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Review Of The Dark Side Of The Left: Illiberal Egalitarianism In America, Donald J. Herzog
Review Of The Dark Side Of The Left: Illiberal Egalitarianism In America, Donald J. Herzog
Reviews
In this elegantly written, provocative, and sometimes just plain provoking book, punctuated by bits of anguish and rather more pique, Richard Ellis worries that the American Left has been so passionate about equality that it has run roughshod over liberty. So put, the thesis is not exactly news. It has been the recurrent lament of conservative indictments- Tocqueville's is the canonical statement, but he has plenty of precursors and followers. And it has its scholarly variations, too, such as Arthur Lipow, Authoritarian Socialism in America: Edward Bellamy and the Nationalist Movement (1982). No profound surprises are on offer here.
Review Of Political Theory For Mortals: Shades Of Justice, Images Of Death, Donald J. Herzog
Review Of Political Theory For Mortals: Shades Of Justice, Images Of Death, Donald J. Herzog
Reviews
Daring to go where plenty of mortals have gone before him, John Seery sets out to explore death. The resulting volume, more episodic than sustained, is brash, even feverishly energetic, as though Seery is desperately cheery about his chosen topic. This book is by turns witty and irritating, its interesting conjectures and lines of argument intimately mixed up with what this stodgy reader saw as frivolous posturing. It's easy to lampoon Seery's prose style; in fact, all one needs to do is quote it. Socrates, we learn, is "a blowhard buffoon," or at least readers might reasonably see him that …
Review Of Reason And Rhetoric In The Philosophy Of Hobbes, Donald J. Herzog
Review Of Reason And Rhetoric In The Philosophy Of Hobbes, Donald J. Herzog
Reviews
In the 1960s, Quentin Skinner wrote a series of polemical if terse papers arguing that the conventional approach to the history of political theory was confused. Using Hobbes as something of a vehicle for his position, Skinner enunciated what is now well known as the "Cambridge" approach to political theory. He urged that we situate authors in their intellectual contexts so that we can isolate what is distinctive, perhaps subversive, in their use of language: only then, he argued, can we have any valid historical understanding on what they are doing in writing these weird books in the first place. …
Review Of The Idea Of A Liberal Theory: A Critique And Reconstruction, Donald J. Herzog
Review Of The Idea Of A Liberal Theory: A Critique And Reconstruction, Donald J. Herzog
Reviews
The flood of literature sometimes derisively referred to as the Rawls/Nozick industry shows no signs of slowing. David Johnston enters the lists to champion an unabashedly cosmopolitan view-humanist liberalism-that focuses on promoting human agency for any and all people in any and all societies. He concedes that he has in place only a rudimentary sketch.
Review Of Willful Liberalism: Voluntarism And Individuality In Political Theory And Practice, Donald J. Herzog
Review Of Willful Liberalism: Voluntarism And Individuality In Political Theory And Practice, Donald J. Herzog
Reviews
This is an elegant and studied little volume, rather more difficult than it lets on. Flathman wants to argue that liberals are sorely in need of a more robust understanding of the will and individuality than they now possess, that they (or we) should be enthusiastically embracing what might seem to be some tendentious commitments about the partial but inescapable opacity of other selves. He does so by working through a large number of texts and authors-some only contentiously called liberal (Hobbes); others not conceivably liberal (William of Ockham, Augustine, Nietzsche); and still others not obviously interested in anything narrowly …
Whose Loyalties?, Christina B. Whitman
Whose Loyalties?, Christina B. Whitman
Reviews
It is disconcerting to open a book subtitled An Essay on the Morality of Relationships and find that the two case studies that most interest the author are reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools and the criminalization of flag burning. Although George Fletcher begins to make his case for giving moral priority to loyalties by referring to the impulse to save one's mother from a burning house (p. 12), he is more concerned with the ties that bind individuals to groups than with the ethics of relationships between individuals. The loyalties to which Fletcher would give "moral importance" …
Review Of Transforming Political Discourse, Donald J. Herzog
Review Of Transforming Political Discourse, Donald J. Herzog
Reviews
Political theorists are almost always fond of giving each other home- work assignments but not generally fond of completing them. The opening salvo in a promised three-volume campaign to redefine the tasks of political theory, Transforming Political Discourse might seem to invite more weary shrugs. Surely, we have too many manifestos already. Well, yes -but this one, happily, is modest, sensible, and mercifully brief. Better yet, its brevity is positively austere in sketching the metadescription of what the promised land looks like. The argument actually hangs on a series of show-and-tell exercises, which are supposed to be applications of the …