Synopses & Reviews
In this book Ian Shapiro offers a systematic comparative evaluation of the writings of contemporary liberal rights theorists and those of their seventeenth-century predecessors. He shows how contemporary arguments about rights and justice evolved out of the contractarian tradition of the seventeenth century but he argues that they are lethal mutation of that tradition. Some of the deepest difficulties of contemporary rights theories derive from the appropriation of parts of the older tradition without the unifying assumptions about knowledge and science that gave the seventeenth-century arguments their underlying coherence. Those assumptions are no longer available to us, making it impossible for us to return to the internally more consistent philosophies of the liberal past. Shapiro draws out the implications of his analysis for current disputes within liberalism between rights theorists and utilitarians and for disputes between liberals and communitarians, arguing that the communitarian critics of liberalism are in danger of incorporating its most serious weaknesses.
Synopsis
Ian Shapiro offers a systematic comparative evaluation of the writings of contemporary liberal rights theorists and those of their seventeenth-century predecessors. He shows how contemporary arguments about rights and justice evolved out of the contractarian tradition of the seventeenth century, but he argues that they are dangerous mutations of that tradition. Some of the deepest difficulties of contemporary rights theories derive from the appropriation of parts of the older tradition without the unifying assumptions about knowledge and science that gave the seventeenth-century arguments their underlying coherence. Liberals have also sought to provide foundations for their political philosophies by infusing the English contract tradition with a version of Kant's ethics, and Ian Shapiro argues that this deontological foundation is untenable. He concludes by arguing that it is impossible to theorise normatively about substantive issues of social justice without dealing with controversial empirical questions.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements; Part I. Introduction: 1. Anatomy of an ideology; Part II. The early arguments: 2. The transitional moment; 3. The classical moment; Part III. The modern arguments: 4. The neo-classical moment; 5. The Keynesian moment; Part IV. Conclusion: 6. The liberal ideology of individual rights; Bibliography; Index.