Studying Liberalism: On Philosophers and Historians

As a consequence of my work on atomization, there was a shift of my focus to the more general concept of individualism, and at that stage Liberalism [LM] appeared as a central concept (appeared even in the diagram of the domain-specific conceptual framework), connected to a set of topics and problems. This delayed emergence of the LM as a central concept was not accidental. It appeared that LM was the hegemonic Ideology, I lived in the era of the hegemony of LM, but somehow LM itself was not visible. This essay has three dimensions in interdependence. It attempts: to summarize a view of the history of LM (1), to reveal and depict its structure and function (2) and finally to assess its present and try to discern its future, its legacy, and its fate (3).

This paper aims to align historical reason with the debate on freedom and liberalism in social science. We subject our criticism of liberalism to two intellectual traditions, economism and the eclectic view, which are divided by the role freedom plays in the unfolding of economic events. Drawing on lessons from the historical nature of liberalism, we conclude with two implications for understanding the value of freedom in socio-economic research. First, the value of freedom, as well as other social values such as equality and justice, cannot be defined within the exclusive scope of a social science discipline, but must capture the epistemological diversity of what is known as the common nature of peoples. Secondly, this modified principle of liberalism manifests itself as a circumstantial deliberation that belongs to a carefully constructed causal history of social processes. The logic of historical reason reflects a shared epistemological predilection in social sciences to search for evolutions of dual characters whose meaning can be revealed only in the historical circumstances of their emergence.

Institute of Lifelong Learning, University of Delhi

In the late twentieth and twenty first century challenges to Liberalism came from various quarters that make the history of Liberal politics complicated and conflictual. Moreover the central themes of Liberalism were questioned and debate started between Liberals and various others. However the debate enriched Liberalism in a number of ways because in the process of responding to various challenges Liberalism undertook the task of incorporating those challenges, and broadening the conceptual parameters of Liberalism .

Social Identities, 2010

The paper addresses two problems in Foucault's work. One concerns his treatment of liberalism in The birth of biopolitics (2008), but probably more familiar through the work of the governmentality mob, and the other concerns a comment on relations between the West and the rest in The order of things (1970) that expresses an insensitive Eurocentrism. I argue that we cannot make sense of liberalism without grasping the place of this Eurocentrism in eighteenth/nineteenth-century western thought.

PS Political Science & Politics, 1994

Over the past eight years, we have jointly taught a series of courses comparing Chinese and European political philosophy. These courses have convinced us that teaching comparative political philosophy is a way of doing two eminently desirable-but seemingly incompatible-things at once: broadening the college curriculum by teaching texts from outside the Western tradition, and carrying out the historical job of liberal education by teaching students to become critical and articulate readers of interpretable texts. In our experience, there is no necessary incompatibility between liberal education and internationalizing the curriculum. To the contrary, we believe that at present neither of them will flourish without the other. We think that friends of the "great books" and friends of "multiculturalism" can and should share an extensive common ground, a ground we try to clarify here by making some proposals about the character of liberal education and by discussing ways in which teaching comparative political philosophy has helped us put these proposals into practice.

The European Legacy, 2018

This volume collects ten essays, mostly published over the previous decade, dealing with the diverse relationships between liberalism and the British Empire. Their overriding ambition is "to probe the intellectual justifications of empire during a key period in modern history" (2). Together, they explore the interconnections between the growth of empire and liberal political thought in nineteenth-century Britain. Although the focus is on the later part of this "age of empire," some chapters explore earlier approaches to empire while others address the resonance of liberal thought across the twentieth century and beyond. The first section includes a long framing chapter on Liberalism and Empire, a chapter on Ideologies of Empire and another on the nature of Liberalism. The second section includes four chapters on themes related to the history of the British Empire in the long nineteenth century. These include the temporality involved in understandings of empire, the role of the monarchy, and the different forms of constitutional order that might unite the globally dispersed British diaspora. The third section is devoted to key philosophical and historical thinkers of the British Empire such as John Stuart Mill, T. H. Green, Herbert Spencer, Henry Sidgwick, and the influential historians John Robert Seeley, J. A. Froude and A. E. Freeman. A final chapter in this section is devoted to the turn of the century liberal anti-imperialists, J. A. Hobson and L. T. Hobhouse. Two overarching themes run through the book: one is the role of historians and more generally "historical consciousness" in structuring the forms of predominantly proimperial discourse during this period. Duncan Bell notes that not all liberals were imperialist and that the languages of imperial justification in Victorian Britain were "complex, contested, and frequently inconsistent" (298). There were two predominant forms of justification. One defended empire as a civilizing mission primarily for the benefit of those populations subjected to colonial rule. John Stuart Mill, one of the best known and most forceful advocates of this approach, famously argued in his Considerations on Representative Government that imperialism was as legitimate as any other mode of government so long as "it is the one which in the existing state of civilization of the subject people, most facilitates their transition to a higher stage of improvement" (302). The other prevailing form of justification focused on the benefits of empire for the imperial power such as national honour, the glory of its people and the

Cultural Dynamics, 2017