Liberal Tradition Research Articles

Entitlements/rights, dignity and liberal democracy. Against the backdrop of the text by Cardinal Gerhard Müller “The Popes as Guardians of Human Dignity”

The concept of human dignity has already been widely discussed. In his interesting contribution, Cardinal Gerhard Müller once again turned to this category to expound upon its significance for Catholic reflection, to draw attention to its role in the teachings of 20th century Popes, and to bring it to light in connection with the increasing disputes concerning the ability/validity of “improving human nature”. Historians of political thought are interested in these disputes, and see them - insofar as they are carried out by using categories developed mainly in Western reflection - not as new ones, but rather embedded in past polemics, referring to old approaches, notably those which are prevailing today. Against the backdrop of the aforementioned disputation, this paper aims to reveal the fundamental tensions between the dominant liberal tradition – which, as the paper argues, is heterogenous – and the approach favored by the Popes”.

THE IDEA OF “SOCIAL EQUALITY” AND ITS INTERPRETATION IN THE MAIN IDEOLOGICAL PARADIGMS OF WESTERN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

Actual scientific researches and issues analysis. In the analysis of the ideas of social equality, inequality and justice through the prism of the main ideological paradigms of political philosophy, we rely on the ideas of the classics of philosophical thought (Plato, Aristotle, J. de Maistre, K. Marx, A. Camus) and on modern theorists of egalitarianism (J. Rawls, J. Pole, H. Phelps Brown, F. Hayek, R. Dworkin, etc.). The research objective. First, we will consider the different gradations of social equality, and look at the main arguments in favor of equality from the point of view of egalitarianism. Next, we will analyze how the idea of equality is interpreted in three key ideological traditions (paradigms) of Western social and political thought: liberalism, socialism, and conservatism. The statement of basic materials. The main gradations of social equality are considered, in particular, formal equality, equality of treatment, equality of opportunities, equality of consideration. It is noted that the philosophy of conservatism, as nostalgia for the state system of the ancient regime, denies equality and acts as an apologist for social inequality expressed in the idea of natural aristocracy. The philosophy of liberalism focuses attention on the formal aspects of equality before the law and political equality. Liberalism is based on the idea of meritocracy, where the equality of starting opportunities allows us to reveal the inequality of human potential. If the tradition of liberalism is characterized by a combination of the ideas of equality and individualism, then for socialism equality is necessarily connected with the idea of the dominance of the collective over the individual. The highest non-ideological gradation of equality is equality of consideration, which can also be called the ontological equality of all people.

Care and COVID 19: Lessons for liberals and neoliberals

AbstractWithin the liberal political traditions, care is regarded as a private matter, a problem of ethics rather than justice. Social justice is framed as an issue of economics (re/distribution), culture (recognition) and/or politics (representation). The pandemic challenged this liberal patriarchal paradigm; it placed the care relational lives of human beings centre stage in terms of social justice, not only in terms of who did or did not do the caring, who was and was not cared for, but who was capable of caring while balancing paid‐work time with care‐work time. The pandemic also challenged dominant ontological assumptions about the human condition, especially assumptions about invulnerability and autonomy that are so pervasive in a neoliberal capitalist era. The vulnerability of the human body came into sharp relief, especially in Western countries where infectious diseases were assumed to be under control. The autonomy myth was shattered too, as unforeseen and uncontrollable social isolation created emotional and relational vulnerabilities. People learned, often in painful ways how the loss of companionship diminished their sense of who they were. Above all, the pandemic demonstrated that the both the personal and professional care infrastructure of societies is foundational to economic, political, cultural and environmental life. It highlighted how affective equality, that is, equality in the doing and receiving of love care and solidarity, is a key dimension of social justice. Consequently, it taught a lesson on why a care/needs‐based concept of justice is as important as a rights‐based theory and why one is incomplete without the other.

From Empires of Nations to the Nation-State of Minorities

Abstract The aim of this article is to investigate the concept of minority up to the temporary stabilization of its meaning in Polish concluded in the adoption of the March constitution of 1921. The history of the concept of national minority bore an imprint on the accommodation to the new political, territorial, and discursive circumstances after transition from empire to nation-state. The idea itself was well anchored in the liberal tradition, but the nationalist right also took it on board to protect the cultural hegemony of the Poles in the areas where they were a minority. Tackling the nexus of the emerging nation-state and the ensuing logic of minoritization sheds light on tiered visions of citizenship essential for understanding the 1921 debate. For this purpose, I use various available sub-corpora of texts—political leaflets, press, and parliamentary debates from the period 1788–1922.

The Use of Thread and Fabric in Feminist Zines

The Use of Thread and Fabric in Feminist Zines

The God of Virginia Theological Seminary, 1823–1871: Retracing a Tradition of Theological Liberalism and White Supremacy

In 1823, not only did a group of Episcopalians choose to found Virginia Theological Seminary. They also decided that this seminary would help keep human beings in bondage. Such an incredible decision begs the question, “What God were the seminary founders worshipping?” This essay aims to reconstruct the doctrine of God as it was taught at Virginia Seminary by turning to an examination of the seminary’s central dogmatic textbook, An Exposition of the Thirty-Nine Articles by Bishop Gilbert Burnet (1643–1715). While theologies of enslavement and white supremacy can be enunciated in many different keys, Burnet’s doctrine of God allowed white supremacy to flourish through a series of apparently liberal and enlightened methodological moves, chief among which was the downgrading of scripture’s authority and the elevation of human experience. By wrestling with Burnet’s legacy, this essay explores the reparative potential of dogmatic theology.

Plays with words: Fungible(ly) fugitive Black sound in ethnographies of communication

Abstract Anti-Black language ideologies manifest in exclusionary language policies (e.g. Sung & Allen-Handy 2019), educational tracking (e.g. Sung 2018), and scholarly claims of Black ‘deficiency’ (Smitherman 2000). A liberal educational research tradition has countered with ethnographic accounts of cultural ‘mismatch’ (Michaels 2006) vis-à-vis Black educational ‘failure’. Conducting a textual analysis of an archive of ethnography of communication texts, I locate multiple genealogical linkages holding between ‘mismatch’ and deprivation discourses, principally ones centered on representations of ‘pathological’ Black ‘matriarchy’. Paralleling Black feminist theorizations of ‘fungible Black flesh’ (e.g. Hartman 1997), I account for these representations by conceptualizing ‘fungible Black sound’. I further argue that ‘fungible fugitivity’ (e.g. Snorton 2017), that is, how Blackness fluidly responds to white incursion is linguistically realized in acts of ‘signifyin(g)’ (e.g. Mitchell-Kernan 1999), yielding the analytic category ‘fungible(ly) fugitive Black sound’. Lastly, I reread an ethnographic text with this analytic to illustrate its affordance for (re)imagining Black futurity. (Black sound, fungibility, fugitivity, raciolinguistic ideologies, ethnography of communication, Black studies)*

The philosophy of pharmaceutical regulation-Paternalism or freedom of choice?

When assessing the value of new drugs regulatory authorities across the world frequently make different decisions even though their decisions are based on the same evidence package. In this perspective we argue that even in today's world regulatory and medical decision making is framed by conflicting philosophical schools of thought, namely the liberal tradition of the Anglo Saxon countries pioneered by the Scotsman Adam Smith and the continental European tradition of paternalism that roots back to the German philosopher Georg Friedrich Hegel. We outline the basics of these two philosophical theories and show that countries following the liberal tradition are more reluctant to reject new drugs due to weak evidence. Instead, they leave decisions to a greater extend to those who are affected, namely patients and their caregivers.

Parliamentary traditions in the UK: exploring beliefs, practices and dilemmas to explain change and continuity in the House of Commons

ABSTRACT What do ‘dilemmas’ reveal about elites’ underlying beliefs, values and attitudes to parliaments and reform? In this article, I answer this question in two ways. First, I identify three parliamentary ‘traditions’ among elites regarding the UK Parliament and reform in British politics (specifically: conservative, liberal and reformist traditions). Second, I explore how these different traditions inform MPs when confronted with dilemmas about Parliament’s role using two illustrative case studies: the vote to leave the European Union and the Covid-19 pandemic. In so doing, this article makes two original contributions: empirically, by establishing that MPs’ actions were informed by one of three traditions, it offers a new explanation for how parliamentary actors respond to challenges; and, theoretically, through the use of the interpretive concept of ‘dilemmas’, the article demonstrates the added value of using interpretive approaches to explaining parliamentary politics and, specifically, opportunities for analysing institutional change and continuity.

The work of time: personhood, agency, and the negotiation of difference in married life in urban Pakistan

AbstractWhat is the work of time on a marriage, and how does it transform people as they struggle to change and leave traces on others? Through reflections of middle‐class women in Pakistan who married men who did not share their religious aspirations, I focus on how difference is negotiated and conceived in these marriages, and on the unexpected outcomes in the religious outlook of both spouses. The work of time, articulated through the concept of sabar (forbearance), emerges here as a canvas for a confluence of human and nonhuman interventions, influences, and motivations, urging us to think of individual agency neither as autonomous action, as theorized in the liberal tradition, nor as wilful submission, as elaborated in Islamic contexts. Rather, agency, the capacity to assert one's own visions and hopes, depends on the malleability and openness of persons to time, leaving those who desire change in others equally exposed to transformation.

Which Democratic Way to Go?

There are concerns amongst researchers and the general public that social media platforms threaten democratic values. Social media corporations and their engineers have responded to these concerns with various design solutions. Though the objective of designing social media democratically sounds straightforward, the concrete reality is not. The authors discuss what a democratic design for social media platforms could look like by exploring two classical conceptions of democracy, one in the liberal tradition and the other in the deliberative tradition. In particular, they discuss three concerns: 1) mis- and disinformation; 2) hate speech; and 3) the relations between filter bubbles, echo chambers, and public debate. By describing the underlying ideals of the two traditions and translating these into design guidelines, the authors make explicit how varied and contrary the implications of different conceptions of democracy can be for addressing public concerns and designing for democratic social media. With these things in mind, this article responds to a call, which is to raise awareness among social media corporations, engineers, and policymakers about varying democratic ideals and the implications that these may have for social media.

“Love Liberates:” A Kitchen Table Talk on Black Liberatory Education

ABSTRACT Rooted in the Black feminist tradition, this kitchen table talk brings together scholars who are doing work in the name of liberation. We begin by naming people who ground us in our beings and our work, and from these offerings, we discuss the power of love in the fight for liberation with the hopes of cultivating educational spaces for Black students where they feel loved, seen, validated, and heard. Furthermore, the disruption of the ways knowledge is circulated and produced in the academy was profound in our dialogue of people and organizations that are doing liberatory work centering Black youth for educational justice. We conclude with an exclamation of the necessity of radical self-care through narratives honoring ourselves and the communities in which we serve.

Prison Activism on Trial: Canadian Feminists Mobilize against the Carceral State during the 1970s

This article uses the 1978–79 trial of Vancouver prison activists and feminists Betsy Wood and Gay Hoon as a means of exploring the changing nature of feminist prison activism in Canada during the 1970s. The trial is placed in its historical context, with a focus on contemporary discussions about reform, abolition, and the carceral state, particularly in the feminist press and feminist organizations. The Wood/Hoon trial is explored through an analysis of both media accounts and archival records, including the very few records of the trial that survived. Discussion surrounding the trial shows the changing nature of feminist thinking about prisons: older feminist traditions of “helping” reform were challenged with new, left-wing, more radical perspectives that argued that all incarceration sustained and perpetuated forms of gender, race, and class social control.

Creating good knowledge together: heartful-communal storytelling at the intersection of caregiving and academia

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore a novel storytelling approach that investigates lived experience at the intersection of motherhood/caregiving and Ph.D. pursuits. The paper contributes to the feminist tradition of writing differently through the process of care that emerges from shared stories.Design/methodology/approachUsing a process called heartful-communal storytelling, the authors evoke personal and embodied stories and transgressive narratives. The authors present a composite process drawing on heartful-autoethnography, dialogic writing and communal storytelling.FindingsThe paper makes two key contributions: (1) the paper illustrates a novel feminist process in action and (2) the paper contributes six discrete stories of lived experience at the intersection of parenthood and Ph.D. studies. The paper also contributes to the development of the feminist tradition of writing differently. Three themes emerged through the storytelling experience, and these include (1) creating boundaries and transgressing boundaries, (2) giving and receiving care and (3) neoliberal conformity and resistance. These themes, like the stories, also became entangled.Originality/valueThe paper demonstrates how heartful-communal storytelling can lead to individual and collective meaning making. While the Ph.D. is a solitary path, the authors' heartful-communal storytelling experience teaches that holding it separate from other relationships can impoverish what is learnt and constrain the production of good knowledge; the epistemic properties of care became self-evident.

Grand strategy and public diplomacy: A case study on China’s Belt and Road Initiative and its reception in the Australian press

This article examines China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as a public diplomacy grand strategy at the macro-level of inter-state relations. It does so from the perspective of Australia, where the Andrews Labor government in the state of Victoria was, for a period, a signatory to the program. Specifically, this study uses content analysis to consider the reception of the BRI in the Australian press and the complex interactions of news values and ideologies that influenced its representation. This study shows that the effectiveness of the BRI as a grand strategy was undermined by the two interacting news cultures dominating media coverage in Australia, one of which stems from the liberal traditions of the press and the other from the conservative ideological proclivities of the Executive Chair of News Corp, Rupert Murdoch. In so doing, this study contributes to research on the different communication strategies mobilized by states in their geopolitical wrangling, as well as how contextual variables can pre-determine the success or failure of specific public diplomacy campaigns.

K politickému liberalizmu Johna Rawlsa: Perspektivy a úskalí v současném občansko-politickém diskurze

Except to the Theory of Justice from 1971, which fundamentally changed the view of pluralist democracies with a market system on the welfare state and redistribution, John Rawls was also responsible for another application of philosophical doctrine to political practice by the form of the idea of political liberalism. This approach, as in the case of the „Theory of Justice“, was to once again solve the fundamental dilemma of democratic and pluralist societies built on the value basis of liberal tradition and market economy, how to approach opinion opponents who hold other ideological attitudes, which operate in democratic frameworks. In the presented text, we tried for an objective definition of John Rawls's political liberalism, while the study had the ambition to analyze the perspectives and pitfalls of this concept for the contemporary civil-political discourse. For the purpose of the presented study, we chose the method of analysis of the author's original work as well as secondary literature. Subsequently, we synthesized the obtained partial findings into statements and knowledge of new quality. The study demonstrated that, similar to the author's work „Theory of Justice“, this concept of the author in the form of „Political Liberalism“ is workable and applicable in civil-political practice. However, the text also works with the idea, that this approach is currently accepted rather formally, and the idea of political liberalism necessarily runs into the problem of gradual preference of liberal conceptions of the good life. By referring to authors from domestic and also foreign philosophical communities, the text demonstrated the international and interdisciplinary scope of the problem, which extends into the broad field of humanities and social sciences..

Reason enough to hope? The citational practices and disorienting subjects that make menstruation a matter of human rights

ABSTRACT Calls to think or embrace an ‘after’ to rights, particularly ones that suggest adopting alternative ways of thinking or acting politically, often do so because of frustration with the liberal dimensions of rights. In this paper, I draw insights from theories of performativity and feminist phenomenology to show that rights claiming remains a site of contestation over key elements of the liberal tradition. Turning my attention to efforts to make menstruation a human rights issue, I show how rights claims that cite norms and conventions from the phenomenological tradition work to shift ways of thinking about the subject of human rights, offering new ways of thinking about human vulnerability and agency. This has implications for how we think the ‘after’ in two senses. First, it expands what counts as an ‘after’ that is an effect of specific rights claims and second, it provides important lessons for any effort to think an ‘after’ as a future with or without rights.

The African Union’s Silencing the Guns: between stereotyping and owning gender roles

Following the motto “African Solutions for African Problems”, the African Union (AU) fosters its agency as a regional actor on gender policies. The Silencing the Guns campaign represents one example. Here, the AU attempts to link gender, peace and security policies. Taking the AU’s motto into account, this research explores to what degree Silencing the Guns is driven by the understanding of gender roles linked to African Feminisms, and to what degree gender assumptions of other feminist traditions are embedded. With the help of hypervisibility as a concept, stereotypes will be put into the context of Silencing the Guns. To answer the research question, a mixed-methods approach is applied for data collection. The results clearly indicate references to African feminist theories such as Womanism. In particular, these results help introduce a discussion around epistemological power hierarchies in feminist discourse defining what (harmful) gender stereotypes are for whom. Although there is a common understanding among most of the feminist researchers that gender is a social construct influenced by socio-cultural contexts, the socio-cultural context of the Global North seems to be the universal departure point to investigate gender stereotypes. However, leaving out the various socio-cultural contexts in the Global South that shape gender as a social construct distorts the knowledge about how gender stereotypes function in different societies. Consequently, the main output of this research is a call to rethink the universal claim on how gender stereotypes are defined and interpreted and to urgently encounter multiple decolonial approaches of epistemology, methodology and ontology.

Boundary integrationism and its subject: shifts and continuities in the EU framework on migrant integration

ABSTRACT The European Union emerged as an important actor in debates on ‘migrant integration’, yet remains understudied. This paper critically maps the EU Framework on migrant integration, outlining the ruptures and continuities that have shaped EU’s approach to ‘diversity governance’ in the past three decades. I propose a typology of the (sometimes opposing) discourses that converge in the EU migrant integration policy, differentiating between neoliberal, egalitarian (welfarist), securitarian and boundary integrationism. I argue that while the early predominantly welfarist and neoliberal discourse on integration was only vaguely interested in questions of values and identity, the recent reformulation of the EU’s integrationist strategy represents a break from universalist ideas of a ‘European community’. In particular, the Commission under von der Leyen adopted a more nativist and securitarian discourse that frames ‘integration’ as a wager in an alleged civilizationist clash between the liberal and the ‘illiberal’ world. I argue that the rising importance of adherence to liberal values as a proxy for ‘integration’, the reinvention of ‘European values’ as cultural values springing from the Judeo-Christian liberal tradition, and drawing new boundaries around the subject of integration are three developments that amount to an important shift in the European Union’s migration and integration agenda.

Pivoting toward solidarity: Black studies, Black feminism, and performance in geographical scholarship on sexuality

In this commentary on Andrew Tucker's ( 2023 ) article, ‘A Sexuality Pivot,’ I discuss both the exciting possibilities and some caveats to consider as we engage critically in solidarity-oriented research. In the main, I am interested in what kinds of considerations we as researchers must engage if we are to effectively pivot toward solidarity. Here, I engage the rich history of solidarity from Abolitionist and Black feminist traditions to think through how contributions from Black studies, expansively defined, might enrich the conversation on solidarity as a research method. In particular, I examine the fruitful possibilities drawn from D. Soyini Madison, Audre Lorde, and the strategy of witnessing (developed from Frederick Douglass by way of Dwight Conquergood) as a way of thinking through contemporary solidaristic scholarship on the geographies of sexuality.