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The enduring appeal of liberalism lies in its commitment to the idea that human beings have a'natural'potential to live as free and equal individuals. The realization of this potential, however, is not a matter of nature, but requires that people be molded by a complex constellation of political and educational institutions. In this eloquent and provocative book, Uday Singh Mehta investigates in the major writings of John Locke the implications of this tension between individuals and the institutions that mold them. The process of molding, he demonstrates, involves an external conformity and an internal self-restraint that severely limit the scope of individuality.Mehta explores the centrality of the human imagination in Locke's thought, focusing on his obsession with the potential dangers of the cognitive realm. Underlying Locke's fears regarding the excesses of the imagination is a political anxiety concerning how to limit their potential effects. In light of Locke's views on education, Mehta concludes that the promise of liberation at the heart of liberalism is vitiated by its constraints on cognitive and political freedom.

This collection of nineteen of Kenneth Minogue's essays, written over a period of more than fifty years, celebrates the advent of modern liberty. They describe the conditions under which liberty and individuality can flourish and the threats to liberty's flourishing in our time. Minogue offers a powerful critique of political correctness, of ideological flights from reality, and of the deformities of study in the modern university.

Bei Marquis de Sade, Max Stirner und Friedrich Nietzsche finden sich Konzeptionen von Individualität, deren Bedeutung für die Sozialwissenschaft bislang weitgehend von der Forschung ignoriert wird. Im Zentrum der interdisziplinär angelegten Untersuchung von Maurice Schuhmann steht die Analyse der von den drei Denkern entworfenen Konzeptionen sowie die Übertragung dieser Ergebnisse auf den aktuellen sozialwissenschaftlichen Diskurs über Individualisierungstendenzen in modernen Gesellschaften. Dabei wird erstmalig in kompakter Form die Individualitätsphilosophie der drei Denker dargestellt und miteinander konfrontiert. Eine innovative Analyse radikaler Positionen des modernen Individualitätsdenkens.

G. W. F. Hegel and Friedrich Nietzsche are often considered the philosophical antipodes of the nineteenth century. In Infinite Autonomy, Jeffrey Church draws on the thinking of both Hegel and Nietzsche to assess the modern Western defense of individuality—to consider whether we were right to reject the ancient model of community above the individual. The theoretical and practical implications of this project are important, because the proper defense of the individual allows for the survival of modern liberal institutions in the face of non-Western critics who value communal goals at the expense of individual rights. By drawing from Hegelian and Nietzschean ideas of autonomy, Church finds a third way for the individual—what he calls the “historical individual,” which goes beyond the disagreements of the ancients and the moderns while nonetheless incorporating their distinctive contributions.

In defiance of the predominant pattern of reading liberal political thought in isolation from the metaphysical and theological investigations of its classic thinkers, Metaphysical Problems, Political Solutions: Self, State, and Nation in Hobbes and Locke seeks to place their writings in context. Asaf Z. Sokolowski demonstrates that the political measures offered by theorists to remedy the social state of instability, known as the'state of nature,'are intrinsically connected to distinctive metaphysical conceptions of the relationship between order and individuation. In each system of thought the origin and role of the self are determined by a particular conception of a created and evolving universal order. In turn, each version of order must contend with the vital question of how the individual is able to sustain a continuous identity. Thus, contrary to conventional thinking, it becomes apparent that the political theory developed by thinkers like Hobbes and Locke is predicated less on a security threat than on a debilitating insecurity concern, derived from ontological identity difficulties. This identity-focused reinterpretation of the liberal tradition transforms differences between key thinkers, previously reduced to nuance, into pivotal discords that shed a new light on the theoretical underpinnings of the self, the state, and the nation. As such, it will be valuable to scholars of political theory, metaphysics, theology, social science, and law.

The objective of this book is to construct an individually emancipatory economic and political philosophy. This means a concrete-based, man-centered, non-hypostatizing, anti-dialectical approach to the apprehension of the material, i.e. nature in general. This constitutes an emancipation from culture-based understandings of reality, and in particular from the metaphysically biased type of culture represented by capitalism. The proposed philosophical emancipation means individual liberation from the logically flawed, massifying character of the dominant mode of thought of capitalist times. From these bases, the social sciences can also be reformulated. Micocci argues that capitalism can be conceptualized as a limited and limiting socialized mode of thought, an intellectuality whose dialectical features are effectively identified by using the proxy of political economy, both marxist and mainstream. Political economy in fact, being a most representative instance of dialectical thinking, mirrors the dialectical nature of capitalist economic and political relationships. According to Micocci, non-dialectical occurrences in capitalism are simply excluded from normal social, economic, and intellectual activities, which are performed in a metaphysical, intellectually isolated environment. In capitalism, therefore, the materials, the concrete, i.e. nature itself, is not considered as a whole but only as occasional instances. Micocci describes capitalism, in sum, as an intellectually constructed culture (a metaphysics) which preserves itself, and props itself up, by means of its iterative (market-like) functioning.

This book examines the use and abuse of the term'freedom'. Based on interviews with people concerning the nature of freedom, the author compares what the people he talked with said about freedom with what writers and thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Herbert Marcuse, and Iris Murdoch have to say about freedom. He concludes that the'political'is not the answer, and that most of the people interviewed for the book and those like them would be better served by learning the political and social skills necessary to carve out small spaces of freedom in a rationalized world.

In an era of heightened concern about injustice in relations of identity and difference, political theorists often prescribe equal recognition as a remedy for the ills of subordination. Drawing on the philosophy of Hegel, they envision a system of reciprocal knowledge and esteem, in which the affirming glance of others lets everyone be who they really are. This book challenges the equation of recognition with justice. Patchen Markell mines neglected strands of the concept's genealogy and reconstructs an unorthodox interpretation of Hegel, who, in the unexpected company of Sophocles, Aristotle, Arendt, and others, reveals why recognition's promised satisfactions are bound to disappoint, and even to stifle. Written with exceptional clarity, the book develops an alternative account of the nature and sources of identity-based injustice in which the pursuit of recognition is part of the problem rather than the solution. And it articulates an alternative conception of justice rooted not in the recognition of identity of the other but in the acknowledgment of our own finitude in the face of a future thick with surprise. Moving deftly among contemporary political philosophers (including Taylor and Kymlicka), the close interpretation of ancient and modern texts (Hegel's Phenomenology, Aristotle's Poetics, and more), and the exploration of rich case studies drawn from literature (Antigone), history (Jewish emancipation in nineteenth-century Prussia), and modern politics (official multiculturalism), Bound by Recognition is at once a sustained treatment of the problem of recognition and a sequence of virtuoso studies.

In this study, John Kekes develops the view that good lives depend on maintaining a balance between one's moral tradition and individuality. Our moral tradition provides the forms of good lives and the permissible ways of trying to achieve them. But to do so, the author argues, we must grow in self-knowledge and self-control to make our characters suitable for realizing our aspirations. In addressing general readers as well as scholars, Kekes makes these philosophical views concrete by drawing on a rich variety of literary sources, including, among others, the works of Sophocles, Henry James, Tolstoy, and Edith Wharton. The first half of the work concentrates on social morality, establishing the conditions all good lives must meet. The second discusses personal morality, the sphere of individuality. Its development enables us to discover what is important to us and how we can fit our personal aspirations into the forms of life our moral tradition provides. Kekes's argument derives its inspiration from Aristotle's objectivism, Hume's emphasis on custom and feeling, and Mill's concentration on individuals and their experiments in living. This book is a nontechnical yet closely reasoned attempt to provide a contemporary answer to the age-old question of how to live well.