This book develops an original and comprehensive theory of political liberalism. It defends bold new accounts of the nature of autonomy and individual liberty, the content of distributive justice, and the justification for the authority of the State. The theory that emerges integrates contemporary progressive and pluralistic liberalism into a broadly Aristotelian intellectual tradition. The early chapters of the book challenge the traditional conservative idea of individual liberty—the liberty to dispose of one’s property as one wishes—and replace it with a new one, according to which liberty is of equal value to all persons, regardless of economic position. The middle chapters present an original theory of socio-economic justice, arguing that a society in which every citizen enjoys an equal share of liberty should be the distributive goal of the State. It is argued that this goal is incompatible with the existence of large disparities in wealth and economic power, and that (contra conservative and libertarian economic arguments) such disparities are harmful to the overall health of national and global economies. The final chapters provide an original argument that the State has both a moral duty and a moral right to pursue this program of socio-economic justice (contra conservative and libertarian moral arguments), and that only the measures necessary to implement this program lie within the morally justifiable limits on the State’s authority. Though primarily a political work, it spans most areas of practical philosophy—including ethical, social, and legal theory; and meta-ethics, moral psychology, and action theory. And though fundamentally a philosophical work, it incorporates research from a number of fields—including decision theory, economics, political science, and jurisprudence; primatology, neuroscience, and psychology; and history, anthropology, sociology, and ecology—and is sure to be of interest to a wide range of scholars and students.

This book uses extensive original archival and elite interview research to examine the attempt to rejuvenate liberalism as a means of disciplining democracy and the market through a new rule-based economic and political order. This rebirth took the form of conservative liberalism and, in its most developed form, Ordo-liberalism. It occurred against the historical background of the great transformational crisis of liberalism in the first part of the twentieth century. Conservative liberalism evolved as a cross-national phenomenon. It included such eminent and cultured liberal economists as James Buchanan, Frank Knight, Henry Simons, Ralph Hawtrey, Jacques Rueff, Luigi Einaudi, Walter Eucken, Friedrich Hayek, Alfred Müller-Armack, Wilhelm Röpke, Alexander Rüstow, and Paul van Zeeland, as well as leading lawyers like Louis Brandeis, Franz Böhm, and Maurice Hauriou. Conservative liberals also played a formative role in establishing new international networks, notably the Mont Pèlerin Society. The book investigates the rich intellectual inheritance of this variant of new liberalism from aristocratic liberalism, ethical philosophy, and religious thought. It also locates the social basis of conservative liberalism and Ordo-liberalism in the cultivated bourgeois intelligentsia. The book goes on to examine the attempts to embed this new disciplinary form of liberalism in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and the United States, and to consider the determinants of its varying significance across space and over time. It concludes by assessing the historical significance and contemporary relevance of conservative liberalism and Ordo-liberalism as liberalism confronts a new transformational crisis at the beginning of the new millennium. Is their promise of disciplining democracy and the market a hollow one?

What transformation would happen if we could combine the best of liberal politics with psychology? Awakening our Faith in the Future investigates the avenues for creating a new branch of psychology, a transformative political psychology. In the past, political psychology has focused directly on analysis and knowledge acquisition, rather than on interventions that transform self and culture. A transformative political psychology combines the best of traditional social science with the transformative intent of clinical psychology in order to create a new political culture. Peter T. Dunlap suggests that while liberals focus intently outside of themselves on changing the world, those with psychological interests focus much more internally on changing themselves. In this book, he argues that by combining political liberalism and psychology, and encouraging psychologists to develop cultural learning practices based on ideas of self-knowledge, there is opportunity to transform our political culture. Divided into five parts, this book explores: stories of political destiny questions of development opportunities for political development a speculative theory of cultural evolution practices of a political psychologist. This scholarly text uses personal experiences and the stories of progressive political leaders as pathways for addressing political problems, making it ideal reading for professionals and students in the fields of both politics and psychology as well as for activists interested in the future of liberalism.

The path-breaking history of modern liberalism told through the pages of one of its most zealous supporters In this landmark book, Alexander Zevin looks at the development of modern liberalism by examining the long history of the Economist newspaper, which, since 1843, has been the most tireless—and internationally influential—champion of the liberal cause anywhere in the world. But what exactly is liberalism, and how has its message evolved? Liberalism at Large examines a political ideology on the move as it confronts the challenges that classical doctrine left unresolved: the rise of democracy, the expansion of empire, the ascendancy of high finance. Contact with such momentous forces was never going to leave the proponents of liberal values unchanged. Zevin holds a mirror to the politics—and personalities—of Economist editors past and present, from Victorian banker-essayists James Wilson and Walter Bagehot to latter-day eminences Bill Emmott and Zanny Minton Beddoes. Today, neither economic crisis at home nor permanent warfare abroad has dimmed the Economist’s belief in unfettered markets, limited government, and a free hand for the West. Confidante to the powerful, emissary for the financial sector, portal onto international affairs, the bestselling newsweekly shapes the world its readers—as well as everyone else—inhabit. This is the first critical biography of one of the architects of a liberal world order now under increasing strain.

Hyper-capitalism and extreme identity politics are driving us to distraction. Both destroy the basis of a common life shared across ages and classes. The COVID-19 crisis could accelerate these tendencies further, or it could herald something more hopeful: a post-liberal moment. Adrian Pabst argues that now is the time for an alternative – postliberalism – that is centred around trust, dignity, and human relationships. Instead of reverting to the destabilising inhumanity of 'just-in-time' free-market globalisation, we could build a politics upon the sense of localism and community spirit, the valuing of family, place and belonging, which was a real theme of lockdown. We are not obliged to put up with the restoration of a broken status quo that erodes trust, undermines institutions and trashes our precious natural environment. We could build a pluralist democracy, decentralise the state, and promote embedded, mutualist markets. This bold book shows that only a politics which fuses economic justice with social solidarity and ecological balance can overcome our deep divisions and save us from authoritarian backlash.​

In the decades following World War II, a movement of clergy and laity sought to restore liberal Protestantism to the center of American urban life. Chastened by their failure to avert war and the Holocaust, and troubled by missionaries’ complicity with colonial regimes, they redirected their energies back home. Renewal explores the rise and fall of this movement, which began as an effort to restore the church’s standing but wound up as nothing less than an openhearted crusade to remake our nation’s cities. These campaigns reached beyond church walls to build or lend a hand to scores of organizations fighting for welfare, social justice, and community empowerment among the increasingly nonwhite urban working class. Church leaders extended their efforts far beyond traditional evangelicalism, often dovetailing with many of the contemporaneous social currents coursing through the nation, including black freedom movements and the War on Poverty. Renewal illuminates the overlooked story of how religious institutions both shaped and were shaped by postwar urban America.

In recent years serious concerns emerged over the state of European democracy. Many democracy indices are reporting a year-on-year drift towards less liberal politics in the countries of the European Union. Polls regularly suggest that the voters are coming to question democratic norms more seriously than for many decades. Here, Richard Youngs assesses these risks as many analysts, journalists and politicians stressed the danger of Europe descending into an era of conflict, driven by xenophobic nationalism and nativist authoritarians slowly dismantling liberal democratic rights. In 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic has intensified these fears. There is another side of the democratic equation, however. Youngs argues that governments, EU institutions, political parties, citizens and civil society organisations have gradually begun to push back in defence of democracy. With each chapter, Youngs shows how many governmental, political and social actors have developed responses to Europe's democratic malaise at multiple levels. Europe's democracy problems have been grave and far-reaching. Yet, a spirit of democratic resistance has slowly taken shape. This book argues that the pro-democratic fightback may be belated, but it is real and has assumed significant traction with various types of democratic reform underway, including citizen initiatives, political-party changes, digital activism and EU-level responses.

John Gerstner (1914-96) was a significant leader in the renewal of Presbyterian and Reformed evangelicalism in America during the second half of the twentieth century. Gerstner's work as a church historian sought to shape evangelicalism, but also northern mainline Presbyterianism. In order to promote evangelical thought he wrote, taught, lectured, debated, and preached widely. In pursuing his aims he promoted the work of the great colonial theologian Jonathan Edwards. He also defended and endorsed biblical inerrancy and the Old Princeton theology. Gerstner was a sharp critic of theological modernism and what he considered its negative influence on the church. Part of Gerstner's fame was his active participation in mainline Presbyterianism and in so many of the smaller Presbyterian denominations and in the wider evangelical movement. His renewal efforts within the United Presbyterian Church USA (later PCUSA) were largely a failure, but they did contribute to the surprising resurgence of Presbyterian and Reformed evangelicalism. Evangelical marginalization in the mainline led Gerstner and other evangelicals to redirect their energy into new evangelical institutions, groups, and denominations. Gerstner's evangelical United Presbyterian Church of North America (UPCNA) background influenced the young scholar and the legacy of the UPCNA's heritage can be detected in the popular forms of the Presbyterian and Reformed evangelical movement that exist today. Moreover, he was significant for the revival of Reformed teaching beyond the bounds of Presbyterianism. This book establishes Gerstner's significance in American church history and provides a thorough analysis of the evangelical movement he sought to reinvigorate.

Just as today's observers struggle to justify the workings of the free market in the wake of a global economic crisis, an earlier generation of economists revisited their worldviews following the Great Depression. The Great Persuasionis an intellectual history of that project. Angus Burgin traces the evolution of postwar economic thought in order to reconsider many of the most basic assumptions of our market-centered world. Conservatives often point to Friedrich Hayek as the most influential defender of the free market. By examining the work of such organizations as the Mont Pèlerin Society, an international association founded by Hayek in 1947 and later led by Milton Friedman, Burgin reveals that Hayek and his colleagues were deeply conflicted about many of the enduring problems of capitalism. Far from adopting an uncompromising stance against the interventionist state, they developed a social philosophy that admitted significant constraints on the market. Postwar conservative thought was more dynamic and cosmopolitan than has previously been understood. It was only in the 1960s and '70s that Friedman and his contemporaries developed a more strident defense of the unfettered market. Their arguments provided a rhetorical foundation for the resurgent conservatism of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan and inspired much of the political and economic agenda of the United States in the ensuing decades. Burgin's brilliant inquiry uncovers both the origins of the contemporary enthusiasm for the free market and the moral quandaries it has left behind.

Of all the critiques of the Enlightenment, the most telling may be found in the life and writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. This searching, long overlooked auto critique receives its first full treatment by Mark Hulliung. Here he restores Rousseau to his historical context, the world of the philosophes, and shows how he employed the arsenal of Voltaire, Diderot, and others to launch a powerful attack on their version of the Enlightenment. With great intellectual skill and rhetorical force, Rousseau exposed the inconsistencies and shortcomings of the Enlightenment: the psychology of Locke, the genre of philosophical and conjectural history, the latest applications of science to the study of society and politics, and the growing interest in materialist modes of thought. As the century moved on, Hulliung shows, the most advanced philosophes found themselves drawn to conclusions that paralleled Rousseau's an agreement that went unacknowledged at the time. The Enlightenment that emerges here is richer, more nuanced, and more self-critical than the one reflected in many interpretations. By extracting Rousseau from personal entangle-ments that stymied debate in his time and that mislead critics to this day, Hulliung reveals the remarkable and remarkably unacknowledged force of Rousseau's accomplishment. This edition includes a brilliant new introduction by the author.