Issues in and around Liberal Theory: What is Liberalism?

Type :

Presentation

Pages :

7 pages

Format :

.doc

Published date :

01/13/2009

Category :

Philosophy & literature

Sub category :

Humanities/philosophy

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Summary :

The attempt to define liberalism in spite of its historical metamorphoses.
1. The use of a word and the birth of a theory.
2. Dworkin's quest of the American current liberalism.
3. From Mill to Dworkin, where is liberalism to be found?
Through a constitutive principle .
1. The constitutive principle remaining within moving derivative positions.
2. Mill's notion of freedom as a means to some end.
3. Dworkin's constitutive conception of equality.
The negative but distinctive liberal principle.
1. A negative principle as an insufficient ground for coherency in policies.
2. The liberal bad faith, or the denial of its moral dimension.
3. A principle of political organization that is required by justice, not a way of life for individuals.
Conclusion.

Abstract

"In this essay I shall propose a theory about what liberalism is". Dworkin's project is here clearly exposed. And, as most political thinkers when they try to define a coherent theory at the fundaments of actual political movements, "I face an immediate problem. My project supposes that there is such a thing as liberalism", liberalism as "an authentic and a coherent political morality" (L, 113). And thus, he widely opens the dark and sticky abyss of skepticism, particularly threatening to the so-called political liberals, and in which all their opponents - from socialists to conservatives - seek to precipitate them armed with their absolute doctrines. Indeed, liberalism as a political banner has been applied and endorsed by an extraordinary diversity of thoughts, acts, men, ideas, parties through time and space: and if with Dworkin we go through some of the recent ones, we might then be lead to the thesis of liberalism as a variable package of causes assembled by interest - so what if we go back to the 18th century?