• Complain

Edmund Fawcett - Liberalism: The Life of an Idea

Here you can read online Edmund Fawcett - Liberalism: The Life of an Idea full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 2014, publisher: Princeton University Press, genre: Politics. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

Edmund Fawcett Liberalism: The Life of an Idea
  • Book:
    Liberalism: The Life of an Idea
  • Author:
  • Publisher:
    Princeton University Press
  • Genre:
  • Year:
    2014
  • Rating:
    5 / 5
  • Favourites:
    Add to favourites
  • Your mark:
    • 100
    • 1
    • 2
    • 3
    • 4
    • 5

Liberalism: The Life of an Idea: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "Liberalism: The Life of an Idea" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

Liberalism dominates todays politics just as it decisively shaped the past two hundred years of American and European history. Yet there is striking disagreement about what liberalism really means and how it arose. In this engrossing history of liberalism--the first in English for many decades--veteran political observer Edmund Fawcett traces the ideals, successes, and failures of this central political tradition through the lives and ideas of a rich cast of European and American thinkers and politicians, from the early nineteenth century to today.

Using a broad idea of liberalism, the book discusses celebrated thinkers from Constant and Mill to Berlin, Hayek, and Rawls, as well as more neglected figures. Its twentieth-century politicians include Franklin D. Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and Willy Brandt, but also Hoover, Reagan, and Kohl. The story tracks political liberalism from its beginnings in the 1830s to its long, grudging compromise with democracy, through a golden age after 1945 to the present mood of challenge and doubt.

Focusing on the United States, Britain, France, and Germany, the book traces how the distinct traditions of these countries converged on the practice of liberal democracy. Although liberalism has many currents, Fawcett suggests that they are held together by shared commitments: resistance to power, faith in social progress, respect for peoples chosen enterprises and beliefs, and acceptance that interests and faiths will always conflict.

An enlightening account of a vulnerable but critically important political creed, Liberalism will be a revelation for readers who think they already know--for good or ill--what liberalism is.

Edmund Fawcett: author's other books


Who wrote Liberalism: The Life of an Idea? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

Liberalism: The Life of an Idea — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Liberalism: The Life of an Idea" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Liberalism THE LIFE OF AN IDEA Liberalism THE LIFE OF AN IDEA Edmund Fawcett - photo 1

Liberalism

THE LIFE OF AN IDEA

Liberalism

THE LIFE OF AN IDEA

Edmund Fawcett

Princeton University Press
Princeton & Oxford

Copyright 2014 by Edmund Fawcett

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW

press.princeton.edu

JACKET ART: Row 1: Wilhelm von Humboldt; Isaiah Berlin (Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, reproduction number LC-USZ62-112715); Walter Lippmann (Walter Lippmann Papers, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library). Row 2: John Maynard Keynes, (print collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations); Alxis Charles Henry de Tocqueville (lithograph, 1848, by Thodore Chassriau. Rosenwald Collection, 1952.8.215. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington); Franklin Delano Roosevelt, photograph by Harris & Ewing (Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, reproduction number LC-DIG-hec-47235). Row 3: Friedrich von Hayek (Courtesy of the Ludwig von Mises Institute); John Stuart Mill

All Rights Reserved

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Fawcett, Edmund.

Liberalism : the life of an idea / Edmund Fawcett.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-691-15689-7 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Liberalism. I. Title.

JC574.F39 2014

320.51dc23 201304736

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Kepler Std

Printed on acid-free paper

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

DEDICATION

TO MARLOWE AND IN MEMORY OF HIS BROTHER, ELIAS

CONTENTS

PREFACE

This is a book about a god that succeeded, though a rather neurotic god that frets about why it has succeeded, whether it really has succeeded, and, if it has, how long success can last. It asks itself who it is and which its idols are. It worries whether it deserves its success or whether it is simply a successor, the next god in line. For one so widely worshipped, the self-doubt is startling. But this is an ungodly god that got its start by challenging other authorities, if not the notion of authority itself. It is the kind of god that tells people to obey its commands so long as they agree to. Though it is hard to picture the world without it, nobody is quite sure what it is or why it feels indispensable. The gods name is liberalism.

Not only is there no quick way to fill out the dots in Liberalism may be defined as . It is hard in many places to get the word out without meeting incomprehension or abuse. Among European anti-globalists liberal means a blind apologist of market greed. To angry American conservatives, liberals are an amoral, bleeding-heart elite. To its zippier metropolitan fans, liberalism nowadays suggests little more than letting people in boardrooms and bedrooms do as they please. Across the wider world, liberalism blurs in many minds with a Western way of life, whether envied or scorned, to be imitated or left aside.

People will tell you that liberals believe in free markets, low taxes, and limited government. Or no, that what really marks a liberal is mutual acceptance, equal respect, social concern, and standing up to bullies. You will hear that liberals are principle-spouting humbugs or dithering fence-sitters, that they are leftists, rightists, or incorrigible centrists hawking for supporters in an ever-shifting middle ground.

If, as I do, you think that liberalism is worth standing up for, then it matters to see liberalism for what it is. As that takes recognizing what kind of thing it is, here too the story threatens to stop before it starts. Liberalism, you will be told, is an ethical creed, an economic picture of society, a philosophy of politics, a capitalist rationale, a provincial Western outlook, a passing historical phase, or a timeless body of universal ideals. None of that is strictly wrong, but all of it is partial. Liberalism on this telling is a modern practice of politics. Like any practice, liberalism has a history, practitioners, and an outlook to guide them. My book involves the running story of all three.

Liberalism has no foundation myth or year of birth. Although its intellectual sources go back as far as energy or curiosity will take you, it arose as a practice of politics in the years after 1815 across the Euro-Atlantic world, but nowhere significantly before. Liberalism responded to a novel condition of society energized by capitalism and shaken by revolution in which for better or worse material and ethical change now appeared ceaseless. In that unfamiliar setting the first liberals sought fresh terms for the conduct of political life that would serve their aims and honor their ideals.

People before them had not fully imagined such an ever-shifting world. Thinkers of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment had encouraged the idea that people might understand and change society. David Hume and Immanuel Kant had called for liberty from ethical tutelage. Adam Smith had welcomed the first shoots of modern capitalism. None had experienced the true force of either. None had understood, let alone felt, a new state of affairs in which society was changing people, often at unprecedented speed and in ways nobody understood. That restless novelty, welcome in ways, bewildering in others, argues for an early nineteenth-century opening to the liberal epic that might otherwise look arbitrary and ill chosen.

Liberalism offered means to adapt law and government to productive new patterns of trade and industry, to hold together divided societies from which familiar organizing hierarchies and overarching creeds were disappearing and to foster or keep hold of standards of humanity, particularly standards for how state power and moneyed power must not mistreat or neglect people with less power. From their own distinctive viewpoints, the great nineteenth-century families of political opposition that sprang up in reaction to liberalismconservatism and socialismeach pictured their adversary as a reckless agent of disruptive change. It is nearer the truth to see the first liberals as struggling for a foothold of stability amid unprecedented upheaval. Liberalism from birth was as much a search for order as a pursuit of liberty.

Neither dynasties, presidencies, nor revolutions mark liberalisms life. Four periods, though, stand out. All were rough, but I have given them sharp dates for the sake of clarity. The first is 1830 to 1880, a time of youthful self-definition, rise to power, and large successes. From 1880 to 1945, liberalism matured and struck a historic compromise with democracy. From that compromise, hard-fought and unstable as it was, liberalism emerged in more inclusive form as democratic liberalism, better known as liberal democracy. After near-fatal failuresworld wars, political collapses, economic slumpliberal democracy in 1945 won itself another chance with the military defeat and moral ruin of its twentieth-century rival to the right, fascism. That third period of achievement and vindication, 1945 to 1989, ended in a year of triumph with the final surrender of liberal democracys twentieth-century rival to the left, Soviet Communism.

Giving liberalism life is a metaphor. Lives show unity and continuity. Liberalism, to my mind, shows both. The metaphor has its limits. Lives and stories end, which is not true of liberalism, not yet. A fourth part after 1989 notes a return of self-doubt as to what liberalism is and how long it may last. Current anxieties about liberalisms identity and fears for its future are probably overdone, though it would be smugand not liberalto sound certain on either point.

Next page
Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Liberalism: The Life of an Idea»

Look at similar books to Liberalism: The Life of an Idea. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.


Reviews about «Liberalism: The Life of an Idea»

Discussion, reviews of the book Liberalism: The Life of an Idea and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.