Suchergebnisse

Preface -- Prolegomenon : Hayek's three unsettling theses -- Beyond human nature -- Beyond moral justification -- Beyond human governance -- Three enquiries on the open society -- The rise of a normative species -- A natural history of moral order -- The "starting point" -- The egalitarian revolution -- Self-interest, reciprocity and altruism -- Internalized, enforced, social rules -- The other side of morality -- Cultural evolution -- Part I : the rise and (partial) fall of inequality -- A complex moral species -- The diversity and self-organized complexity -- Liberalism and the open society -- Understanding diversity -- Autocatalytic diversity -- Diversity and complexity -- Too much complexity? -- The morality of self-organization -- The social contract -- A self-organization model -- Moral diversity In the open society -- Part II: the complexities of self-governance -- Self-governance -- Macro control -- Macro structure -- Strategic dilemmas and polycentricity -- Meso-level goal pursuit -- Sectoral policy -- Self-governance from the bottom-up : simplifying the problems of governance -- Our moral nature and governance in the open society -- Liberal democracy -- Epilogue -- Appendix A -- Appendix B.

'The Open Society and Its Complexities' marshals formal models and empirical evidence to show that our open society is grounded on the moral foundations of human cooperation originating in our distant evolutionary past, but has built upon these foundation a complex society that requires us to rethink both the nature of moral justification and the meaning of democratic self-governance.

Acknowledgements; Introductory; Part One: Human Nature; 1. Individuality 2. Sociability: Social Life 3. Sociability: Community 4. Developmentalism; Part Two: Politics; 5. Liberty 6. Democracy 7. Economic Organisation; Concluding Remarks; Bibliography; Index

In his provocative new book, The Tyranny of the Ideal, Gerald Gaus lays out a vision for how we should theorize about justice in a diverse society. Gaus shows how free and equal people, faced with intractable struggles and irreconcilable conflicts, might share a common moral life shaped by a just framework. He argues that if we are to take diversity seriously and if moral inquiry is sincere about shaping the world, then the pursuit of idealized and perfect theories of justice--essentially, the entire production of theories of justice that has dominated political philosophy for the past forty years--needs to change. Drawing on recent work in social science and philosophy, Gaus points to an important paradox: only those in a heterogeneous society--with its various religious, moral, and political perspectives--have a reasonable hope of understanding what an ideally just society would be like. However, due to its very nature, this world could never be collectively devoted to any single ideal. Gaus defends the moral constitution of this pluralistic, open society, where the very clash and disagreement of ideals spurs all to better understand what their personal ideals of justice happen to be. Presenting an original framework for how we should think about morality, The Tyranny of the Ideal rigorously analyzes a theory of ideal justice more suitable for contemporary times.

"When people of good faith and sound mind disagree deeply about moral, religious, and other philosophical matters, how can we justify political institutions to all of them? The idea of public reason--of a shared public standard, despite disagreement--arose in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the work of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant. At a time when John Rawls' influential theory of public reason has come under fire but its core idea remains attractive to many, it is important not to lose sight of earlier philosophers' answers to the problem of private conflict through public reason. The distinctive selections from the great social contract theorists in this volume emphasize the pervasive theme of intractable disagreement and the need for public justification. New essays by leading scholars then put the historical work in context and provide a focus of debate and discussion. They also explore how the search for public reason has informed a wider body of modern political theory--in the work of Hume, Hegel, Bentham, and Mill--sometimes in surprising ways. The idea of public reason is revealed as an overarching theme in modern political philosophy--one very much needed today."--Provided by publisher

In this text, Gerald F. Gaus provides students with a comprehensive overview of the key tenets of liberalism developed through Hobbes, Locke, Kant and Rawls to present day theories and debates.

Drawing on current work in epistemology and cognitive psychology, this treatise develops a theory of personally justified belief. Building on this, it then advances an account of public justification that is more normative and less "populist" than the views of political liberals