Liberalism & the Liberal StateFurious Fancies: American Political Thought in the Post-Liberal Era. By Philip Abbott Social Justice in the Liberal State. By Bruce A. Ackerman Political Philosophy and the Issues of Politics. By Joseph Cropsey The Collapse of Liberal Empire: Science and Revolution in the Twentieth Century. By Paul N. Goldstene Approaches to Democracy: Philosophy of Government at the Close of the Twentieth Century. By W. J. Stankiewicz

Polity ◽  
1982 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 701-710
Author(s):  
Gerald M. Bonetto
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Liberal State ◽  
American Political Thought

Utopophobia

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Estlund
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Ideal Theory ◽  
Theory Of Justice ◽  
Sound Theory ◽  
Theory Versus ◽  
History Of ◽  
Practical Guidance

Throughout the history of political philosophy and politics, there has been continual debate about the roles of idealism versus realism. For contemporary political philosophy, this debate manifests in notions of ideal theory versus nonideal theory. Nonideal thinkers shift their focus from theorizing about full social justice, asking instead which feasible institutional and political changes would make a society more just. Ideal thinkers, on the other hand, question whether full justice is a standard that any society is likely ever to satisfy. And, if social justice is unrealistic, are attempts to understand it without value or importance, and merely utopian? This book argues against thinking that justice must be realistic, or that understanding justice is only valuable if it can be realized. The book does not offer a particular theory of justice, nor does it assert that justice is indeed unrealizable—only that it could be, and this possibility upsets common ways of proceeding in political thought. The book's author engages critically with important strands in traditional and contemporary political philosophy that assume a sound theory of justice has the overriding, defining task of contributing practical guidance toward greater social justice. Along the way, it counters several tempting perspectives, including the view that inquiry in political philosophy could have significant value only as a guide to practical political action, and that understanding true justice would necessarily have practical value, at least as an ideal arrangement to be approximated. Demonstrating that unrealistic standards of justice can be both sound and valuable to understand, the book stands as a trenchant defense of ideal theory in political philosophy.

Social democracy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Miller
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
Social Democracy ◽  
General Interest ◽  
Social Democrats ◽  
Social Democratic ◽  
Practical Politics ◽  
Post War ◽  
Distribution Of Income

The idea of social democracy is now used to describe a society the economy of which is predominantly capitalist, but where the state acts to regulate the economy in the general interest, provides welfare services outside of it and attempts to alter the distribution of income and wealth in the name of social justice. Originally ’social democracy’ was more or less equivalent to ’socialism’. But since the mid-twentieth century, those who think of themselves as social democrats have come to believe that the old opposition between capitalism and socialism is outmoded; many of the values upheld by earlier socialists can be promoted by reforming capitalism rather than abolishing it. Although it bases itself on values like democracy and social justice, social democracy cannot really be described as a political philosophy: there is no systematic statement or great text that can be pointed to as a definitive account of social democratic ideals. In practical politics, however, social democratic ideas have been very influential, guiding the policies of most Western states in the post-war world.

scholarly journals DEMOCRACY AND EXPERTISE IN THE LIPPMANN–TERMAN CONTROVERSY

2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (02) ◽  
pp. 561-592 ◽  
Author(s):  
TOM ARNOLD-FORSTER
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
John Dewey ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Democratic Theory ◽  
Intelligence Testing ◽  
American Political Thought ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Walter Lippmann ◽  
And Control

Historians often interpret American political thought in the early twentieth century through an opposition between the technocratic power of expertise and the deliberative promise of democracy, respectively represented by Walter Lippmann and John Dewey. This article explores Lippmann's concurrent controversy with Lewis Terman about intelligence testing, in which Dewey also intervened. It argues that the Lippmann–Terman controversy dramatized and developed a range of ideas about the politics of expertise in a democracy, which centered on explaining how democratic citizens might engage with and control the authority of experts. It concludes by examining the controversy's influence on democratic theory.

Representative Government and Constitutional Reality: Spain between Literature and Political Thought

Pólemos ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-105
Author(s):  
Daniel Fernández Cañueto
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Constitutional Law ◽  
Political Representation ◽  
Law And Literature ◽  
Constitutional History ◽  
Multidisciplinary Perspective

Abstract The article analyses how the features of modern political representation have developed in Spanish constitutional history from a multidisciplinary perspective (political philosophy, political science, constitutional law and literature). Between the eighteenth- to the twentieth-century, indeed, the Kingdom of Spain experienced transformations in the concepts of sovereignty, periodic suffrage, free public opinion, and the free and non-revocable mandate. The article also takes into account how the evolution of concepts at stake affected the evolution of the others.

Moral Order in the Western Tradition: Harry Jaffa's Grand Synthesis of Athens, Jerusalem, and Peoria

2009 ◽  
Vol 71 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-206
Author(s):  
Robert P. Kraynak
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Abraham Lincoln ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Moral Order ◽  
Leo Strauss ◽  
Western Tradition ◽  
The West ◽  
American Political Thought ◽  
Natural Right

AbstractHarry V. Jaffa has inspired a generation of students in American political thought by defending the natural rights principles of the Declaration of Independence and of Abraham Lincoln. Jaffa is also a defender of Leo Strauss's idea of a “political science of natural right,” which Strauss drew primarily from classical Greek political philosophy. Jaffa's efforts to defend the several strands of the Western natural right tradition led him to develop a grand synthesis of “Athens, Jerusalem, and Peoria,” which I argue is a noble but untenable way of upholding the moral order of the West—and a departure from the intentions of Leo Strauss.

Michael Oakeshott, 1901–1990

2009 ◽  
Vol 71 (1) ◽  
pp. 100-112
Author(s):  
Timothy Fuller
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Human Conduct ◽  
Michael Oakeshott

AbstractMichael Oakeshott, one of the most important political thinkers in the second half of the twentieth century, has been understood to be a skeptical conservative, a romantic, a liberal individualist, an historian of political thought, a philosopher, a charismatic teacher. Each of these characterizations conveys something to be found in his life and work. This essay offers an intellectual portrait of his life's work from early to late through consideration of his major works from Experience and its Modes (1933) to Rationalism in Politics (1962; 1991), to the culmination in On Human Conduct (1975). His understanding of political philosophy is examined. The usefulness of the aforementioned characterizations is assessed.

Leo Strauss and the Dignity of American Political Thought

1998 ◽  
Vol 60 (2) ◽  
pp. 231-246 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wilson Carey McWiliams
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Leo Strauss ◽  
American Political Thought ◽  
Natural Right ◽  
American Life ◽  
Political Tradition ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
American Thought

Leo Strauss wrote only rarely about American thought, but he pointed his students and readers toward the “high adventure” of the American political tradition as a serious encounter with the great questions of political philosophy. Strauss saw American theory as a contest—one fought less between Americans than within them—pitting modernity's “first wave”, with its appeal to reason and natural right, against the more radical individualism and the historicism of later modern doctrine. Religion and classical rationalism, offering their own standards of a right above opinion, had been historically the allies of “first wave”, modernity, but those voices, Strauss recognized, were growing weaker in American life. In recent American teaching and culture, by contrast, Strauss saw that the increasingly dominant ethics of self—interest and success, other political inadequacies aside, were incapable of speaking to the highest aspirations or winning the deepest allegiance of the young. By reviving classical teaching, Strauss also sought to contribute to the rearticulation and reanimation of the American ideal.

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