Collapse Of Liberalism Research Articles

Sir Roger Casement on the Ottomans and Armenians in Britain’s Great War

The paper explores the reasons why Sir Roger Casement, the internationally famous humanitarian and future central figure in the 1916 Rising, took the hostile attitude he did to the Armenian cause and why he regarded the presentation of the events of 1915 merely as war propaganda. Casement was a complex character and not just a simple nationalist opposing British policy in the world from an Irish Republican position. It is argued that whilst Casement’s transition from servant of Empire to Irish Republican anti-imperialist had an undoubted effect on his political stance, it was Casement’s view of the Great War, in representing the moral collapse of Liberalism, that most fundamentally determined his attitude to the Armenians and how he viewed the events of 1915.

A legalidade administrativa e a crise do positivismo jurídico

Trata-se de trabalho que analisa o princípio da legalidade no âmbito da Administração Pública, desde a concepção liberal até a crise do positivismo jurídico, bem como o desenvolvimento do pensamento pós-positivista. Aborda a questão da segurança jurídica, princípio caro aos teóricos e profissionais do direito, que influenciou consideravelmente a concepção liberal do princípio da legalidade. Apresenta as características fundamentais do pensamento juspositivista. Expõe pensa­mento crítico ao positivismo que se desenvolveu em seguida à derrocada do liberalismo, estabele­cendo um contraponto com as características juspositivistas antes apresentadas. Discorre acerca do pensamento de juristas históricos que se debruçaram sobre o tema, em especial Hans Kelsen, Norberto Bobbio, Claus-Wilhelm Canaris, J.J. Gomes Canotilho e Charles Eisenmann. Enfrenta, finalmente, o princípio da legalidade do direito administrativo contemporâneo, especialmente a problemática relacionada aos regulamentos editados pela Administração Pública.

Aesthetics and Ideology in Queirós's A Cidade e as Serras

In his article "Aesthetics and Ideology in Queirós's A Cidade e as Serras" Pedro Serra contributes to the study of Eça de Queirós's post-naturalist fiction, offering an in-depth view of traces of utopian socialism -- a major ideological influence in Queirós's intellectual generation -- in the aesthetic fabric of A Cidade e as Serras (1901) (The City and the Mountains). According to Serra, who reads this novel in light of Oliveira Martins's socialist idearium, Queirós's post-naturalistic writing exposes a complex network of late nineteenth-century cultural predicaments: the collapse of liberalism and realism paves the way to an ideological and aesthetical poetics of the novel that incorporates a paternalist socialism incarnated by Jacinto, the protagonist of the narrative. Serra suggests that Queirós's late poetics of the novel imply the anesthetization of "ethnic" determinations, a process that results from the Portuguese resistance to the nightmarish avatars of Modernity -- emblematically represented by Paris, a dystopian metropolis -- and that is represented in what Serra calls theatrum anthropologicum, a set of figures that determine the meaning of being Portuguese.

An international civilization? Empire, internationalism and the crisis of the mid-twentieth century

This article explores the notion of an international civilization in nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century thinking on international relations and the state system. This idea was fundamental to Victorian thinking about relations between Europe and the rest of the world, and was particularly important in reconciling the universal claims of liberal thought with the spread of European imperial control in Africa and Asia. Between the First and Second World Wars, however, the collapse of liberalism and the rise of ideological conflict within Europe led to the gradual retreat from eurocentric claims to civilizational predominance. The emergence of a genuinely global international order after 1945 through the United Nations occurred simultaneously with the collapse of the idea of an international civilization.

The Scope of Public Theology

This article examines the changing scope and method of ecumenical public theology from the World Missionary Conference of 1910 until the present. Most changes were made in response to the changing ideological and political contexts. The collapse of liberalism and the social gospel was followed by a type of confessional ethics which arose directly out of the German Church Struggle. In opposition to this there emerged a realist ecumenical social ethics, much indebted to Reinhold Niebuhr, and of Ronald Preston. This type of public theology and its distinctive ‘middle axiom’ method are examined and contrasted with the more recent public theologies which were influenced by liberation theology and grassroots movements. It is suggested that the ending of the Cold War and the fundamental changes that have taken place since September 11 2001 present a radically new kind of challenge to public theology.

Graham Greene: The Dangerous Edge (review)

Reviewed by: Graham Greene: The Dangerous Edge David Leon Higdon Judith Adamson . Graham Greene: The Dangerous Edge. New York: St. Martin's, 1990. 216 pp. $39.95. Judith Adamson closes Graham Greene: The Dangerous Edge with the claim that Greene's writing "has probably made more Western readers sympathetic to the Left than that of any other novelist, while at the same time becoming legendary in the Soviet Union for defending individual rights." While this statement would more appropriately close a reader-response study, it is not inappropriate as a conclusion to this significant attempt to map and analyze Greene's politics during his sixty-year-long career. Adamson structures her discussion around basic questions: What is (are) Greene's political attitude(s) over the years? How have his politics changed in shading and quality? How are his political and religious opinions intertwined? What impact have these views had on his fiction? These important questions have too seldom been asked despite the obvious political nature and ideological bent of his novels, but Adamson immediately foregrounds them by focusing on "the commitments Greene has made as he roamed the world," on "the development of his political ideas," and especially on "how a novelist who set out in the thirties to record public issues dispassionately became in the process an important political conscience." Adamson delineates three stages. The first, Greene's attempt to be "an acute observer" and detached reporter, lasted from the 1920s until the early 1950s. The second, firmly announced in The Quiet American, demanded involvement, commitment, and action and found much of interest in "the accomplishments of communist governments." The final stage, seen in his close relationship with Omar Torrijos, involved public commitment to social democracy while extolling doubt. Adamson convincingly traces how the collapse of liberalism in the 1920s seemed to Greene to leave the world in such a state of crisis that an individual could not hope to make sense of the condition and could only record the numerous wrongs. In this almost paralyzed confusion, Greene maintained that faith gave the individual dignity and status in the face of an organized, hostile society. His conservative religious viewpoint culminates in The Power and the Glory, offering the timeless Church against the timebound State and granting the former a tenuous triumph over the dictatorial ambitions that often usurp socialism. Adamson concludes that "his ability to expose injustice was not supported in his early fiction by a clear understanding of the political and social forces involved" and points to Greene's distancing himself from the Spanish Civil War at the very time his generation was becoming engaged in it. [End Page 793] Detached observation transformed itself in The Third Man and The Quiet American after Greene had written himself into "an [sic] spiritual blind alley" with The Heart of the Matter; however, his public statements about the McCarren Act and defense of Charlie Chaplin, his observation of the State of Emergency in Malaya, and his reports on the Mau Mau (two significant world events that did not enter his fiction) seem to have been the fodder forcing the change. Adamson shows how Greene "kept clear of questions that required analysis rather than descriptive responses," but four visits to Vietnam, an audience with Ho Chi Minh, and a Vietnamese woman's blood spattered on his shoes turned his antipathies toward American foreign policy, capitalist materialism, and the Church during the mid-1950s. This phase ends with the complex consideration of engagement in The Comedians. The text offers numerous perceptive observations, a sensible assessment of major political topics, and an informed evaluative discussion of ideological shifts. It is, though, oddly hybrid at times. The first two-thirds of the book approach the topic with an almost dogged chronological focus and discussion of all the novels, even when works have little to offer in the way of insight. The last third, however, adopts a topical and thematic approach, concentrating on Greene's travels, his quarrels with specific countries and leaders, his essays, and his letters to editors. Greene the public political conscience becomes more evident, but the discussion of the novels becomes less thorough, and odd omissions occur just at the point that...

The New Conservative Feminism

rise of the New Right, an organized antifeminist social movement with legions of devoted female activists, forced feminists to the painful recognition that we could not speak for or to all the women we hoped to represent. Then the collapse of liberalism sealed a profound rightward shift in the social and political climate that made attacks on feminist ideology and politics attractive vocations, not only for neoconservatives, but, more disturbingly, for prominent leftists as well.1 Soon the media was welcoming the appearance of a postfeminist era whose arrival it celebrated with tales of the accomplished young women who had rejected feminist ideology.2 And now a feminist backlash has emerged. Mounted by notable, self-identified feminists, this backlash represents an attack on the core beliefs and politics of the women's liberation movement and gives chastening evidence that the New Right and the collapse of liberalism have taken their toll. Responding to a widespread crisis in personal life and to perceived inadequacies in the ways feminism has addressed this crisis, the backlash poses a serious challenge to the women's movement. Indeed, it initiates a new and conservative terrain of struggle over what feminism will mean in the next historical period. This internal backlash was foreshadowed in 1977 by Alice Rossi's A Biosocial Perspective on Parenting, a then startling rejection of feminist cultural analysis by an eminent feminist scholar.3 In recent literature by Betty Friedan and Jean Bethke Elshtain, the two most significant contemporary voices of what I tentatively am labeling the new conservative feminism, the backlash has become far more explicit and more strident.4 Recent writing by Friedan and Elshtain, however, commands feminist attention for nearly opposite reasons. On the one hand, Friedan's pivotal, highly public role in the founding of contemporary femi