The Banner of Upright Swiss Liberty

The liberty of the Swiss has not been sufficiently appreciated,by Europeans, by federalists, and even by foreign lovers ofliberty who chose to live there, such as Gibbon. In his Bannerof the Upright Seven, Gottfried Keller of Zürich uncoversthe basis of Swiss federalism, displays the liberty it promotes,savors the well-being it provides, and yet shows how it woulddestroy it if its basis were forgotten. And he does so festively.     

The Communal Basis of Swiss Liberty

This article examines the relationship between liberty and itscommunal basis in Switzerland. The author identifies the basiccultural values shared by the Swiss that have served to guaranteea republican form of government. These values are an expectationof "nonpersonalized" government and a preference for small-scaleorganization. These, together with the multilingual compositionof the country, have combined to produce Swiss republicanismfrom which liberty is a byproduct. More recently, the Swissnotion of liberty has evolved from communal liberty into onethat is oriented toward individual rights, which has also certainnegative implications.     

Liberty and development: A further empirical perspective

This paper uses the Wright ratings of economic freedom to investigate the relationship between economic freedom and economic development for most countries in the world. This relationship is apparently strong and direct for such economic freedoms as freedom of property and freedom of movement but inverse for freedom of association. These findings appear to be independent of the type of economic system or civil liberties, as measured by the Gastil ratings, which have their own important effects on economic development.With the statistical assistance of Laurie D. Still. Comments on previous drafts by Iraj Aberdian, Merle Holden, Brian Kantor, John W. Kendrick, Peter Kennedy, Jack Knetsch, Chris Lingle, Denton Marks, Peter Moll, Frank Vorhies, an anonymous referee, and the participants of seminars at the University of Cape Town, the University of Natal and Simon Fraser University are gratefully acknowledged.     

从阿马蒂亚·森自由发展观看改革开放三十年

以阿马蒂亚·森自由发展观来看,改革开放三十年的最大成就就是提高了人的可行能力,扩展了人的实质自由;其基本历程就是通过自由来促进发展的过程。阿马蒂亚·森自由发展观,对改革开放近三十年后的中国所存在的问题仍具有重要的启示作用。     

One Concept of Liberty

In this paper I argue in favour of a single conception of liberty, that picked out by Berlin as negative liberty. However, Berlin's defence of liberty so understood seems to rest on a view not open to the moral realist.
The first half of the paper explains this and suggests an alternative defence compatible with such a moral position. The defence rests on an account of why we value freedom. In the second half of the paper this negative conception is defended against recent criticism from Charles Taylor. His appeal to qualitative distinctions within freedom is queried, as is the conception of the self that seems required for his outlook.     

How Terrorism Upsets Liberty

As terrorism increasingly penetrates Western democracies, liberals and libertarians are obliged to ask themselves whether contending with it justifies restricting civil liberty and, if so, to what extent. Neither personal security nor individual liberty is ever fully realised – both are a matter of degree – and they are often perceived as being at odds with each other. Hence it has been suggested that we reconsider the existing trade-off between them, or reassess their 'rate of exchange'. While such questions are sometimes raised by left-leaning liberals, they are in fact particularly acute for liberals on the right, or libertarians, who would normally resist any increase in government intervention. Right-wingers who advocate 'hands off' policies on all other occasions now call for an increase in government intervention as regards security measures. Many left-liberals, on the other hand, are reluctant to concede any further power to the state in order to combat terrorism.     

Constructing and Deconstructing Liberty: A Feminist and Poststructuralist Analysis

Debates about liberty have been dominated by discussion about the relationship between its negative and positive conceptions. In accepting this framework, political theorists have left unquestioned certain foundational ideas that both concepts share but which actully constrain our thinking about freedom. This relates in particular to subjectivity and our assumptions about the free self. This critique uses feminist and poststructuralist approaches and explores the implications of the spatial metaphors which both concepts of liberty invoke.     

Hobbes's Liberty and Skinner's Discontent

This article questions the plausibility of the interpretation of Hobbes's liberty that Quentin Skinner articulates in Hobbes and Republican Liberty . It argues that Skinner's book fails to prove two of the three claims it must uphold: the 'textual accuracy claim' and his 'methodological claim'. This article maintains that understanding Hobbes's use of liberty in Leviathan according to his definition of 'corporall liberty', as Skinner does, ignores many of Hobbes's claims that invoke liberty outside the beginning of chapter 21, resulting in a one-dimensional reading of Hobbes.     

Liberty, Rights and Justice: A Conversation with Hillel Steiner

In this piece, Mario Ricciardi conducts an interview with Hillel Steiner centred around Steiner's prize winning book, An Essay on Rights. Steiner responds to questions on the development of his views, their practical implications and on key aspects of his theoretical standpoint.     

席勒美学的政治自由思想及其现实困境

席勒美学不仅是对艺术的审美理论,更是对法国大革命的政治哲学反应,后者是常被忽视的问题。作为政治哲学,他以审美作为政治自由的前提,批判康德在观念上导致了纯粹实践理性与感性的对立,并指出法国大革命的政治自由理想与实践的矛盾是政治自由目的化。他用和解原则化解康德在观念上的对立,并将美育实践视为实现整体性政治自由的理路。他以感伤原则批判卢梭的自然状态是对政治自由的叛逃,并扬弃政治自由实践中当下与未来的对立,为政治自由赋予历史性维度。在此意义上,席勒政治自由思想构成通向黑格尔政治哲学的重要环节。     

Mill, Liberty and the Facts of Life

This paper examines John Stuart Mill's discussion of economic liberty and individual liberty, and his view of the relationship between the two. It explores how, and how effectively, Mill developed his arguments about the two liberties; reveals the lineages of thought from which they derived; and considers how his arguments were altered by political economists not long after his death. It is argued that the distinction Mill drew between the two liberties provided him with a framework of concepts which legitimized significant government intervention in economic matters without restricting individual liberty.     

Swiss worlds of welfare

Are there different worlds of welfare in Swiss cantons, analogous to different national welfare state regimes? Are the welfare regimes made up of functionally related sub-regimes in the field of employment, education, taxation and social security, as argued in recent analyses of ‘varieties of capitalism’? And can the variations between such cantonal welfare regimes be explained by the same politico-institutional variables that account for the development of national welfare states? These are the guiding questions of this article. We find strong empirical evidence for large inter-cantonal variation in welfare state policies. The sub-regimes are not functionally connected, however. Their variation is related to different sets of variables, indicating a weak functional link between them. Developments and causal structures are specific to the various subregimes. In addition, it is socio-economic and not politicoinstitutional variables that have had the strongest imprint on the overall structure of cantonal welfare regimes.