Gerald Gaus and John Rawls. This paper shows that Gaus’s explicit defense of a presumption of liberty fails. Gausa and his many followers repeatedly appeal to a particular thought experiment from Stanley Benn. We argue that this thought experiment fails to (...) show that there is a presumption of liberty, but instead shows, at best, the trivial point that when any particular moral concern is specified to be the only relevant concern, then there is a presumption in favor of that concern. Further, Gaus, along with Shaun Nichols, has tried to demonstrate empirically that the intuitions and conclusions he draws from this example are fairly uniform and universal among other moral agents, but we explain why their experimental results do not vindicate any such conclusion. We conclude that undermining the alleged presumption of liberty places public reason liberalism in serious jeopardy. (shrink)

Industry-funded religious liberty legal groups have sought to undermine healthcare policy and law while simultaneously attacking the rights of sexual and gender minorities. Whereas past scholarship has tracked religiously-affiliated healthcare providers’ growing political power and attendant transformations to legal doctrine, our account emphasizes the political donors and visionaries who have leveraged religious providers and the U.S. healthcare system’s delegated structure to transform social policy and bureaucratic agencies more generally.

It is my intention in this paper to highlight the dangers which arise when people appeal to moral intuitions to settle questions in political, and in general in applied, philosophy. But first I want to ask why all or nearly all of us are in favour both of liberty and of equality – why all our intuitions are on their side. In the case of liberty it is easy to understand why. Although philosophers have held diverse theories about (...) the concept of liberty – theories which have been drawn together into two main groups in a famous lecture by Sir Isaiah Berlin – there cannot be much doubt that in the mind of the ordinary man to have liberty is to be under no constraint in doing what one wants to do. This, at any rate, is a main constituent of the concept of liberty as all of us understand it. Since, therefore, it seems self-evidently true that we want to be able to do what we want, we are bound to want liberty and, in general, to be in favour of it. We want it for ourselves; if we universalize our prescriptions, this constrains us to be in favour of it for others as well. That explains why, if any politician can claim that he is fighting for liberty, he is likely to win a large following. In the case of equality the matter is not so clear cut. (shrink)

This study of the political philosophy of William Ernest Hocking be gan as a doctoral dissertation at Tulane University. Hocking (1873- 1966) was for many years Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity at Harvard University. Although he is relatively well-known among American philosophers, particularly by students of metaphysics and the philosophy of religion, very little atten tion has been given to his political philosophy. Some general studies of his thought summarize his political writings in a very (...) cursory fashion, but they do not discuss his contributions in detail or relate them to significant issues in political philosophy. Most important general works on modern political philosophy or American political thought do not even mention Hocking; a few note his name in passing. Because he is almost completely unknown in the social sciences, the original purpose of this study was to explore, systematize, and present his extensive writings in political philosophy. It then became apparent that his entire political philosophy is oriented around the concepts of liberty and community. When his thought is analyzed in terms of these themes, its unity and coherence are more obvious. Moreover, his writings become more significant when they are related to liberty and community, for these are focal concepts for important problems in modern political philosophy. This study of Hocking's political philosophy will, it is hoped, help us to see how liberty and community can be more understandable, attainable, and compatible with one another. (shrink)

Introduction: the age of Paine -- Portrait of a failure -- The great American cause -- The peculiar honor of France -- The Age of Reason -- An honest and useful life.

The Mental Health Act 2007 introduced Deprivation of Liberty safeguards into the Mental Capacity Act 2005 with potentially far reaching resource implications. There appears to be no scientific data regarding the prevalence of deprivation of liberty in clinical settings such as hospitals and nursing homes. We examined how many patients across a whole Trust area in Wales were subject to some lack of capacity, how well documented this was and how many were potentially deprived of their liberty. (...) We found that no patient was deprived of their liberty, but 8% lacked capacity to make either basic or complex decisions; another 5% lacked capacity to make complex decisions. Documentation was good in mental health and community directorates, but there were gaps in documentation (not practice) in the medical and surgical directorates. Routine collection of data improved documentation regarding deprivation of liberty criteria. There is a high likelihood that senior nursing staff underestimate the number of patients who lack capacity. (shrink)

For years now, unionization has been under vigorous attack. Membership has been steadily declining, and with it union bargaining power. As a result, unions may soon lose their ability to protect workers from economic and personal abuse, as well as their significance as a political force. In the Name of Liberty responds to this worrying state of affairs by presenting a new argument for unionization, one that derives an argument for universal unionization in both the private and public sector (...) from concepts of liberty that we already accept. In short, In the Name of Liberty reclaims the argument for liberty from the political right, and shows how liberty not only requires the unionization of every workplace as a matter of background justice, but also supports a wide variety of other progressive policies. (shrink)

In this article, we address the relevance of J.S. Mill’s political philosophy for a framework of public health ethics. In contrast to some readings of Mill, we reject the view that in the formulation of public policies liberties of all kinds enjoy an equal presumption in their favor. We argue that Mill also rejects this view and discuss the distinction that Mill makes between three kinds of liberty interests: interests that are immune from state interference; interests that enjoy a (...) presumption in favor of liberty; and interests that enjoy no such presumption. We argue that what is of focal importance for Mill in protecting liberty is captured by the essential role that the value of self-determination plays in human well-being. Finally, we make the case for the plausibility of a more complex and nuanced Millian framework for public health ethics that would modify how the balancing of some liberty and public health interests should proceed by taking the thumb off the liberty end of the scale. Mill’s arguments and the legacy of liberalism support certain forms of state interference with marketplace liberties for the sake of public health objectives without any presumption in favor of liberty. (shrink)

Europe's long sixteenth century—a period spanning the years roughly from the voyages of Columbus in the 1490s to the English Civil War in the 1640s—was an era of power struggles between avaricious and unscrupulous princes, inquisitions and torture chambers, and religious differences of ever more violent fervor. Ideas of Liberty in Early Modern Europe argues that this turbulent age also laid the conceptual foundations of our modern ideas about liberty, justice, and democracy. Hilary Gatti shows how these ideas (...) emerged in response to the often-violent entrenchment of monarchical power and the fragmentation of religious authority, against the backdrop of the westward advance of Islam and the discovery of the New World. She looks at Machiavelli's defense of republican political liberty, and traces how liberty became intertwined with free will and religious pluralism in the writings of Luther, Erasmus, Jean Bodin, and Giordano Bruno. She examines how the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre and the clash of science and religion gave rise to concepts of liberty as freedom of thought and expression. Returning to Machiavelli and moving on to Jacques Auguste de Thou, Paolo Sarpi, and Milton, Gatti delves into debates about the roles of parliamentary government and a free press in guaranteeing liberties. Drawing on a breadth of canonical and lesser-known writings, Ideas of Liberty in Early Modern Europe reveals how an era stricken by war and injustice gave birth to a more enlightened world. (shrink)

This provocative book outlines a powerful and original theory of liberty structured by the liberal conception of justice and the rule of law. Drawing on insights from philosophy, political theory, economics, and law, he shows how this new conception of liberty can confront, and solve, the central societal problems of knowledge, interest, and power.

This book takes the thinking of Quentin Skinner, Philip Pettit and J. G. A. Pocock on republican liberty and explores the way in which this idea of liberty can be used to illuminate educational practice. It argues that republican liberty is distinct from both positive and negative liberty, and its emphasis on liberty as non-dependency gives the concept of liberty a particularly critical role in contemporary society. Each chapter formulates and expounds the idea that (...) an empire of liberty requires the existence of what are termed 'liberty-bearing agents', and shows how education - with a particular emphasis on knowledge - is needed to foster the human powers which allow people to become liberty-bearing. It is also emphasised, however, that republican liberty is non-perfectionist and non-eudaimonic: the core values enshrined in an empire of liberty centre on non-dependency rather than the promulgation of a certain way of life. Drawing on prominent seventeenth century contract theorists, the link between liberty and authority is explained, suggesting that appropriate authoritative structures need to underpin the provision of education, and especially schooling, if educational practice devoted to the pursuit of liberty is to flourish. Liberty and Education will be of value to both educational theorists unfamiliar with republican theory, as well as republican theorists interested in how their theory might play out in education. It will also be of interest to researchers and students from the fields of politics and the philosophy of education. (shrink)

'it is only the cultivation of individuality which produces, or can produce, well developed human beings'Mill's four essays, 'On Liberty, 'Utilitarianism', 'Considerations on Representative Government', and 'The Subjection of Women' examine the most central issues that face liberal democratic regimes - whether in the nineteenth century or the twenty-first. They have formed the basis for many of the political institutions of the West since the late nineteenth century, tackling as they do the appropriate grounds for protecting individual liberty, (...) the basic principles of ethics, the benefits and the costs of representative institutions, and the central importance of gender equality in society.These essays are central to the liberal tradition, but their interpretation and how we should understand their connection with each other are both contentious. In their introduction Mark Philp and Frederick Rosen set the essays in the context of Mill's other works, and argue that his conviction in the importance of the development of human character in its full diversity provides the core to his liberalism and to any defensible account of the value of liberalism to the modern world. (shrink)

Liberalism has often been viewed as a continuing dialogue about the relative priorities between liberty and equality. When the version of equality under discussion requires equalization of outcomes, it is easy to see how the two ideals might conflict. But when the version of equality requires only equalization of opportunities, the conflict has been treated as greatly muted since the principle of equality seems so meager in its implications. However, when one looks carefully at various versions of equal opportunity (...) and various versions of liberty, the conflict between them is, in fact, both dramatic and inescapable. Each version of the conflict poses hard choices which defy anysystematicpattern granting priority to one of these basic values over the other. In this essay, I will flesh out and argue for this picture of fundamental conflict, and then turn to some more general issues about the kinds of answers we should expect to the basic questions of liberal theory. (shrink)

Theorists of Gallican liberty took as their premise the idea that France had an exceptional status amongst the national Christian churches. However, as contemporaries had noted, the precise definition of Gallican liberties remained at stake; Antoine Hotman noted in his treatise on the subject that ‘it is a strange phenomenon that everyone talks of the liberties of the Gallican Church and, most of the time, very few people know what they are and cannot account for their origins or for (...) their progress’. Within the context of French reactions to the papal excommunications of Henri III and Henri de Navarre, and reception of the Tridentine decrees, the question of how to define Gallican liberty was an extremely pertinent one. This article examines the treatment of Gallican ideas in Catholic League treatises as they negotiated a balance between arguments for Gallican independence and indirect papal power. Despite accusations from their contemporaries that they were attacking the Gallican church, Leaguer discussions of Gallican liberty frequently proved to be an integral part of the argument that Catholicity was a ‘fundamental law’ of France. (shrink)

How to read Plato's Dialogues? -- Freedom-general and universal -- Dialectic of library -- Participation and appropriation -- Onto-politics and political ontology -- Equality and difference -- The good-rationality, totality, dialectic -- Justice, politics and philosophy -- Foundations of responsibility -- The politics of virtue -- Dialectic of liberty revisited-democracy and Politeia -- Liberty in the Polis.

In Homelessness, Liberty and Property, Terry Skolnik establishes a novel theory about the government's duties to end homelessness, maintain public property's value, and legitimize laws that regulate public space. In doing so, Skolnik provides new insight into how the property law system and the regulation of public space limit unhoused persons' freedom and political equality. The book deepens our understanding of how various areas of law, such as constitutional law, legal philosophy, criminal law, and property law, approach the reality (...) of homelessness and advances original arguments to provide new justifications for the right to housing. Skolnik concludes by offering a set of concrete proposals for how the government can reduce the incidence of homelessness and treat unhoused persons with greater concern and respect. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available open access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details. (shrink)

The words “liberty” and “liberalism” have a common root, reflecting the commitment of the original or classical liberals to a free society. Over the last century, the latter term has come to represent a political position that is willing to sacrifice liberty in the economic realm for the sake of equality and/or collective welfare. As a consequence, those who wish to reaffirm the classical version of liberalism – those who advocate liberty in economic as well as personal (...) and intellectual matters – have invented a new word from the old root; they call themselves libertarians. Both in doctrine and in etymology, then, partisans of this view define themselves by their allegiance to liberty. Yet they spend most of their day-to-day polemical energies defending property rights and the economic system of laissez-faire capitalism that is based upon such rights. Evidently there is a strong link between liberty and property at work here. What is that link? The history of political thought is full of ideas and controversies about precisely this question. My goal here is to raise the question in a specific form, one that I think captures a basic difference in approach between classical liberals and most libertarians today. The difference is not in the substance of the position – it is not a disagreement about how the ideal society would be constituted – but rather in the way the position is to be defended. The key question is: can the right to property be derived from the right to liberty? Of course a property right is a right to kind of freedom. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe article uses the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision in the same-sex marriage caseObergefell v. Hodgesas the springboard for a general enquiry into the nature and existence of a constitutional right to liberty under the American Constitution. The discussion is divided into two main parts. The first examines the meaning and the justifiability of there being a moral right to liberty as a matter of political philosophy. Two such rights are distinguished and defended: first, a right not to (...) be coerced by the state when the state is motivated by improper reasons ; and second, a right not to be coerced by the state when there are insufficient justifying reasons for the state to do so, irrespective of how such state coercion may be motivated. Neither right is regarded as “absolute,” and so it is morally permissible for the state to override such rights in certain circumstances. The second part of the article examines the distinct and additional considerations that must be taken into account when these two moral rights to liberty are fashioned into corresponding legal rights under American constitutional law. Both such rights survive the transformation, but each becomes altered somewhat in its content. This legal transformation includes recognition of the nonabsolute nature of moral rights, such recognition taking the form of some doctrine of “compelling state interests.” The discussion in these two main parts of the article is prefaced with a defense of the article's use of political philosophy to inform constitutional law, a defense motivated by Chief Justice Robert's denunciation of such an approach to constitutional law in his opinion inObergefell. (shrink)

Taking the title of his book from Isaiah Berlin's famous essay distinguishing a negative concept of liberty connoting lack of interference by others from a positive concept involving participation in the political realm, Samuel Fleischacker explores a third definition of liberty that lies between the first two. In Fleischacker's view, Kant and Adam Smith think of liberty as a matter of acting on our capacity for judgment, thereby differing both from those who tie it to the satisfaction (...) of our desires and those who translate it as action in accordance with reason or "will." Integrating the thought of Kant and Smith, and developing his own stand through readings of the Critique of Judgment and The Wealth of Nations, Fleischacker shows how different acting on one's best judgment is from acting on one's desires--how, in particular, good judgment, as opposed to mere desire, can flourish only in favorable social and political conditions. At the same time, exercising judgment is something every individual must do for him- or herself, hence not something that philosophers and politicians who reason better than the rest of us can do in our stead. For this reason advocates of a liberty based on judgment are likely to be more concerned than are libertarians to make sure that government provides people with conditions for the use of their liberty--for example, excellent standards of education, health care, and unemployment insurance--while at the same time promoting a less paternalistic view of government than most of the movements associated for the past thirty years with the political left. (shrink)

John Stuart Mill, whose relevance for Nietzsche’s late work has been documented by recent research, is not directly mentioned in On the Genealogy or Morality (1887). This article argues that Mill’s On Liberty (1859) nevertheless played a crucial role in the development of the Genealogy. Following a source-based methodology, three major references demonstrate how Nietzsche used On Liberty as a resource as he initiated and developed his own exploration into the origin of morality. After tracing Nietzsche’s reading of (...) Mill through pencil marks in his copy of On Liberty, I discuss the reappearance of Mill’s motives and terminology as well as the explanatory power of Mill as a source for the respective sections in the Genealogy. It becomes clear to what extent Nietzsche adapts Mill and how he turns Mill’s own weapons against him through skillful transformations. The article concludes that instead of delivering the “better” Mill, Nietzsche builds up a fruitful tension between a then-common take on morality and its transgression. (shrink)

Isaiah Berlin was one of the leading political thinkers of the twentieth century, and his work continues to attract admiration and debate. In Isaiah Berlin: Liberty, Pluralism and Liberalism, George Crowder provides both an accessible introduction to Berlin's ideas and an original contribution to political theory. Berlin's range of interests and learning was vast but united by a single overarching project: the uncovering of the conceptual roots of twentieth-century totalitarianism. He traces these through three levels of analysis: the distortion (...) of the concept of freedom by thinkers such as Rousseau, Fichte, Hegel and Marx; the scientism of the Enlightenment and irrationalism of the Counter-Enlightenment and romanticism; and moral monism, the idea that all ethical questions can be answered by reference to a single moral law. Against monism, Berlin asserts the claims of value pluralism, which he aligns with a politics of liberal moderation. In this new assessment, Crowder argues that Berlin's critique of the modern enemies of liberty is exciting and powerful, but also that the coherence of his thought is threatened by a tension between its liberal and pluralist elements. Crowder goes on to suggest how that tension can be resolved by appeal to arguments that go beyond the case actually presented by Berlin but which remain within the spirit of his general outlook. (shrink)

In recent years, a number of realist thinkers have charged much contemporary political theory with being idealistic and moralistic. While the basic features of the realist counter-movement are reasonably well understood, realism is still considered a critical, primarily negative creed which fails to offer a positive, alternative way of thinking normatively about politics. Aiming to counteract this general perception, in this article I draw on Bernard Williams’s claims about how to construct a politically coherent conception of liberty from the (...) non-political value of freedom. I do this because Williams’s argument provides an illuminating example of the distinctive nature of realist political thinking and its attractions. I argue that Williams’s account of realist political thinking challenges the orthodox moralist claim that normative political arguments must be guided by an ideal ethical theory. I then spell out the repercussions Williams’s claims about the significance of political opposition and non-mor... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Human Liberty and Human Nature in the Works of Faustus Socinus and His ReadersSarah MortimerI.Few issues were more hotly contested by early modern theologians than the extent of human liberty and its implications for both religion and society. In the Protestant world, the sixteenth century saw increasingly strident statements of mankind's bondage to sin and the importance of God's eternal decree of predestination, but the concept of (...) human moral responsibility still had its defenders. One influential proponent of human liberty was Faustus Socinus (1539–1604), the Italian scholar known most commonly today for his denial of the trinity. Yet the central theme of his theology was his insistence that Christian virtues must be carried out voluntarily; it was from this principle that his more heterodox ideas flowed. He made a sharp distinction between natural and voluntary action, and argued that the practice of Christianity must be an act of human will, not one to which men were drawn by nature. Separating Christianity from the natural order, Socinus argued that eternal life awaited those who chose to follow the law of Christ rather than the natural law. His argument challenged the Protestant commitment to the unity of natural and divine law and it opened up conceptual space for voluntary action outside the natural law. In this article, I shall sketch the Socinian position on human liberty and Christianity, and suggest how and why the Italian's ideas were developed by Protestants in the early seventeenth century. His readers included the eminent Dutch scholar Hugo [End Page 191] Grotius (1583–1645), and the exchange between Grotius and the Socinians reveals the concern on both sides to explain the relationship between human liberty, Christianity, and natural law.Socinus' life, like his theology, began within the reform movement in Italy and ended among the marginalised anti-trinitarians in Poland. Born of a long line of Italian jurists, he shared both his family's legal interests and their critical approach to the Catholic Church. In his youth he had been a courtier in Florence but his increasingly critical attitude towards Catholicism—and the death of his patron Grand-Duke Cosimo I—resulted in his departure from Italy in 1574. After a period in Basel he found a home among the Polish Anabaptists at Rakow, a young and precarious community which he helped to sustain through his advice and through the tracts which he penned on their behalf.1 During these years, he was also able to develop his own interpretation of Christianity, and to explain it in numerous works issuing from the community's press. Although his ideas generated a lively debate from the start, both in Poland and Germany, it was only after his death that they began to be absorbed into the mainstream of European intellectual discussions. Socinus' theological ideas had their attractions for some Protestant readers, but they became entangled with more political questions and their implications for civil life began to cause serious alarm. For this reason my focus will be upon the responses of Dutch and German readers, particularly Hugo Grotius and Johan Crell (1590–1633), both of whom addressed the civil as well as the theological aspects of Socinus' legacy. First, however, I shall draw out the salient points from Socinus' rich and complex theology, paying particular attention to his understanding of human liberty. Unlike his orthodox Protestant contemporaries, Socinus believed that liberty was the precondition for virtue.Socinus shared with the broader Christian humanist tradition the belief that Christ demanded works as well as faith from his followers. Christians must follow the pattern of ethical living laid down by their master; like Erasmus before him, and like the Italian exiles he met in Basel, Socinus saw Christianity as a religion of action.2 For this reason, he was determined to protect the liberty and capacity of each individual to act virtuously, and therefore to defend what he understood as human free will. It was, he felt, [End Page 192] a pressing task, for these qualities were being undermined by his contemporaries and particularly by those on the Protestant side. Most Protestants followed Luther's belief, expressed most forcefully in De Servo Arbitrio (1525... (shrink)

Hobbes claims that the sovereign's absolute authority is consistent with the subjects' retaining liberties to resist certain commands. In this essay, I explore what it means for subject to authorize a sovereign with a right to command. I show how retained rights are compatible with sovereignty. Though any given subject does not authorize the sovereign to do anything, I argue that the sovereign power is absolute. The sovereign has the most power anyone could command.

The history of liberalism is the history of an ethical ideal as well as a set of political and social arrangements. In the latter sense liberalism entrenches the juridical equality of all citizens, their equal civil and political rights – including among those rights a set of liberties strong enough to restrict the authority of society over the individual in a fundamental way. How to express in institutions this politically fundamental restriction is an important matter of debate, but that debate (...) will not concern us. For present purposes I assume I can refer to liberalism as a set of political and social arrangements without further examination. Our concern will instead be the liberal ethical ideal and its present prospects. (shrink)

This paper aims to persuade its reader that libertarianism, at least in several of its varieties, is a species of the genus Michael Oakeshott referred to as ‘rationalism in politics’. I hope to demonstrate, employing the work of Oakeshott, as well as Aristotle and Onora O’Neill, how many libertarian theorists, who generally have a sincere and admirable commitment to personal liberty, have been led astray by the rationalist promise that we might be able to approach deductive certainty concerning the (...) 'correctness' of some political programme. Of course libertarians, in common with the adherents of almost any other political ‘stance’, are not a monolithic body, but exhibit a variety of more or less rationalist arguments for their views. For example, a thinker like Hayek, who is often placed in the libertarian camp, came to adopt much of Oakeshott’s critique of rationalism in his later work. And, of course, Oakeshott himself expressed an affinity for libertarian ideas in his essay, ‘The Political Economy of Freedom’ (1991 [1962]). But a general predilection to enhance individual freedom as far as is deemed practicable is quite a different matter from taking a stance in which liberty, and liberty conceived in a rather narrow fashion, is the only value deemed admissible into ‘reasonable’ political discourse. (We will see in a subsequent section that Oakeshott recognized this urge to sanctify one value above all others as a logical requirement of striving for deductive political truths.) I believe that a critique of such libertarian rationalism is particularly relevant given the present situation in the United States vis-à-vis civil rights and the ongoing ‘war on terror’, in that many non- libertarian supporters of peace and strong civil rights find themselves allied with libertarians on these issues—if libertarians have gotten these issues ‘correct’, then how might they have gone wrong elsewhere? Furthermore, the critique may aid libertarians themselves, because, if the title of this paper is accurate, such a single-minded exaltation of one value above all others is an enemy of true liberty, so that libertarians might want to rethink adopting such a position. As Philip Pettit demonstrates (1997), freedom as non-domination is more robust and inclusive of all that we value about freedom than is the libertarian concept of freedom as non-interference; by allowing, say, immense economic power to be concentrated in a single corporation, as intervention to break the company up would violate the principle of non-interference, libertarian ideas may greatly diminish the liberty of the people subject to that corporate power. (shrink)

There are old and convincing arguments for intellectual liberty in all of its forms — freedom to think, to speak, to publish — based on assumptions that we who have been brought up in Western democratic countries take for granted. Two major arguments are particularly powerful. The first I shall call the Utilitarian argument which, in its simplest form, says that without intellectual liberty any Party and any government will harden into an exploiting class, a tyranny. The Kantian (...) argument is that, quite apart from its value to society, intellectual liberty — Kant calls it autonomy — is absolutely indispensable to the integrity of the person. In this paper I defend the Kantian approach. The philosophical-epistemological question "How do you know autonomy is a good thing?" remains unanswered. No further foundation can be given. (shrink)

There are at least three tolerably distinct views about the connections between liberty and property; two of these I shall discuss fairly briefly in order to get on to Mill's central claims about the relationship between property rights and freedom, but in conclusion I shall return to them to show how they bear on what Mill has to say.

What I propose to do in this paper is to demonstrate the versatility of the concept of rules—to show that it is versatile and at least in part just how. I shall first exhibit this versatility in the context of games proper; then—on the other side of the analogy of rules—in other social contexts, where social scientists may discern games by analogy. Finally, I shall sketch the attractions that the liberties which may be taken with it impart to the concept (...) of. rules. My argument, even if it does all these things, will fall short of proving that social scientists take all the available liberties; but it will, I think, indicate that it is worth investigating which liberties they do take, and when. I myself would postpone until such investigations have been made the question how much the analogy of rules contributes to the progress of the social sciences. (shrink)

Aggregation-friendly moral theories such as classical utilitarianism are forced to invest a great deal of ingenuity in damping out and modulating the effects of welfare aggregation. In Mill's treatment, the problem famously appears as the puzzle of how the Principle of Liberty is meant to be compatible with the Principle of Utility, and there have been a great many attempted interpretations of his solution, all, in my view, unsatisfactory. I will first reconstruct Mill's generally unnoticed account of the psychological (...) implementation of higher pleasures; this will allow me to explain what the distinction between higher and lower pleasures was, and how Mill was introduced lexical preference orderings into his theory. Then I will show how the underlying psychological theory permits Mill to argue for the lexical priority of liberty over the goods which liberty allows us to obtain. Finally, I will turn to the Millian considerations omitted from the argument I will have reconstructed. By way of explaining why they are so difficult to accommodate, I will consider why Mill might have abandoned his projected sciences of character. I will take my leave by asking what Mill's failure to turn his implementation analysis of the higher pleasures into an argument expressing the importance of individuality and originality means for us. (shrink)

This paper is about certain of the ways in which rights and liberties are interrelated. It is also about the distinction between "prima facie" and "on balance" rights. Although philosophers concerned with the former issue commonly reject the notion of a prima facie right or ignore it entirely, I argue that an adequate account of how rights are related to liberties must rest on the idea that some rights are only prima facie.

This chapter demonstrates how early modern male and female thinkers alike were concerned not only with ethical, religious, and political liberty, but also with the liberty to philosophize, or libertas philosophandi. It is argued that while men’s interests in this latter kind of liberty tended to lie with the liberty to philosophize differently from their predecessors, women were more concerned with the liberty to philosophize at all. For them, the idea that women should be free (...) to think was foundational. This chapter shows how some women thinkers of the period, such as Damaris Cudworth Masham (1658–1708) and Mary Astell (1666–1731), followed through on the general trend of thinking about liberty in terms of freedom of the mind, to thinking about liberty for women in wider ethical and political terms. To support this point, the chapter explores their views on education, female rationality, and moral philosophy. (shrink)

Early modern political thought transformed toleration from a prudential consideration into a moral obligation. Three questions need to be answered by any explanation of this transition: Did religious toleration really become an obligation of the state in this period? If this was the case, how could tolerating heresy and idolatry possibly become a moral duty to Christians? How could Europeans both condemn practices as idolatrous and immoral, and yet insist that these practices ought to be tolerated? To answer these questions, (...) the article shows how the early policy of toleration in British India was constituted by a Protestant theological framework. Toleration turned into a moral obligation, it is argued, because the Reformation had identified liberty in the religious realm as God's will for humanity. This gave rise to a dynamic in which Christian states and churches were continuously challenged for their violations of religious liberty. The principle of toleration developed as a part of this dynamic. (shrink)