Hayek's Bizarre Liberalism: A Critique

This paper questions the conventional view of F. A. Hayek as a reviver of 'classical liberalism'. It argues that the foundation of Hayek's doctrine is a naturalist or physicalist conception of man which is at variance with the classic tenets of liberalism. It shows how Hayek's theory of society and of the abstract rules that ought to govern society are partly a continuation and partly a contradiction of his physicalist notion of man. The paper draws particular attention to Hayek's work The Sensory Order and to the sometimes overlooked influence of Ernst Mach on his ideas.     

Liberalism: Interacting to Conserve

Post-war liberalism should be defined in terms of its promotion of (social) interaction. It is not to be seen as the opposite of communitarianism, as current usage implies, nor is it individualist. In practice it strengthens the nation state. It has a purpose, too, for given an innate but not perfect human conservatism, maximising interaction will minimise change. This conservatism does seem to exist, but liberalism is 'ideological' in concealing it as a goal. With success, for no change-directed and specifically anti-interactive normative theory has emerged Partly, perhaps, because it would lie outside the concept of the political entirely.     

Pluralism and Liberalism

Meta-ethical pluralism, as developed in the work of writers like Isaiah Berlin, is the idea that ethical values cannot be reduced to a single hierarchy or system but are irreducibly multiple. It has often been argued that simply to recognize this fact is to have a reason to favour liberal institutions. On the contrary, the plurality of values in itself gives us no reason to support liberalism, indeed no reason to prefer any particular political arrangement to any other. If pluralism is true, the liberal's best defence may lie in appealing, in the manner of writers like Walzer and Rorty, to the de facro limitations on moral commitments imposed by the existing political culture.     

Liberalism,neo-liberalism and governmentality: introduction

This paper concerns the emergence of a specifically 'economic' way of governing poverty at the start of this century, an event which is to be accounted for, though by no means exhaustively, by the discovery of 'unemployment'. The latter will make it possible to relate the nineteenth-century 'problem of the unemployed' to an object domain that is primarily economic, rather than cultural or moral. A new object of regulation will emerge from this economic problematization of the 'social question': the labour market. The paper pays particular attention to the national labour exchange system, the political technology that will visibilize the labour market in new ways. Together with unemployment insurance, it will suggest new ways of governing poverty and a new course for social policy.     

Liberalism and Culture

Will Kymlicka's new book makes important conceptual, methodological, and substantive contributions to contemporary discussions of multiculturalism. Nevertheless, Kymlicka's attempt to construct a defense of special rights for minority cultural groups on the basis of his conception of "societal culture" entails implications that are both too radical and too restrictive with regard to the kinds of minority claims they support. In particular, Kymlicka's account undermines the claims of immigrant minorities to the sorts of special rights that Kymlicka thinks they are entitled to demand.     

马克思主义与自由主义

自由主义在西方至今仍是占主导地位的意识形态。它的历史虽然可以追溯到古希腊，但作为一种思想流派和理论体系，则是近代以来的事情，实质上是资产阶级的一种自由观和民主观，与马克思主义的自由观民主现有着本质的区别。本文围绕马克思主义与自由主义在自由民主问题上的基本分歧作一筒要评述。     

Proffering Pork: How Party Leaders Build Party Reputations in Brazil

Despite its highly candidate-centered electoral law, recent studies have shown that Brazilian party leaders are more powerful, and Brazilian parties are more unified, than alleged by long-dominant scholarship. Examining post-War and contemporary democracy in Brazil, governed by the same federal legislative electoral law, this article provides a controlled test of the role of leadership and electoral law in driving party unity. The combination of leadership intervention to enforce unity, increased unity, and partisan tides in contemporary Brazil, in contrast to an absence of leadership intervention, lower unity, and no partisan tides in the post-War, provides strong support for the role of the leadership in generating unity, as emphasized in the collective action theory of party organization. The findings also suggest that a general theory of variation in party unity requires examining factors that lead to variation in party leaders' incentives to enforce unity, in addition to the current emphasis on backbenchers' incentives to defy the leadership.     

Welfare reform and paternity establishment: A social experiment

From March 1988 through September 1989, a demonstration study was conducted in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, on procedures for expediting paternity establishment. The issue of paternity establishment is central to current concerns about child support. In the 1988 Family Support Act, for example, administrative reforms to expedite paternity establishment are prominently featured. The results of the Cuyahoga demonstration provide early evidence of the likely impact of the 1988 reforms. At the implementation stage, the demonstration points up the complex interorganizational dependencies that are likely to limit the impact of mandated performance standards and associated sanctions directed at state and local child support agencies. As to the impact on paternity establishment outcomes, interventions directed at expediting administrative processes are likely to have a positive effect. However, the results of the demonstration indicate that noncooperative behavior among a significant portion of the client population is likely to seriously limit the effectiveness of expedited processes.     

Human Rights and Modern Liberalism: a Critique

The idea of human rights has become one of the central moral notions of both the theory and practice of international politics. While its foundation and future in the practice of politics looks bright, it is an idea that still causes great trouble at the theoretical level. What are human rights? Why do we have them? To what should we attribute the authority of their moral claims? The theorist Michael Freeman has suggested one theory that by addressing such questions may serve as a foundation for human rights. His theory, however, ends by begging the questions it set out to answer.     

Anti-perfectionism and Rawlsian Liberalism

This article examines the justifications of anti-perfectionism given by John Rawls in his recent work Political Liberalism. Rawls, I argue, gives one major argument in defence of anti-perfectionism (what I shall call the 'reasonableness among free and equal persons' argument) and two subsidiary arguments (what I shall call the 'social unity' argument and the 'stability' argument). None of these arguments, I claim, are persuasive. Rawls's most recent justification of anti-perfectionism is therefore unsuccessful.     

Policy and Blame Attribution: Citizens’ Preferences,Policy Reputations,and Policy Surprises

Negativity bias suggests that the attribution of blame to governments, for alleged or actual policy failures, is disproportionately pertinent for their popularity. However, when citizens attribute blame for adverse consequences of a policy, does it make a difference which policy was it, and who was the political agent that adopted the policy? We posit that the level of blame citizens attribute to political agents for policy failures depends on three policy-oriented considerations: (1) the distance between a citizen’s ideal policy and the agent’s established policy position; (2) the distance between a citizen’s ideal policy and the agent’s concrete policy choice; and (3) the distance between the agent’s established policy position and her concrete policy choice. The inherent relationship between these three policy-oriented considerations renders their integration in one model a theoretical and methodological imperative. The model provides novel observable predictions regarding the conditions under which each of the three policy-oriented factors will produce either pronounced or subtle observable effects on blame attribution. We test the model’s predictions in two survey experiments, in Israel and in Germany. The results of both experiments are highly consistent with the model’s predictions. These finding offer an important contribution by specifying the ways in which individual-level preferences interact with politicians’ policy reputations and policy choices to shape blame attribution. Our model entails unintuitive revisions to several strands of the literature, and in the “Discussion” section we provide tentative support for the applicability of this model to other political judgments beyond blame attribution.