Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn. Benjamin Franklin

Thursday, July 17, 2014

Book Review: Liberalism by Edmund Fawcett

By Jonathan Derbyshire 

Prospect  / July 17, 2014

Political philosophers may find Edmund Fawcett’s assertion that “liberty is the wrong place to begin” when telling the story of liberalism rather startling. They tend to be in the business of deriving conclusions about the legitimate activity of the state from a set of assumptions about liberty, consent and individual rights. In Fawcett’s account, by contrast, liberalism is not a settled doctrine arrived at through rational argument but a “political practice” with a history. As for liberty, it’s certainly something liberals believe in, Fawcett writes, but then so too do “most non-liberals.”
In place of the tattered standard of liberty, he puts four key ideas—tolerance of conflict, resistance to power, belief in progress and civic respect. And taking these as his guiding thread through a long history that starts in the first half of the 19th century, Fawcett is able to find family resemblances between thinkers and statesmen otherwise as diverse as François Guizot and William Gladstone, John Stuart Mill and Pierre Mendès France.

READ MORE...

No comments:

Post a Comment