Suchergebnisse

Born in bloodshed: the origins of democracy -- Voices in the wilderness: democracies in North America -- Democracy deferred: the English Civil War -- Coup d-Etat: 1688 in England and America -- Sympathy, will, and democracy in the enlightenments of Europe -- Faith, enlightenment, and resistance in America -- Democracy and American independence -- Constituting American democracy -- Ratification and reciprocity -- Delusions of unity and collisions with tradition in the French revolution -- Virtue and violence in the French revolution -- Democracy in the wake of terror -- Diagnosing democratic cultures in America and Europe -- The tragic irony of democracy.

Intro -- Contents -- ONE: Introduction: Rethinking America's Liberal Tradition -- TWO: The Virtues of Liberalism: Christianity, Republicanism, and Ethics in Early American Political Discourse -- THREE: Knowledge and Belief in American Public Life -- FOUR: Premature Requiem: Republicanism in American History -- FIVE: Life Everlasting: Tocqueville in America -- SIX: Democracy and Disenchantment: From Weber and Dewey to Habermas and Rorty -- SEVEN: Deliberative Democracy and the Problem of Poverty in America -- EIGHT: Political Ideas in Twentieth-Century America -- NINE: Why History Matters to Political Theory -- Notes -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W.

This spirited analysis and defence of American liberalism demonstrates the complex and rich traditions of political, economic, and social discourse that have informed American democratic culture from the seventeenth century to the present. The Virtues of Liberalism provides a convincing response to critics right and left. In contrast to prevailing tendencies to simplify and distort American liberalism, Kloppenberg shows how the multifaceted virtues of liberalism have inspired theorists and reformers from Jefferson and Madison through Jane Addams and John Dewey to Martin Luther King Jr., and how these virtues persist in the work of liberal democrats today. Endorsing the efforts of such neo-progressive and communitarian theorists and journalists as Michael Walzer, Jane Mansbridge, and Michael Sandel, Kloppenberg adds a more acute analysis of the historical development of American liberalism and of the complex reasons why it has been transformed and made more vulnerable in recent decades.; At a time when conservatives join radicals in distorting the development of liberalism and underestimating its resources, Kloppenberg offers a probing historical analysis and reassessment of the theory and practice of liberalism today.

Abstract
Americans interested in community today often lament precisely what conservative Americans prize: the perceived emphasis on individual rights and absence of explicit endorsements of civic duty, collective authority, and social equality in our eighteenth-century founding documents. Many who are familiar with the influence John Rawls had on contemporary political theory likewise fault him for prioritizing liberty over equality, a preference widely criticized by communitarians insisting that the common good is the proper end and measure of government. This article challenges those understandings of our nation's founding, and of Rawls's work, in order to show that concerns with the common good run as deeply through American history as do celebrations of individual rights.

When I began work on Toward Democracy more than twenty years ago, I planned to write a short book explaining how and why ideas about self-government developed in European and American thought from the middle of the eighteenth century to the present. Teaching courses and writing articles on republican, liberal, and democratic ideas, I found thinkers reflecting again and again on searing experiences of fratricidal violence, and as a result the theme of civil war became more prominent in my understanding of democracy. Had my analysis begun in the eighteenth century, I would have missed—as US historians often do—the shaping force of the devastating sixteenth-century wars of religion, the murderous mid-seventeenth-century English Civil War, and the less violent but no less crucial English revolution of 1688. Attempts to establish non-monarchical regimes, or even to modify monarchies to include elements of popular participation, foundered for multiple reasons, but among them were recollections of the carnage that ordinary people repeatedly inflicted on other ordinary people. Misgivings about democracy did not only arise from cultural conservatism or reverence for hierarchy. They also were forged in irrepressible memories of savagery.

Intellectual history and the history of political thought are siblings, perhaps even twins. They have similar origins and use similar materials. They attract many of the same friends and make some of the same enemies. Yet like most siblings, they have different temperaments and ambitions. This essay explores the family resemblances and draws out the contrasts by examining two major works by one of the most prominent political theorists of the past half-century, Alan Ryan, who has recently published two big books that intellectual historians will find rewarding and provocative.

American intellectual history in the future will be embodied, embedded, and extended. Building on a sturdy foundation of past practices, intellectual historians will consolidate the advances of the last half-century and continue to study ideas articulated in multiple registers, by multiple historical actors, for multiple purposes.

In December of 1850, exhausted by his role in French politics and recuperating from tuberculosis, Alexis de Tocqueville retreated to the Amalfi coast to think, write, and recover. To his best friend Louis de Kergolay, Tocqueville wrote about completing his memoir on the 1848 revolution and his plans to undertake a comprehensive account of French history that would explain the turmoil of the past century. The appeal was powerful, he explained to Kergolay, but "the difficulties are immense. The one that most troubles my mind comes from the mixture of history properly so called with historical philosophy. I still do not see how to mix these two things," he conceded, "and yet, they must be mixed, for one could say that the first is the canvas and the second the color, and that it is necessary to have both at the same time in order to do the picture." Tocqueville feared "that the one is harmful to the other, and that I lack the infinite art that would be necessary in order to choose properly the facts that must, so to speak, support the ideas.