Suchergebnisse

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright -- Contents -- Preface -- Introduction -- CHAPTER 1 The Political Economy Debate: What Brings Prosperity? -- CHAPTER 2 The Moral Philosophy Debate: Are Market OutcomesMorally Acceptable? -- CHAPTER 3 The Democratic Ideals Debate: Markets and the Good Society -- CHAPTER 4 Why No Slam-Dunk Answers -- CHAPTER 5 Conclusion: Toward Reasonable Judgments -- Notes -- Index.

My/traditional American liberalism: a recollection of recurrent themes -- The new face of American liberalism -- Why did it happen? -- The deontology trap -- New democratic vistas

Reason and Democracy breaks new ground in providing a plausible philosophical basis for the communitarian view of a healthy democracy as the rational pursuit of common purposes by free and equal citizens. Thomas A. Spragens Jr. argues that the most persistent paradigms of Western political rationality originated in classical philosophy, took their modern expression in the philosophies of Kant and Mill, and terminated in Max Weber's pairing of purely technical rationality with arbitrary ends.Drawing on recent work in the philosophy of science and the philosophy of language, combined with approp

Recent debates over American liberalism have largely ignored one way
of understanding democratic purposes that was widely influential for much
of American history. This normative conception of democracy was inspired
by philosophical ideas found in people such as John Stuart Mill and G. W.
F. Hegel rather than by rights-based or civic republican theories. Walt
Whitman and John Dewey were among its notable adherents. There is much
that can be said on behalf of Richard Rorty's recent argument that
American liberals would be well advised to recover and reclaim the
heritage of Whitman and Dewey; but some additions and emendations to his
construction of these champions of democracy would strengthen his
case.

Two principal issues interact and overlap in this penetrating analysis: the relationship between Hobbes' natural philosophy and his civil philosophy, and the relationship between Hobbes' thought and the Aristotelian world view that constituted the philosophical orthodoxy he rejected. On the first point Thomas A. Spragens Jr. argues that Hobbes' political ideas were in fact significantly influenced by his cosmological perceptions, although they were not, and could not have been, completely derived from that source. On the second, the author demonstrates that Hobbes undertook a highly systematic

A review essay on a book by Bruce Miroff, The Liberals' Moment: The McGovern Insurgency and the Identity Crisis of the Democratic Party (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007).

What they have in common is that they all represent attempts by Shapiro (and Alexander Wendt and Donald Green, each of whom coauthored one of the essays) to respond to what he calls 'one of the central challenges for political theorists: serving as roving ombudsmen for the truth and the right by stepping back from political science as practiced, to see what is wrong with what is currently being done and say something about how it might be improved' (p. 179). The authors seek to show that the specific pieces of social science research cited by these critics as examples of rational-choice theoretical research that make important contributions either do not make such contributions or do so only because these pieces of research venture beyond the confines of the rational-choice paradigm.