Liberal Claims Research Articles

Socialism and the romantic 'self': The case of Edward Thompson

The consideration of socialist ideology is best undertaken through a pluralist and anti-essentialist interpretative framework. The latter permits attention to the neglected by-ways of this ideology's development and the re-examination of points of contact between socialist thought and indigenous cultural traditions, in particular romanticism. Edward Thompson's efforts to forge a bridge-head between English romantic themes and socialist politics are considered as an interesting case-study of such an overlap. His romantic socialism relied upon an ontological vision drawn both from William Morris's notion of 'desire', and a celebration of William Blake's flawed attempt to fuse romantic voluntarism with republican radicalism. This ontology undergirded Thompson's attempt to persuade the British left to return to its pre-Marxist 'humanist' origins. Yet his vision proved only partially convincing to the communities of interpretation in which he operated in the 1950s and 1960s, failing to dislodge liberal claims upon the romantic lineage.

Church and State in Stanley Fish's Antiliberalism

Even though they contain one of the most forceful critiques of liberalism in contemporary political thought, the political writings of Stanley Fish have been neglected by political theorists. Fish's critique of liberal claims of moral and religious neutrality points to the conclusion that the liberal separation of church and state lacks a coherent justification. I offer a qualified defense of liberalism by arguing that while Fish's critique of liberal neutrality is sound, he fails to do justice to liberalism's substantive basis. Moreover, by simply negating liberalism, Fish's thinking remains within the liberal horizon in a way he fails to recognize.

Multiculturalism

In rejecting the liberal claim to the universality of morals, some contemporary philosophers insist on the danger of reducing the human being to an abstraction. This paper goes beyond this debate. The theoretical core of multiculturalism is the recognition that these universalistic claims can be realised in different ways in different cultures, so as to require a re‐conception of the liberal thesis of the well‐being and dignity of people. This interpretation of morality cannot be understood within the ideology of nationalism. Replacing nationalism as the common bond of society is thus one of the main political challenges facing multiculturalism. However, any specific policy must presuppose a new social sensitivity: Societies are not made up of majorities and minorities, but of a plurality of cultural groups. This is why the notion of toleration is not enough.

Liberal Democracy and the Politics of Criminal Justice in Australia

Liberal democratic states like Australia manage criminal justice issues in ways which reflect an inbuilt tension between liberal and democratic values. Liberal democracies are responsive both to liberal claims and to democratic claims. As a result, policy debates and strategies can oscillate between (on the one hand) liberal sensitivity to individual rights and opposition to enhanced state capacity and (on the other hand) democratically legitimised community norms and collective values. Four crime‐related policy debates — about the creation and operation of the National Crime Authority, about strategies for combating drug‐related crime, about gun control legislation and about identity systems to counter money laundering, tax evasion and public benefit fraud — illustrate the characteristic liberal democratic mode of politics in operation. The spectrum of policy responses to crime issues within liberal democratic political systems corresponds to an analogous spectrum within criminology which encompasses individualistic and structuralist conceptions of the nature and causes of crime.

Michael Novak and Yves R. Simon on the Common Good and Capitalism

The article evaluates Michael Novak's theory of the common good by comparing it with Yves Simon's writings. Simon's insights reveal that Novak's argument for a “new concept” of the common good, incorporating liberal claims, falters on both theoretical and practical grounds. Theoretically, Novak's version of the common good opens the door to considerable exclusion from participation in the material benefits of society. Related to this is Novak's problematic contention that political authority should not intend the common good materially considered. Practically, his idealized version of capitalism plays down or ignores problems raised by Simon, particularly “one-way” exchanges, unequal exchange, and “illusory services”.

The production and consumption of the ‘means of violence’: Implications of the reconfiguration of the state, economic internationalisation, and the End of the cold war

This paper examines the basis of the widely heard suggestion that the End of the Cold War will turn out to have marked the transition to an era of global demilitarisation. It shows that this ‘pacificationist’ position rests on an implausible attempt to resuscitate classic Liberal claims as to the nature of society and the state (claims which have echoes in certain branches of Marxist theorising). In reality, foreseeable economic restructuring and the associated reconfiguration of the state are likely to exacerbate social divisions and re-fuel the demand for organised violence. The supply side however, is changing profoundly. As the national arsenals of the Cold War period unravel, a complex new international network of armsrelated producers is emerging, crossing geographical and sectoral boundaries. This poses new analytical and practical problems. The local economic benefits of arms production are declining, while the global proliferation of lethal equipment is becoming more serious. ‘Pacificationism’ overlooks these grimmer realities.

Family and the Law in Eighteenth-Century Fiction: The Public Conscience in the Private Sphere (review)

REVIEWS 81 John P. Zomchick. Family and the Law in Eighteenth-Century Fiction: The Public Conscience in the Private Sphere. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. xviii + 210pp. US$54.95. ISBN 0-521-4151 1-X. What seems at first glance in its nominal emphases a rather cumbersome title soon proves a fit introduction to the critical inclusiveness and synthesizing imagination that distinguish this study. Central to John P. Zomchick's argument is the dialectical relation between the component elements of his title: while we customarily associate familial discourses with the private sphere and legal ones with the public, the eighteenth century, he suggests, witnesses the law's active participation in the constitution of both the individual and the collective. By virtue of its distinctive ability to straddle the shifting boundary between public and private, the law thus enables analysis of a transitional culture shaped by an expanding market economy and increasing secularization. Within that culture, moreover, law, uniquely the agent of both residual and emergent ideologies, provides the individual subject with systems of order that compensate for the erosion of belief in providential structures. These complex interrelations of formal law and internalized juridical discourse represent for Zomchick the matrix within which numbers of eighteenth-century authors plot their protagonists' coming to maturity. For most, the domesticity celebrated in the closing pages of their novels represents the ideal harmonizing of affective and juridical discourses—the public conscience in the private sphere—and as such forms a hedge against the disruptive energies of the unregenerate public sphere. The favoured retirement motif with which many of the period's novels conclude is thus seen as product of a dialectical relation between the family and civil society in which the retreat of a Roderick Random or a Captain Booth involves not a straightforward rejection of the public sphere but a complex reformation of its principles in ways that confirm emergent liberalism. The "internally coherent and self-regulated" (p. 2) personality attained by the novel's end at once marks the victory of contractual over customary affiliations and deflects potential alienation by locating the reformed hero within the sentimental family. Those characters who, in Zomchick's phrase, "fail to make the law their reason" (p. 20) are correspondingly denied the pleasures of domestic happiness and are sentenced to either the pains of death or exile, or, as in the case of Clarissa, the exclusionary realm of transcendence. The analysis of the central texts for which this paradigm holds true—Clarissa, Roderick Random, Amelia, and The Vicar ofWakefield—is framed by discussion of the protagonists of two quite different works, both of whom fail to achieve full juridical status: Defoe's Roxana, who proves unable to reconcile the impulses of possessive and affective individualism , and Godwin's Caleb Williams, who as victim equally of bourgeois liberalism and the power of formal law is denied the domestic Utopia granted earlier eighteenth-century heroes. The use of the exceptional to define the normative is complemented in its tendency to produce richly patterned readings by the cumulative interpretations of the chosen texts. Having established, for instance, the ways in which Roxana is positioned for reasons of gender as both a juridical and patriarchal subject, Zomchick can build on the implications of this model in his analysis of Clarissa. In Richardson's novel, such incompatible allegiances define not only the titular heroine but also her family, as they adhere to the conflicting claims of absolutism and liberalism, and Lovelace, as he enacts both aristocratic and individualist codes. Only Belford, Zomchick argues, adequately effects the sorts of compromises that allow him to stand at the novel's end as coherent juridical subject and ideological paradigm of bourgeois individualism. In addition to the theoretical cogency of its organizing model and the subtlety of its individual readings, Family and the Law displays an assured capacity to assimilate constructively a range of interpretive strategies. Attention to genre—Roderick Random's picaresque, Amelia's romance, The Vicar of Wakefield's pastoral—underlines the degree of ideological coherence discoverable in these novels' attempted accommodation 82 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 7:1 of the public to the private sphere through the agency of the...

Kant's Theological Constructivism

Our generation celebrates its freedom from the constricting yoke of the imperial age of grand systems. It joyfully rebels against abstract thinking and disavows preoccupation with systematicity, which none epitomized better than Immanuel Kant, according to whose daily routine the women of Königsberg allegedly set their clocks. Contemporary liberal theology claims that we can no longer believe in a universal disembodied reason that is free from the constraints of particular circumstances. Our thinking, it alleges, reflects interests and desires. Theories serve our will to power and are to be interpreted not by appeal to an aloof rationality, but through analysis of our needs and inclinations. Freedom, however, produces new trepidations. Confronted with radical implications of their convictions, very few are willing to regard their theologies as relatively valid. Tending to reject the past yet wary of anarchy, contemporary liberal theology seeks a method that is attuned to contingent circumstances and avoids the pitfalls of unbridled relativism. I suggest that in our haste to defy and overthrow past masters, we deprive ourselves of profound insights that could guide a quest for resolution. As a case in point, I propose that if we are willing to look afresh at Kant and explore central elements of his system that have been obscured by an overzealous portrayal of his thought as a rigoristic abstract formalism, we shall find clues for escaping the impossible choice between absolutism and relativism.

Liberalism's Claim to Culture

At the heart of the argument in Kymlicka's book is a principle which is characteristic of liberalism as he conceives it: attachments to a community and to the culture that it embodies are to be honoured as indispensable to intelligible personal choice (p. 47–58, 165–66, 192–93), so long as everyone with the attachments is free to examine them critically and then revise them in any or all of their features (p. 13, 48, 50–51, 167, 172). In one part of the book, the argument moves inward—diastolically—aiming, as the heart is approached, to expose various communitarian objections to liberalism as mistakes about the conditions that liberalism accepts for intelligible personal choice. In the other part of the book, the argument moves outward—systolically—aiming to demonstrate the robust support that liberalism can give the cultures of minority communities like Canadian Indians even when that support requires some restriction of the liberties of other people.

Taking Irony Seriously: Rorty's Postmetaphysical Liberalism

Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity By Richard Rorty Cambridge University Press, 1989 In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Richard Rorty unveils his blueprint for a postmetaphysical utopia inhabited by ironists like himself. An inspection of this blueprint reveals, however, that Rorty's liberal ironism turns out to be neither genuinely ironic nor especially liberal. His postmetaphysical aspirations ultimately thwarted by his unironic adherence to a rigid between public and private. In the end, Rorty compromises the irony that would promote human solidarity in order to preserve the sanctity of the private sphere. Mindful that irony and liberalism do not ordinarily mix, Rorty readily concedes that irony of little public (120) and is of no use to qua liberals (95). If, however, we simply honor a firm distinction between public and private, then we can reconcile the competing claims of irony and liberalism (83). Although ironists are at best useless and at worst dangerous [as public figures], they nevertheless can play a constructive role in accommodating [other ironists'] private sense of identity to [their] (68). When irony and liberalism joined (though never intermingled), the result is a public commitment to liberalism by ironists who privately acknowledge the historical contingency of their commitment. By confining irony to the private sphere, thus restricting its corrosive power to the personal pursuit of autonomy, the ironist can also maintain a public commitment to the promotion of human solidarity. Ironists' private quest for autonomy is uniquely informed by an irreverent attitude toward their own vocabulari[ies], a designation Rorty proposes for the collection of terms, concepts, and expressions by means of which we articulate our most basic hopes and values. Because ironists acknowledge that their final vocabulary is arbitrary, contingent, perhaps incoherent, and at any rate subject to interminable

The Market for Toleration: A Case Study in an Aspect of the Ambiguity of ‘Positive Economics’

Liberal apologists for the free market commonly claim for it the virtue of promoting toleration by eroding – through financial penalties – economically irrelevant ‘discrimination’. This claim is contested both by a consideration of a range of evidence from economic anthropology and by a critique of the conceptual position held to sustain it. Anthropological evidence suggests that ‘perfect’ markets frequently generate long-term non-contractual dyadic ties which undermine the one-off spot-contract constitutive of the ideal market. Furthermore, the pursuit of such ties often follows and so reinforces ethnic or religious distinction. Conceptually, the liberal argument's validity hinges on the assumption that market actors prefer to maximize money-holdings rather than express intolerance or maintain discrimination. This assertion is not only empirically false, but, if true, would ironically undermine the liberal claim that free markets are ‘neutral’ with regard to actors' preferences. Thus, libertarian claims about the effect of the operation of the market can only be sustained by violating their own theoretical premisses.

Locke's Political Anthropology and Lockean Individualism

Locke's anthropological accounts do not depict isolated individuals whose behavior is governed by rational calculations of their interests. He is not an "atomistic" individualist; he acknowledges what communitarian critics of liberalism claim that liberals do not acknowledge--the extent to which men are social beings. Nonetheless, his political theory is individualistic as a normative theory of individual natural rights. Locke seeks to combat authoritarianism by altering the relation between admittedly powerful social forces and political rights. The combination of his individualistic political theory and his recognition of the anthropological record of traditional authority gives rise to difficulties in his work concerning consent, the rule of law, and party politics.

Liberalism and World Politics

Building on a growing literature in international political science, I reexamine the traditional liberal claim that governments founded on a respect for individual liberty exercise “restraint” and “peaceful intentions” in their foreign policy. I look at three distinct theoretical traditions of liberalism, attributable to three theorists: Schumpeter, a democratic capitalist whose explanation of liberal pacifism we often invoke; Machiavelli, a classical republican whose glory is an imperialism we often practice; and Kant, a liberal republican whose theory of internationalism best accounts for what we are. Despite the contradictions of liberal pacifism and liberal imperialism, I find, with Kant and other democratic republicans, that liberalism does leave a coherent legacy on foreign affairs. Liberal states are different. They are indeed peaceful. They are also prone to make war. Liberal states have created a separate peace, as Kant argued they would, and have also discovered liberal reasons for aggression, as he feared they might. I conclude by arguing that the differences among liberal pacifism, liberal imperialism, and Kant's internationalism are not arbitrary. They are rooted in differing conceptions of the citizen and the state.

Liberalism and World Politics

Building on a growing literature in international political science, I reexamine the traditional liberal claim that governments founded on a respect for individual liberty exercise “restraint” and “peaceful intentions” in their foreign policy. I look at three distinct theoretical traditions of liberalism, attributable to three theorists: Schumpeter, a democratic capitalist whose explanation of liberal pacifism we often invoke; Machiavelli, a classical republican whose glory is an imperialism we often practice; and Kant, a liberal republican whose theory of internationalism best accounts for what we are. Despite the contradictions of liberal pacifism and liberal imperialism, I find, with Kant and other democratic republicans, that liberalism does leave a coherent legacy on foreign affairs. Liberal states are different. They are indeed peaceful. They are also prone to make war. Liberal states have created a separate peace, as Kant argued they would, and have also discovered liberal reasons for aggression, as he feared they might. I conclude by arguing that the differences among liberal pacifism, liberal imperialism, and Kant's internationalism are not arbitrary. They are rooted in differing conceptions of the citizen and the state.

Characterization of Arrival Statistics of Multiplexed Voice Packets

An assumption that voice packets arrive by a Poisson arrival (or an exponential interarrival) distribution has not widely been accepted by analysts from an obvious observation that voice packets are generated at regular intervals in a talkspurt. Through a simulation, supported by an approximate analysis, this paper claims that when a sufficiently large number of voice sources are multiplexed, packets observe an exponential or hypoexponential interarrival distribution. When the number of packets arriving during a single or a multiple slot is considered instead, a more liberal claim is made that regardless of the number of voice sources multiplexed, a Poisson process can be assumed with reasonable accuracy.

Deinstitutionalization's Throwaways: The Development of a Juvenile Prison in Massachusetts

With its deinstitutionalization of juvenile offenders in the early 1970s, the Department of Youth Services in the state of Massachusetts de veloped the reputation of being extremely progressive. However, the label progressive does not characterize all forms of juvenile correction under the new system. In the midst of deinstitutionalization, a small maximum-security prison was developed for juvenile offenders who could not be treated in any of the community-based programs de signed to replace the training schools. Despite all the therapeutic jargon and liberal claims relating to secure care, the Worcester Secure Treatment Program was and remains a prison. Attempts to impose concepts of treatment in this maximum-security, custodial setting have led to conflict and confusion in objectives, with unfortunate re sults.

The Left Against Mill

In an era commonly believed to be subject to disintegrating crises—whether a (further or continuing) crisis of capitalism, a crisis of legitimacy, the imminence of ecological Armageddon, an uprising of the third or fourth worlds, or whatever—the claims of liberalism are widely contested, at both prescriptive and descriptive levels. The progressive doctrines of a confident and vital age seem to have stultified and grown old, becoming banalities in the next. Liberalism is seen commonly as a body of cliches, disguising a brutal reality and Justifying what one of its most vocal critics has called ‘a non-terroristic economic-technical co-ordination which operates through the manipulation of needs by vested interests’. Its continuing appeal in ‘affluent’ societies is but one measure of our collective false consciousness.