The Dialectical Liberalism of Richard Hofstadter

This essay examines Richard Hofstadter’s The American Political Tradition, alongside some of his unpublished writings from the 1940s, in order to reassess his contributions to the history of American political culture and thought. After exploring some of the implications of Hofstadter’s critical analysis of mid-century liberalism, the essay then considers how we might bring his insights into the present.     

新自由主义的主张及其实质

新自由主义产生于20世纪20—30年代,主要有弗莱堡学派、伦敦学派、现代货币学派等流派,它以捍卫"自由主义"为核心,从自由主义出发要求私有化、市场化、世界经济一体化,反对政府干预。新自由主义披着科学的外衣,真正用意是为了维护西方资产阶级和西方大国的利益。     

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 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.     

Rethinking Postwar Liberalism: The Road to 2010 and Beyond

The nineteenth and early twentieth century Liberal Party has been well served by British political historians. By contrast, research on the post-1945 Liberal Party and Liberal Democrats has become a specialised field, with strong empirical foundations (including in biographies and political science work) but few connections with the larger narratives that historians tell about postwar Britain. This article explores how the story of the ‘long Liberal revival’ from the late 1950s to the 2010–15 coalition might be reintegrated with contemporary historiography, including debates about deindustrialisation, class dealignment and the rise of ‘popular individualism’. It argues that careful attention to the nature and limits of Liberals’ political agency can help us understand the changing meaning and significance of third-party politics in Britain.     

新自由主义核心价值认同的利益机制——兼析对和谐社会建设的启示

经济全球化为价值认同提供了新机遇,利益机制由此成为全球化语境中价值认同的新工具。新自由主义运用利益机制在全球推进价值认同,它首先在初创时期以经济思潮作为面具出场,然后在转化时期从经济思潮嬗变为政策实践,最后在扩张时期以政策实践推进价值认同。在构建社会主义和谐社会的进程中,应当在理论上以唯物史观审视利益机制,在实践中以体制性利益机制抵御西方价值观侵袭,同时以政策性利益机制推进社会主义核心价值认同。     

On Liberalism’s Religion

ABSTRACT

This chapter addresses two crucial issues raised by Laborde’s superb Liberalism’s Religion. The first pertains to where the liberal democratic modern state draws the line between the self-governing prerogatives of religious nomos communities and their regulation by the civil law; the second pertains to the prerogative of the state to do the relevant line drawing. Theorists concerned with religious freedom focus on the first set of questions under the rubric of ‘accommodation.’ The issue is unfair discrimination. I focus on Laborde’s approach to the second. This is again an important issue due to the recent revival of jurisdictional political pluralism: an approach that challenges the supremacy of the civil law and of the authority of the sovereign state over domestic religious authorities. I suggest more work must be done to parry those challenges.     

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.     

Liberalism and the anxiety of belief

Anxiety about perceived threats to liberal freedom has played a double role in liberalism. On the one hand, such anxiety has driven the development of liberal institutions aimed at safeguarding freedoms. Yet another, problematic, side of this anxiety can also be found in the history of liberalism and in the policies and practices of contemporary liberal states. From the beginning, liberal intolerance of those perceived to be connected, through religious affiliation or beliefs, with arbitrary or absolute power and therefore deemed to pose a threat to the existing order has justified social exclusion and, in many cases, systematic violence. Rae’s article examines the theoretical and political roots of this distinctive form of liberal anxiety, tracing the connection between anxiety about Catholicism and Catholics in John Locke’s time and contemporary anxieties about the relationship between Islamism and Muslims in liberal states.     

The Dynamics of State Policy Liberalism, 1936–2014

Applying a dynamic latent‐variable model to data on 148 policies collected over eight decades (1936–2014), we produce the first yearly measure of the policy liberalism of U.S. states. Our dynamic measure of state policy liberalism marks an important advance over existing measures, almost all of which are purely cross‐sectional and thus cannot be used to study policy change. We find that, in the aggregate, the policy liberalism of U.S. states steadily increased between the 1930s and 1970s and then largely plateaued. The policy liberalism of most states has remained stable in relative terms, though several states have shifted considerably over time. We also find surprisingly little evidence of multidimensionality in state policy outputs. Our new estimates of state policy liberalism have broad application to the study of political development, representation, accountability, and other important issues in political science.     

The dispossession of the Innu and the colonial magic of Canadian Liberalism

This article examines the legal and philosophical grounds which are used by the nation state of Canada to dispossess aboriginal people who have not ceded land through treaties. Using the Innu people of the Labrador‐Quebec peninsula as an example, my thesis is that, far from being a neutral doctrine of rights and citizenship, liberalism functions as a magical, yet ethnocidal, instrument of colonial domination and land usurpation. I demonstrate this by looking at the way in which policies such as Comprehensive Land Claims and Environmental Impact Assessment, ostensibly for the protection of the Innu and other aboriginal peoples, predetermine that land will be legally ceded and ways of life based on it exterminated. The roots of this approach are traced through an examination of the imposition of sovereignty in colonial policy and its continued assertion in Canadian court cases, including the recent Delgamuukw decision. In conclusion, I draw attention to the affinities between the ideas of contemporary liberal theorists of citizenship and the rhetoric and policies of the Canadian state. As a positive proposal, I suggest that outstanding aboriginal land claims in Canada should be treated as the ‘Canada claim’, and that new processes for their resolution which do not presume Canadian sovereignty be established.