Liberalism

The Encounter That Defined an Era In 1971, John Rawls (1921–2002) published A Theory of Justice — a work that revived normative political philosophy after decades of positivist dominance. Three years later, in 1974, Robert Nozick (1938–2002) responded with Anarchy, State, and Utopia, which became the most rigorous libertarian critique of the Rawlsian program. Both were professors at Harvard. The debate they conducted — personally amicable, philosophically radical — remains the most productive confrontation in twentieth-century Anglo-American political philosophy. ...

Why should we obey the State? What makes a law legitimate rather than a mere order imposed by force? In the history of Western philosophy, these questions found their first systematically modern formulation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with three thinkers who changed forever the vocabulary of politics: Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The three give radically different answers, but share a method: contractualism — the idea that political legitimacy must be thought from a hypothetical pact among free individuals. ...

Isaiah Berlin Latvian-British political philosopher and historian of ideas, one of the greatest liberal thinkers of the 20th century. Famous for the distinction between negative and positive liberty, and for his defense of value pluralism against all forms of political utopianism. Born in Riga in 1909, in what was then the Russian Empire, Berlin witnessed the 1917 revolutions in Petrograd — where his family had moved in 1916 — before they returned to Riga and emigrated to England in 1921 — an experience that left a lasting mark on his distrust of promises of collective redemption. Educated and later a professor at Oxford, where he held the Chichele Chair of Social and Political Theory, he devoted himself less to building a system than to the history of ideas, recovering forgotten voices and countercurrents of modern thought. It was in this spirit that he delivered, in 1958, the celebrated inaugural lecture “Two Concepts of Liberty,” a text that organized the postwar political debate by showing that liberty understood as self-mastery (positive) could, taken to its extreme, license coercion in the name of the citizen’s “true self.” ...

John Rawls American political philosopher; A Theory of Justice (1971) relaunched normative political philosophy after decades of dominance by positivism and utilitarianism. The most influential work of 20th-century political philosophy. A professor at Harvard for most of his career, Rawls wrote at a time when many regarded political philosophy as dead, reduced to conceptual analysis or to a history of doctrines. His central problem was to find a conception of justice for the basic institutions of society — the constitution, the economy, the family — that could be accepted by free and equal citizens without appealing to a single comprehensive worldview. Against the dominant utilitarianism, which was willing to sacrifice the well-being of some for the sake of the aggregate sum, Rawls insisted that each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the general welfare cannot override. To articulate this intuition he revived the contractualist tradition of Locke, Rousseau, and Kant, but at a higher level of abstraction: the agreement is not about a concrete government, but about the very principles that should govern the basic structure. ...

John Stuart Mill Born in London in 1806, John Stuart Mill was subjected by his father, James Mill, to an extraordinarily precocious and rigorous education — designed by Bentham’s circle to form a utilitarian thinker: he learned Greek at the age of three and devoured the classics and economics in childhood. At twenty he suffered a profound existential crisis, from which he recovered partly through Romantic poetry — an experience that led him to correct the arid utilitarianism in which he had been raised. He was also an economist, a Member of Parliament, and the intellectual companion of Harriet Taylor. He became the most influential liberal of the nineteenth century. ...

Karl Popper Austrian-British philosopher. Proposed falsificationism as a criterion for scientific demarcation and defended the open society against totalitarianism. Sharp critic of Marxism and historicism. Born in Vienna in 1902, Popper came of age in intellectual contact with the Vienna Circle — the group of philosophers and scientists who sought to ground knowledge in strict verificationist terms. Rather than joining their programme, however, he turned the question around: the central problem of epistemology is not how we confirm theories, but how we distinguish genuine science from pseudo-science. His answer, falsificationism, holds that the hallmark of a scientific theory is its refutability: a claim is scientific if and only if it is possible to conceive of an observation or experiment that could prove it wrong. This methodological reorientation, set out in The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934), reshaped the foundations of twentieth-century philosophy of science. ...

Michael Sandel Michael Sandel (b. 1953, Minneapolis) is an American political philosopher and professor of government at Harvard since 1980, known both for the rigour of his philosophical critique of Rawlsian liberalism and for the enormous public reach of his course “Justice”, one of the most popular classes in Harvard’s history. Sandel is a central figure in the so-called liberal–communitarian debate of the 1980s, although he himself resists the label. His doctoral thesis, published as Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982), offered one of the sharpest philosophical critiques of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice. In the following decades he broadened his scope to the critique of the commodification of social life and of meritocratic ideology. ...