Abstract
Nearly half a century ago, Lionel Trilling wrote, “It has for some time seemed to me that a criticism which has at heart the interests of liberalism might find its most useful work not in confirming liberalism in its sense of general lightness but rather in putting under some degree of pressure the liberal ideas and assumptions of the present time.”1 This book is an attempt to enact a version of Trilling’s program. Many of the reigning ideas of liberal political theory are challenged and criticized, though for the most part the spirit animating these criticisms is itself liberal.
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Notes
Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1953), p. 6.
Ronald Dworkin, “Liberalism,” in Stuart Hampshire, ed., Public and Private Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 113–43.
This is not to say that there were not other important works articulating the idea of neutrality. Dworkin’s essay gave crystallized expression to a view which may also be found most powerfully expressed in Bruce Ackerman, Social Justice and the Liberal State (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980); Charles Larmore, Patterns of Moral Complexity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); and John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971).
Jeremy Waldron, “Locke, Toleration and the Rationality of Persecution,” in Liberal Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 106.
See, for example, Robert Audi, “The Separation of Church and State and the Obligations of Citizenship,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, vol. 18, no. 3 (Summer, 1989), pp. 259–96.
See also in this regard Larry Alexander, “Liberalism, Religion and the Unity of Epistemology,” San Diego Law Review, vol. 30, no. 4 (Fall, 1993), pp. 763–99.
Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 142–7.
Brian Barry, A Treatise on Social Justice: Volume I, Theories of Justice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).
Ronald Dworkin, “Foundations of Liberal Equality,” in Grethe B. Peterson, ed., The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, vol. 11 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1990), pp. 1–119.
A more elaborate account of my understanding of Hobbes is in “Hobbes and Rational Choice Theory,” Western Political Quarterly, vol. 41, no. 4 (September, 1988), pp. 635–52; a reading of Hobbes to which I am both sympathetic and indebted is in Richard Flathman, Thomas Hobbes: Skepticism, Individuality and Chastened Politics (Newbury Park, Ca.: Sage Publications, 1993).
See St. Augustine, The City of God (New York: Penguin Books, 1984), Bk. 19, ch. 6, pp. 859–61.
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© 1997 Patrick Neal
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Neal, P. (1997). Introduction. In: Liberalism and Its Discontents. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-14362-7_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-14362-7_1
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