In this paper, the author takes up the opposition between liberty and dependence proposed by Quentin Skinner and applies it to the analysis of the debates involving voting rights and regulations. The goal here is to examine the rhetoric supporting different positions in favor and against the extension of suffrage, the exclusion of certain groups, etc. The author points out that dependence can be detected even in democratic societies that lack traditional hierarchies. A similar effort is made to think how commitment, deliberation, and contestation can take place in the context of today's representative democracy in ways that enhance freedom instead of endangering it.
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Voting and Liberty
Contemporary Implications of the Skinnerian Re-thinking of Political Liberty
Kari Palonen
In Contributions to the History of Concepts
- Published (Print):
- 01 Apr 2007
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 23–41 (19 total)
Geoff Kennedy
This article examines the development of popular discourses of liberty as independence emerging from the struggles between peasants and landlords over the course of the late medieval and early modern periods. This discourse, relating to the aspirations of the dependent peasantry for free status, free tenure, and free labor, articulated a conception of independence that overlapped with the emerging republican discourse of the seventeenth century. However, whereas republicanism focuses almost exclusively on the arbitrary powers of the monarchical state, the popular tradition emphasizes freedom from the arbitrary powers of landlordism. After a brief introduction to the republican conception of liberty and a discussion of the dependent peasantry in England, the work of Gerrard Winstanley is presented as an innovative synthesis of popular and republican discourses of freedom as independence from the arbitrary powers of exploitation.
In Contributions to the History of Concepts
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2013
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 25–44 (20 total)
Fadi Amer
In this article, I am principally concerned with Amartya Sen's account of liberty as it appears throughout his prolific career, performing two central functions. I aim to show that Sen's understanding of freedom is irreducible to any one of the
Paul Delany
, Berlin was in a period of transition away from celibacy and abstraction. By 1950 he had arrived at his central philosophical achievement: framing the conflict between Enlightenment and Romantic values in terms of rival concepts of liberty. He kept up his
In European Judaism
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2021
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 135–144 (10 total)
Boris Maslov
Literary History as a Challenge to the History of Concepts The history of the concept of liberty has a very familiar plotline. Presaged in Greco-Roman antiquity, triumphantly proclaimed at the time of the American and French Revolutions, and
In Contributions to the History of Concepts
- Published (Print):
- 01 Jun 2019
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 42–65 (24 total)
Against Liberty
Adorno, Levinas and the Pathologies of Freedom
Eric S. Nelson
Adorno and Levinas argue from distinct yet intersecting perspectives that there are pathological forms of freedom, formed by systems of power and economic exchange, which legitimate the neglect, exploitation and domination of others. In this paper, I examine how the works of Adorno and Levinas assist in diagnosing the aporias of liberty in contemporary capitalist societies by providing critical models and strategies for confronting present discourses and systems of freedom that perpetuate unfreedom such as those ideologically expressed in possessive individualist and libertarian conceptions of freedom.
Daryl Glaser
This article suggests ways of demarcating a liberal-egalitarian family of conceptions within political philosophy. It seeks to accommodate diverse conceptions while nevertheless demarcating liberal egalitarianism in a way that is coherent, distinctive and attractive. Liberal egalitarianism (the article argues) is about the simultaneous strong defence of individual liberty and substantive equality. But because there are real tensions and sometimes contradictions between certain liberties and substantive equalities, liberal egalitarianism is also necessarily a set of theories about how to address these. Liberal egalitarians differ in their accounts of equality and in their proposals for addressing liberty-equality tensions. Even so, I argue, any attractive and distinctively liberal-egalitarian resolution of these tensions must require a strong but morally individualist account of substantive equality, protection of political and civil liberties from trade-offs with equality or welfare, weak protection of property rights and respect for a proceduralist-democratic minimum.
Applying Begriffsgeschichte to Dutch History
Some Remarks on the Practice and Future of a Project
Karin Tilmans and Wyger Velema
This article is a progress report on the Dutch national conceptual history project. The project places emphasis on interdisciplinarity, the resort to the widest possible range of sources, and the prospect of international comparison. The initiative, started by a group of Dutch scholars in the 1990s, has so far focused on the concepts of liberty, fatherland, and citizenship, all of which have had a prominent role in a specifically Dutch political discourse.
In Contributions to the History of Concepts
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2006
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 43–58 (16 total)
Liberty P. Sproat
Since the early 1920s, following the Bolshevik Revolution, Clara Zetkin, the renowned German socialist, politician, and fighter for women's rights, argued that only communism provided complete emancipation for women because it brought equality both in theory and in practice. Zetkin used her periodical Die Kommunistische Fraueninternationale (The communist women's international) (1921-1925) to convince women of the virtues of joining Soviet Russia (later the Soviet Union) in worldwide revolution rather than succumbing to the empty promises of feminist movements in capitalist nations. From reports of International Women's Day celebrations to statistical reviews of the institutions established to aid working women, Die Kommunistische Fraueninternationale used the example of Soviet Russia to illustrate what life for women entailed in a country that had experienced a successful communist revolution. The Soviet model portrayed in Die Kommunistische Fraueninternationale was optimistic and illustrated what Zetkin anticipated her female readers dreamed for themselves. The periodical, thus, became a tool of communist propaganda to convince women that supporting international communism was the most effective path for obtaining equal economic and social rights with men.
David Bilchitz
These modern constitutions that have been adopted largely in the Global South enshrine a set of divergent values and rights that embrace both political philosophical concerns relating to liberty as well as distributive equality. This article seeks to grapple with the approach to distributive justice that can best give expression to the multiple normative commitments of these constitutions as well as key institutional features thereof. I argue for these societies to adopt what I term a two-tier theory of distributive justice: these theories require a set pattern or threshold to be achieved in a certain domain but also allow for a tolerable variation in resource distribution in another domain. I seek to show how two of the foremost egalitarian liberal theories of distributive justice – that of Ronald Dworkin and John Rawls – exemplify this structure as well as the resources they have to address the problems thereof. I then argue that a two-tier structure of a theory of distributive justice can help explain and reconcile key features of these modern constitutions. In particular, I shall seek to show the manner in which such theories conform to understandings of the role of a constitution, and the importance of preserving space for democratic decision-making. At the same time, two-tier theories assist in delineating the appropriate role constitutional courts should play in addressing the distribution of economic resources in society. These theories also have important implications for the role of the state and markets. Such a structure, I shall conclude, gives effect to a particular conception of equality as well as liberty and so manages to reconcile these two normative values.