Individualist Liberalism Research Articles

К ВОПРОСУ СОЦИАЛЬНО-ФИЛОСОФСКИХ ОСНОВАНИЙ ДУХОВНОГО ПЕРЕФОРМАТИРОВАНИЯ ОБЩЕСТВА И ЛИЧНОСТИ

Актуальность данного исследования состоит в том, что в настоящее время, время масштабных изменений, происходящих, как в пространстве научного познания, так и в геополитическом пространстве, имеет место быть формирование новой картины мира, новой онтологии, с одной стороны, и актуализация проблем всех типов идентичности (от национально-государственной и до уровня индивида, личности, человеческой идентичности, в конечном итоге), с другой стороны. Авторы считают, что эти два процесса взаимосвязаны через новые подходы к пониманию духовности, основанному на новом понимании принципа целостности, всеобщих связях. Поскольку в основе всех типов кризисов, по мнению авторов, а также многих исследователей, лежит духовный кризис, то и духовное переформатирование общества является главной целью построения перспективных моделей будущего. По мнению авторов, «точкой отсчета» в духовной модернизации общества должна стать, в первую очередь, личность как духовно-телесная целостность, реализующая себя, утверждающая себя через феномен интерсубъективности в пространстве культуры. Цель и новизна данного исследования заключается в том, что подобная философская экспликация понятия «личность» как точки отсчета духовной трансформации общества не должна осуществляться на основе постмодернистского индивидуалистического либертализма в противовес новой формирующейся онтологии с ее новым подходом к феномену духовности как практической необходимости, основанному на новом понимании принципа целостности, значении всеобщих связей и единого происхождения объекта и окружающего мира.

Freedom and Culture: Building a Bridge Between Individualistic Liberalism and Liberal Multiculturalism

En este trabajo se defiende la tesis de que el liberalismo de corte individualista ha sido insuficiente como modelo teórico político para realizar el ideal liberal de libertad individual y, sobre esa base, se argumenta que lo determinante a la hora de realizar el ideal de libertad individual es la relación entre cultura y libertad. El liberalismo, sin que por ello ignore que hay culturas, se enfoca decididamente en el individuo y en su libertad. En ese desconocimiento relativo de la diversidad cultural, concretamente del papel que la cultura juega frente al ideal de libertad individual, el liberalismo se ha conducido a un callejón sin salida: uno en el que esa relativa ignorancia afecta su propio ideal de libertad individual.

Opposition of Civilizations and the Role of State in the Era of Multipolar World

To study long-term socio-economic processes and the factors that determine them, two methods, two approaches are usually used at the present time: the theory of the cyclic change of world economic structures (WES) and the theory of the evolution of civilizations. In the theory of civilizations, attention is focused mainly on the factors that have the most long – ​term impact on economic and social processes, namely, on value-sense factors and the principles of the structure of society. The current spiritual, ideological, and geopolitical opposition – ​the confrontation between the American-style approach to globalization and the multipolar world (MPW) – ​can be seen as the most important engine and threat to historical development. The purpose of the article is to describe this confrontation in the language of the theory of civilizations. The article describes the civilizational turning point, the transformation of Christian Western Europe into the civilization of the capitalist West. The main task of this transformation was to eliminate all the traditional highest senses and ethical restrictions for the domination of the capital accumulation attitude and the ideology of individualistic liberalism. The article presents some features of the MPW that allow us to consider it (along with the concept of transition to a new, integral WES) as an emerging new civilization, an alternative to the civilization of the West. The leaders of the development of the new civilization are Russia and China. In these civilizations, the most important sense center is the state. In Russia, the focus on perfecting and heightening the status of the state can largely compensate for the decline of spiritual and ideological factors. This article is a continuation of the articles (Volkonsky, 2018; Volkonsky, Gavrilets, Kudrov, 2020).

Krise der liberalen Demokratie? Nein! Krise des individualistischen Liberalismus

AbstractThe current crisis of liberal democracy is actually a crisis of individualistic liberalism as recent literature shows by its analysis and more often by its example. Whilst social inequality by many authors is seen as main source of the crisis, it is only the consequence of a contradiction inherent in individualistic liberalism: Equal individual liberty leads to social and in the consequence to political inequality because of the inevitable differences in the use of that individual liberty. However, political equality is a necessary condition of individual liberty as a reciprocal right. Therefore, it is necessary to overcome a purely individualistic understanding of liberty that threatens not only democracy but individual liberty itself.

MEDICAL MALPRACTICE AS A TORT IN THE U.S., AS A CRIME IN ITALY: FACTORS, CAUSES, PATHS AND OUTCOMES

The aim of the paper is, firstly, to try to understand the reasons for the different approaches to medical malpractice in two legal systems taken as models: the U.S., where professional negligence is almost exclusively subject of tort law; Italy, where criminal law instruments are instead widely used. The different extent of criminal responsibility for negligence and omission seems connectable to different political and cultural models: individualistic liberalism, on the one hand, solidarist statism and communitarianism, on the other hand; in juridical terms, to the ideal contrast between the reactive State and the active State; to the different approach to the relationship between subject and body, dominical-individual versus collectivist-social; with a tendential "privatization" of the health-good, in the US model, and a "socialization" of the good-health itself, in the Italian model. Secondly, the paper tries, in a comparative perspective, to evaluate these different approaches, in terms of access to justice, paths and outcomes of the two models. The article attempts to highlight the strengths and the weaknesses of the contingent-fee system in the U.S. tort arena, and of the criminal justice system as "free legal aid" in Italy: a balanced solution should also allow victims hindered by the costs and the length of civil actions the possibility of using these latter form of protection, avoiding that criminal justice is exploited for compensatory purposes. Indeed, tort law more easily can meet compensatory claims, due to the lower probative standard required, the preponderance of evidence, rather than the beyond any reasonable doubt standard, required in criminal law. Also in terms of outcomes, the main problems arising in the two systems need to be tackled: the problem of few persons compensated, allowing a greater number of injured parties to access to justice and obtain fair compensation; the problem of symbolic criminal convictions (observed in the Italian experience), avoiding the automatic use of suspended penalties and monetary penalties as substitute of penalties weighing on professional practice and freedom, since these automatic mechanisms limit the preventive effectiveness of the criminal sanction and run the risk of creating discrimination on a census basis.

Corporatism and Civil Society

This paper develops an alternative view of corporatism. The dominant view of corporatism, as espoused by Edmund Phelps in his recent book Mass Flourishing, views corporatism as an advanced form of state capture. The alternative view developed here instead argues that corporatist institutional arrangements are aimed at curbing special interests. Corporatist institutional arrangement seek to achieve this, not by insulating the state from special interest groups as traditional models of interest groups often implicitly try to do. Instead these institutional arrangements are aimed at channeling the interest of powerful (encompassing) interest groups toward the common good, or rather away from harm and domination. Through a historical case-study of the school struggle in the Netherlands this paper demonstrates that corporatism is closer to private-interest self-governance, than state capture. Although corporatism has been associated with episodes in which the state mobilizes civil society for its own goals, the perspective developed here emphasizes that 2 we can learn from current and historical corporatist institutional arrangements, which have been able to limit state power. Building on recent work by Levy in his Rationalism, Pluralism and Freedom which distinguishes between rationalist liberalism and pluralist liberalism, we argue that the view developed here is closer to the pluralist tradition of liberalism which emphasizes the constructive role of civil society and its role in limiting state power. The standard account on the other hand is suspicious of social power and hence of interest groups, and is closer in line with what Levy calls rationalist or individualist liberalism.

The Railroad and the State: War, Politics, and Technology in Nineteenth-Century America , and: Nations, Markets, and War: Modern History and the American Civil War , and: The Business of Civil War: Military Mobilization and the State, 1861–1865 (review)

The Railroad and State: War, Politics, and Technology in Nineteenth-Century America. By Robert G. Angevine. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004. Pp. xvii, 351. Cloth, $70.00.)Nations, Markets, and War: Modern History and American Civil War. By Nicholas Onuf and Peter Onuf. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2006. Pp. xii, 362. Cloth, $45.00.)The Business of Civil War: Military Mobilization and State, 1861-1865. By Mark R. Wilson. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Pp. xii, 306. Cloth, $47.00.)Reviewed by Samuel WatsonDid nineteenth-century nationalism serve liberalism, or vice versa? Each of these works implicitly addresses that question; each does so from different angle and arrives at different answer, from intermittent but ultimately mutually beneficial collaboration between railroads and state (Angevine) to tradition of nation-state authority, unknown to most historians, that became decisive during nation's greatest crisis but faded afterward (Wilson), to contest between sectional economic nationalisms that ultimately posited individualist liberalism against compromises essential to national union (Onuf and Onuf).Nations, Markets, and War is difficult book, tremendously broadranging and sophisticated, but sometimes maddeningly abstract because it operates on many levels, employing protean thinkers like Thomas Jefferson and Adam Smith to examine development of nationalism and coming of Civil War through debates over commercial policy. This second collaborative book by brothers Nicholas and Peter Onuf begins with a conjectural of conjectural history (19), half philosophical and half an exploration of modernity as a mode of historical thinking that . . . authorized nation-states making up modern (6). In second half of their book, Onufs examine transformation of federal union, initially seen as model for liberal world order, into national union, even nation-state, through over the proper extent of market (6), nationalism fashioned in anticipation of discipline of nations - war. Was this process reversion to European balance of power and terrible evils of necessity that Jefferson and other founders had sought to transcend, or was it part and parcel of nineteenth-century liberalism, product of tragic declension as nationalism submerged impulses of age of revolutions?For United States, this path was embodied in conflict rooted in slavery. Here questions of cause and effect, causal priority, and levels of analysis appear most acute. The Onufs observe that conflicts of interest over commercial policy - like divisions over slavery - drove Americans apart (6) and that divisions over slavery often operated through definitions . . . predicated on assumptions about future of American foreign trade relations (259). But these of interest - the tension between nation-as-market and world-as-market (181) - were rooted in specific markets for specific products, some produced by slave labor and some by free. I am not persuaded that absent slavery debate between traders - essentially slaveholding planters - and protectionists would have been so potent, or that it would have been argued by slaveholders in uncompromising political languages of republicanism and minority rights, rather than negotiable, potentially utilitarian economic ones of cost-benefit calculations. Indeed, reader is left wondering how to account for protectionist demands of sugar and hemp producers, southerners and slaveholders, often Whigs and Constitutional Unionists, who did not espouse sectionalism of cotton kings. As Onufs observe, during 1830s or 40s southern nationalists abandoned liberal cosmopolitanism of an earlier generation of free traders (324). One might ask, however, how cosmopolitan Old Republicans and Quids (the earlier free traders) really were, and whether we can or should characterize them principally through their exchange relationships as free traders, rather than through their labor relationships as lords of lash? …

Christianity and the Secular (review)

Reviewed by: Christianity and the Secular Stanley P. Rosenberg Robert A. Markus Christianity and the Secular Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006 Pp. xi + 99. $15.00 (paper). This latest offering by Professor Markus is consistent with his trajectory of inquiries and is the publication of his 2004 Notre Dame lectures, the "Blessed Pope John XXIII Lecture Series in Theology." The work exhibits the strengths and weaknesses often found in a lecture series. The argument is sweeping and engaging and contains both syntheses and intuitions of a senior scholar who has chipped away extensively at a related series of questions. The lectures, which aim "to contribute to an understanding of the place occupied by the secular in Christian history and within a Christian understanding of society," ask "What sort of view of human society in relation to the Kingdom [End Page 583] of God would an appeal to an Augustinus redivivus authorize" (9)? In his introduction and four chapters Markus argues that the Christian tradition offers a legitimate place for the autonomy of the secular. The first two chapters trace evolving notions of the secular in the context of the Constantinian revolution or "Constantinian heresy" as some interlocutors would argue. The fourth chapter summarizes pertinent developments between Augustine and Gregory the Great, which transformed what Markus describes as an Augustinian "liberalism" into the Christendom emerging at the time of Gregory. The third chapter focuses on the implications and adaptations of Augustine's notions for the evolving projects of twentieth-century liberalism. The order of the last two chapters is a bit perplexing. The lectures in many ways synthesize the trajectory of inquiry (perhaps one might describe these as amounting to a project) which Markus has followed in his major publications dating back to 1960. (I should note that I participated in a graduate seminar at Catholic University which Markus offered in 1988 while he was working on The End of Ancient Christianity, published in 1990.) The informed reader will readily find vestiges of Markus's book-length studies and articles (including self-conscious comments on them). Markus's interests are not only those of a specialist scholar but are also those of one who is deeply concerned about the implications of historical developments for Christianity in the twentieth century. The work touches on the debates between Augustinian liberalism as interpreted by Markus and some alternative interpretations of the place of the secular; throughout the author spars with theologians better known for their political and cultural engagement as well as for their broader reflections on Augustinian theology than as specialist scholars in patristics (Oliver O'Donovan is an exception). It would not be particularly productive herein to offer criticism of the three chapters by covering terrain presented in Markus's major studies which have been previously critiqued. There are, however, comments to be made about chapter three and related issues teased out elsewhere. Markus describes this chapter as his own retractatio responding to criticism that his interpretation of Augustine's view on the limits and functions of public authority comes "perilously close" to making Augustine a "precursor of modern secular liberalism" and to casting the debate in terms of a "modern individualist liberalism" (51). Markus's reply emphasizes the eschatological character of Augustine's views and stakes out a position in contrast to two other positions. The first is the stance of Oliver O'Donovan whose interpretations of Augustine carve out a middle way, offering a less affirming and engaging place for the secular within the economy of God than Markus's interpretation does. The second is the contrapositive position of John Howard Yoder, Stanley Hauerwas, and John Milbank, who each in differing ways represent what some might term fideism, rejecting the notion that the secular has positive attributes. While acknowledging that the nature of the lectures limits the scope of the book, I found the retractatio to be all too brief. Markus's discussions draw upon Charles Taylor's work on secularism and liberalism (albeit, by his own admission, all too briefly). One might suggest that just as he has employed Taylor's distinctions on types of liberalism, he likewise [End Page 584] might make more extensive...

Globalising liberalism or multiculturalism? The Durban agenda and the role of local human rights education in the implementation of global norms

This article critically evaluates recent attempts to globalise norms on improving policy responses to the increasing existence of multicultural societies by the United Nations conference widely referred to as the Durban agenda. The article, first, sets out the context for and the content of the Durban agenda. It then discusses whether a liberal model of minority rights based on a principle of toleration should be the basis for global norms or whether a model of multiculturalism based on the idea of recognition should form the starting‐point. After reflecting on the drawbacks of either model, a defence of a balance between liberal minority rights and multicultural group rights is developed. The argument acknowledges the need to reform individualist liberalism, while warning of the dangers of human rights violations condoned in the extreme versions of the multicultural model. The process of globalising norms governing multiculturalism risks failure if implemented top‐down only. The second question is therefore what the role should be for local human rights organisations in implementing these global norms. The article shows the high importance of local human rights education by reference to a recent project in post‐communist Europe. The assessment of current campaigns in Bosnia‐Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia‐Montenegro and Bulgaria shows that neither the implementation of the Durban agenda nor the protection of minority rights emphasised in the process of enlargement of the European Union can create sustainable change without engaging with teachers, community leaders and young people in non‐formal education. Moreover, these examples also illustrate the importance of a sensitive balance between liberalism and multiculturalism, strengthening the argument that global norms ought to include both concerns.

From human wrongs to universal rights: communication and feminist challenges for the promotion of women's health in the Third World.

This article argues that in the quest for global bioethics in its relation to the promotion of women's health and women's rights, the main challenge is to, first, rise above the relativist trap and second, to solve the false dilemma between individualism and collectivism. Particularly in order to improve women's position and advance their well-being in many developing countries with patriarchal cultural practices, there is an urgent need to introduce modern medicine and to share more evenly and efficiently the health care resources of the industrialized societies. This presumes that we can find a normative bioethical approach that promotes the rights of individuals without striving for cultural assimilation and disrespect. From the philosophical point of view this means that we have to overcome the debate between the rival views of justice, and rather find the shared features of the various approaches, thus diminishing the exaggerated polarizations between them. The author claims that despite its importance in women's rights protection, feminist bioethics cannot remain as a normative alternative that can replace either liberal or communitarian approaches. Instead feminism needs to be part of both liberal and communitarian ethical thinking. Communitarianism, for its part, cannot offer an alternative to either liberalism or feminism, but it can function as an essential critical balancing force within these approaches. Individualist liberalism, on the other hand, has to find its way into collective social structures and accept their maintenance, instead of exhausting itself in its attempts to lift individuals above or beyond their social contexts. All in all, the article shows that in finding the global bioethical norms the incompatibility between universalist and relativist reasoning or between individualist and collective ethical positions per se is not the main problem. Rather the problem is in our persistent tendency to believe that such an incompatibility exists. However, if we overcome the debate on whether one cultural background is superior to another, we can find a way to agree on some common norms that are based on shared values of very different traditions. Finding globally acceptable values, however, is not enough unless we pay more attention to their promotion in practice, in very different economic, social and political circumstances.

'Liberty and truth' or 'the sovereignty of reason': Carlo Cattaneo and the place of politics in the modern world

My purpose here is to place the thought of Carlo Cattaneo in relation to French Restoration liberalism, and I therefore consider the doctrinaire school (among others, Guizot and Cousin) and the Coppet Circle (notably, Constant, StaËl and Sismondi). A concern to render reason sovereign was perhaps shared by all in post-revolutionary Europe who were cultivating human or social science, yet there was in Guizot's concept of 'the sovereignty of reason' a spiritualist, authoritarian and anti-individualist implication. By contrast, Cattaneo wished to honour 'the truth of local facts', that is the specific attributes of all the parts of which a state consisted, and in this regard his thought is descended not from the doctrinaires but from the individualist liberalism of Constant. I also remark upon Cattaneo's debt, openly declared, to the earlier historical writings of Thierry,and therefore to the political precepts of the late id é ologue tradition. Il mio scopo è quello di porre il pensiero di Carlo Cattaneo in relazione al liberalismo francese durante il periodo della Restaurazione, e confrontarlo in particolare con l'Ecole Doctrinaire (tra gli altri, Guizot e Cousin) ed il Circolo Coppet (principalmente, Constant, StaËl e Sismondi). L'idea di rendere la ragione sovrana era forse un sentimento condiviso da molti intellettuali nell'Europa post-rivoluzionaria, specialmente in coloro che dedicavano attenzione ed interesse alle scienze umane e sociali; tuttavia, nel concetto di Guizot sulla 'sovranitÀ della ragione' era insita una componente spiritualista, autoritaria ed antindividualista. Cattaneo, diversamente, tendeva ad onorare 'la veritÀ delle realtÀ locali', ossia di tutte le caratteristiche insite negli innumerevoli elementi di cui lo stato è composto; ed in questo aspetto, il suo pensiero traeva ispirazione dal liberalismo individualista di Constant piuttosto che dai doctrinaires. Credo anche che il liberalismo di Cattaneo sia dichiaratamente debitore verso gli scritti di Thierry ed inoltre nei confronti della filosofia politica appartenente alla tradizione degli idéologues.

Vampires, Mummies, and Liberals: Bram Stoker and the Politics of Popular Fiction (review)

Reviewed by: Vampires, Mummies, and Liberals: Bram Stoker and the Politics of Popular Fiction Marianne Dekoven David Glover. Vampires, Mummies, and Liberals: Bram Stoker and the Politics of Popular Fiction. Durham: Duke UP, 1996. 212 pp. David Glover’s wonderful title is a reliable indicator of how well written, elegant, and enjoyable this book is; it also hints, through its conjunction of fantasy/mythology with culture, history, and political ideology, at the large scope and complex syntheses of Glover’s argument: how much analytical mileage he gets out of Stoker’s variegated popular oeuvre (consisting of romance and adventure novels as well as Dracula and other supernatural gothics, one of which features a revivified mummy). This title does not, however, give a hint of the remarkable depth and range of Glover’s erudition and the meticulousness of his scholarship, both worn lightly and wittily throughout and seamlessly integrated into the analytical narrative. Glover’s strong intelligence and deft eye for shifting textual nuance never flag. This is a brilliant book, one of the best of any sort I’ve read in a long time. Though modernism is not Glover’s subject, this book provides one of the most useful accounts available of the cultural-historical-political-intellectual context out of which modernism evolved: what Glover analyzes as the crisis of liberalism in Britain, but what could also be called the crisis of modernity itself. Glover sees this crisis played out in the contradiction between Stoker’s avowed rationalist, individualistic liberalism and his uncanny narratives of blood, sex, crime, terror, race, and nation: “one can see much of the fear that resides in the [End Page 1014] pages of Dracula as reflecting the underside of the liberalism to which Stoker adhered, a nightmare vision of unruly subjects who are unamenable to its formal democratic calculus. . . . To think of political representation in this bloodless way [subjects viewing themselves as “citizens” or “persons” rather than as members of a particular gender, class, or race] is to be forever haunted by the return of the flesh-and-blood identities that liberalism seeks to neutralize or exclude theoretically.” “The terror inspired by Count Dracula is a terror of biological difference both masked and free floating.” This terror defies the modern forces of reason, science, and technology that Stoker brings to bear against it in his novels, as he constructs a vivid representation of “a modernity still struggling with the powers of the past, even when equipped with phonographs, telegrams, cameras, newspapers, and typewriters.” The primary components of this “underside of liberalism,” in Glover’s analysis, are race, ethnicity, and nation; blood, family ancestry, crime and physiological criminology, degeneracy and “character,” spiritualism and the occult; and gender, sex, and sexuality. These are the central topics of the book’s three chapters: “‘Dark enough fur any man’: Sexual Ethnology and Irish Nationalism,” “Vampires, Mummies, and Liberals: Questions of Character and Modernity,” and “Sexualitas Aeternitatis.” In “‘Dark enough fur any man,’” Glover analyzes the partial resolution through exogamous marriage of the contradiction in The Snake’s Pass, Dracula, and The Lady of the Shroud between Stoker’s liberal Irish nationalism and his adherence to the late-nineteenth-century scientistic racial hierarchies which denigrated the Irish as an inferior “race.” The second chapter, “Vampires, Mummies, and Liberals,” explores the tension between Stoker’s retention of a belief in the “classic liberal idea of character as individual self-mastery” and the representation of the “assault on the autonomy of the individual subject,” in Dracula and The Jewel of Seven Stars (the mummy novel), by degeneration theory and physiological criminology, shifting constructions of masculinity in imperialism and the emergence of the manly man, related anxieties about feminine sexuality, and the odd convergence of science with the occult in “psychical research.” The “antinomies of freedom and determinism” produced by this tension are not resolved in these works; moreover, as novels of imperialism, they display a [End Page 1015] “deadly hysteria about race and selfhood at the heart of national spectacle and jingoistic camaraderie.” The third chapter focuses centrally on the issues of sex, gender, and sexuality that have been important throughout, showing through analyses of The Man and Lady Athlyne how Stoker...

Teorie della giustizia e allocazione delle risorse sanitarie

Nell’attuale dibattito bioetico e biogiuridico particolare rilievo ed importanza ha la questione dell’allocazione o distribuzione delle risorse sanitarie. Ovviamente tutti auspicherebbero la situazione ideale in cui vi fosse disponibilità sufficiente di risorse per ognuno. Ma il dato empirico della finitezza delle risorse in sanità da un lato e l’esigenza, avvertita con sempre maggiore urgenza nella società attuale, di un accesso alle cure che sia sempre più esteso quantitativamente e sempre migliore qualitativamente, acuisce il problema della distribuzione delle risorse sanitarie, facendo emergere con forza la necessità di rispondere preliminarmente alle domande: “che cosa”, “quanto”, “quando” e “come” distribuire, “chi” distribuisce e soprattutto “a chi” distribuire in ambito sanitario. Da tutto ciò si evince la rilevanza etica e giuridica della questione.
 Se tutti sono d’accordo nel distribuire “giustamente” le risorse sanitarie, non tutti sono d’accordo nel modo di concepire la giustizia, nel contesto del pluralismo filosofico che caratterizza il dibattito attuale.
 Dall’esame dei diversi modelli teorici - liberalismo individualistico, utilitarismo sociale, egualitarismo, personalismo ontologicamente fondato - dei problemi legati alla micro-allocazione e alla macro-allocazione delle risorse e ai concetti di giustizia distributiva e giustizia commutativa, si evidenzia come l’applicazione del pensiero personalista e giusnaturalista consente di individuare un modello terico che si contrappone sia al collettivismo sia all’individualismo bilanciando i diritti individuali di libertà e i diritti sociali collettivi, nella ricerca del diritto alla vita e alla tutela della salute del singolo nel contesto della solidarietà e della responsabilità sociale in vista di un miglioramento globale del bene comune.

Cultures autochtones et libéralisme au Canada: les vertus médiatrices du communautarisme libéral de Charles Taylor

AbstractThe Constitution Act, 1982 recognized certain rights for aboriginal peoples. These rights were to be identified and defined subsequently. Ten years later, after several rounds of negotiations, the question of the recognition and definition of an aboriginal right to self-government remains unresolved. Many specialists claim that the problems faced during these negotiations result from the incompatibility between the main philosophical traditions guiding the actors. Through an analysis of the relationship between the cosmology underlying the aboriginal demands on the one hand and three of the main trends in contemporary Canadian liberal political philosophy on the other hand, this article tries to shed some light on the philosophical incompatibility thesis. While a strictly individualist liberalism rejects outright the notion of collective rights and Will Kymlicka's revisionist liberal individualism limits considerably the scope of an aboriginal right to self-government, communitarian liberalism, like that of Charles Taylor, seems to provide a favourable framework for the integration of cultural co-existence with the First Nations, without repudiating its attachment to fundamental individual rights and freedoms.

Stakeholders and Takeovers: Can Contractarianism Be Compassionate?

The issue of what, if any, purchase non-shareholder corporate constituencies (that is, employees, creditors, suppliers, customers, and communities) should have on the discretionary decisions of corporate management has proved to be one of the most durable, if not vexing, issues in modern corporate scholarship. Most recently, the issue has resurfaced in the context of the takeover wave of the 1980s, particularly during the latter part of the decade when control transactions became associated with high levels of leverage. At core, stakeholder advocates were riveted by the asymmetries involved in change-of-control transactions. While target shareholders earned consistent and sizeable returns from these transactions, stakeholders were left in the cold. Indeed, in some cases, control transactions were thought to be capable of inflicting highly focused losses on stakeholders. So severe were these losses that some commentators, were led to conclude it was the gains from opportunistic breaching of stakeholder contracts that motivated the transactions in the first place. As in the past, participants in the stakeholder and takeover debate generally array themselves into two distinct camps: one, which views any judicial or legislative attempt to protect stakeholders from harms not explicitly prohibited by corporate contracts as anathema ('non-protectionists'), and the other, which regards corporate responsibility for stakeholder harms as an innate and natural feature of the system of modern corporate governance ('protectionists'). In a perceptive article, Romano attributes part of the differences among scholars on divisive issues of corporate law to the starkly divergent normative beliefs that underlie each side. For nonprotectionists, the underlying normative framework is individualistic liberalism, whereas for protectionists, it is usually communitarianism. Given the gulf that divides these underlying normative views, the hope for a principled and durable resolution to the stakeholder debate is indeed dim.

Rigidities in the Labour Market

THE STEADY EXPANSION OF THE FUNCTIONS OF GOVERNMENT and its increasingly interventionist role in the economy has for much of the twentieth century seemed an inexorable and irreversible trend. The jurist, Dicey, already saw it as such at the beginning of the century. In a famous series of lectures, he traced the retreat of Benthamite individualist liberalism in the face of what he called ‘collectivism’. The common theme in all the developments he considered — the protection given to trade unions on the one hand, compulsory education and municipal trading on the other — was their limitation of the freedom of contract, the limitation of — the buzz-word of British politics in the late 1980s — ‘choice’.

Aus den Anfängen der Psychoanalyse. Briefe an Wilhelm Fliess. Abhandlungen und Notizen aus den Jahren 1887-1902 (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 281 g. The Problematics of History. Two types are distinguished: the more general neoidealism , especially the Italian, which will be treated in subsequent volumes; and the more technical examination of historical knowledge by Dilthey, Simmel, Spengler, Windelband, Rickert, M/insterberg, Weber, Troeltsch, Meinecke, and Huizinga. Without exaggerating it, Lamanna points to the strain of "inquietude" and restlessness which shows itself in much of the early twentieth-century philosophizing, especially in its attacks on rationalism, and which serves to foreshadow the greater anxieties that will be portrayed in the second volume of the trilogy. I add only two small observations, not by way of criticism, but merely to supplement the expositions (which seem to me to be excellent) of two men whom I happen to know well. Giuseppe Prezzolini appears with Papini (as he should) as a founder and leader o[ the pragmatist periodical Leonardo. Whereas Papini's adventures in philosophical romance were quite extravagant, Prezzolini's contributions were satirically ironical His L'Arte di persuadere, which to a hasty reader might well appear as a "manuale per i bugiardi" (p. 308), really appears, in view of his subsequent career in La Voce and in his Vita di Macehiavelli as a brilliant Macchiavellian satire. Similarly there is an undercurrent of genial satire in the pragmatisms of James and Schiller. The criticism in Dewey's social philosophy of what he refers to as the bourgeois Utilitarian liberalism and individualism of early nineteenth-century Britain appears in Lamanna 's pages (as in other scholarly European works) as a criticism of "Americanism." Dewey called his political philosophy a "new individualism" which was about the same as the doctrines of European social democrats. It was very democratic in contrast to the liberalism of the early utilitarians. But this early individualistic liberalism is no more American than it is European. Certainly Dewey's democracy is at least as American as the "Americanism" which he criticized. If we must use these terms, we could say that the socalled "Americanization of Europe" coincided with the Europeanization of America. James was politically an individualist and Dewey was a socialist; both were equally American and equally concerned to be cosmopolitan. These terminological problematics are not intended as a criticism of Lamanna's exposition of Dewey's philosophy, which seems to me one of the very best of the many I have read. On p. 245 "Cominger" should be Commager. HERBERT W. SCHNEIDER Claremont, California Aus den A nfiingen der Psychoanalyse. Briefe an Wilhelm Fliess. A bhandlungen und Notizen aus den Jahren 1887-1902. By Sigmund Freud. (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1962. Copyright, Imago Publishing Co., London, 1950.) This selection of the letters, notes and treatises sent to the Berlin physician and biologist Wilhelm Fliess makes fascinating reading today, twenty-five years after Freud's death. Most of this material originates in the years 1893-1901 and therefore covers not only the period of Freud's shift from neurology to psychology but also the period of his most vigorous creativity in psychoanalysis itself, namely the publication together with his predecessor, Josef Breuer, of Studien iiber Hysterie. It is the period of his self-analysis which laid the groundwork for psychoanalytic therapy, the years during which he conceived and published his basic work Interpretation of Dreams. It is also the time when he wrote Sexuality in the Etiology of Neuroses, Ueber den Traum, and Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens. 282 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Included in this volume of papers sent to Fliess is The Draft of a Psychology written in a burst of enthusiasm during three weeks in the autumn of 1895 (pp. 305-384 of the text). This important paper deals not only with emotive life but with the origin of cognitive thought, a topic which went in part into Chapter 7 of the Interpretation of Dreams. In this paper Freud still tries to combine his ideas of the physiology of the brain with his psychological and psychopathological findings. It is therefore a watershed of his intellectual endeavors , although Freud abandoned on the whole the effort to incorporate a theory of cognitive thought into his writings. Some rudiments of the Draft reappeared, however, in Das Ich und das...