Gal Gerson

Liberal Feminism: Individuality and Oppositions in Wollstonecraft and Mill

The essay explores liberal feminism by matching Wollstonecrafts and J. S. Mills works against radical feminist criticism. Though censured by radicals for perceiving society in binary terms modeled on the male-female distinction, liberal feminists subscribe to a worldview that is variegated and dynamic. Liberal feminism does not oppose nature to culture or individuality to society, but rather sees the ability to achieve autonomous personhood as dependent on social conditions. This insight underpins liberal feminisms attitude to the status of women: to form as rational agents, humans have to be provided with social safeguards such as education and the vote. Far from being starkly individualistic, this agenda is based on liberal feminisms perception of individual rationality as a social product.

Winnicott, Participation and Gender:

Winnicott’s work has been both criticized and commended by feminists: it was attacked for normalizing women’s traditional role, but praised for conceptualizing relationships which are free of the I-other oppositions. In the picture painted by his advocates, Winnicott appears as a participationist who values the transformative qualities of social interaction and public deliberation. I argue that, while Winnicott does hold participation up as an ideal, he relegates other pursuits to subsidiary roles that are distanced from participation, and so divides the world into two realms that complement and exclude each other. His work is therefore at odds with feminism’s project of overcoming the sphere division.

Cultural nationalism and liberal values: An elusive synthesis

In this article, we critically analyse the scholarly advocacy of nationalism recently offered by scholars such as Will Kymlicka, Neil MacCormick and David Miller. Their overall position is that basing nationality on culture rather than descent or religion would make nationalism compatible with liberalism. Synthesising nationalism and liberalism, according to this perspective, renders liberalism applicable in a world where nationalism is a reality, and addresses the flaws that communitarians have found in liberalism. Relying on earlier critiques of this position, we contend that the tacit character of national culture places political authority on a basis that is not universally visible and debatable. It accordingly conflicts with the strong constitutionalist element in liberalism. We argue, moreover, that the outlook offered by cultural nationalist authors seems to prize the determination of choice and deliberation by forces that cannot be reduced to verbal analysis. This new advocacy of nationalism thus suffers from some of the flaws that have made nationalism suspect to liberals since its inception.

George Orwell on Political Realism and the Future of Europe

Abstract George Orwell perceived the possibility of a postwar united Europe, based on regional integration along social-democratic lines, as a means of survival in a world struggle rather than as a preamble to peace. This was the logical conclusion of his understanding of political realism: his endorsement of its assumption that violence is endemic to social life and that the force-wielding sovereign cannot be done away with. Yet Orwell also had reservations about realism. He argued that a purely realist analysis that was not normatively connected to any values outside itself would go astray because analysts would be unable to factor in their own positions and would thus lose the analytic distance from their objects of study. Orwell was thus as suspicious of a politics managed by experts as of the utopian anticipation of a violence-free world. His world-view, rooted in realist necessity while leaving room for the values of democracy and socialism, offered a vision of a postwar united Europe that fostered the spirit of solidarity and could endure the existential struggles of world politics.

Liberalism,welfare and the crowd in J.A. Hobson

J.A. Hobson is known for his views on economy and imperialism. He was also concerned with social psychology and especially with the phenomenon of crowds, which was much discussed at the beginning of the twentieth century. As crowd behaviour was both collective and apparently irrational, it could undermine liberalism. However, Hobson uses crowd phenomena to bolster his own brand of social-democratic liberalism. He perceives mass behaviour as a constituent of the social dialogue favoured by liberals since J. S. Mill, and argues that alterity and festivity are themselves human traits that merit political and legal recognition. This expanded view of human nature grounds a perception of rights which includes entitlements to leisure and structureless sociability: the welfare measures which guarantee such entitlements are thus made constituents of a revised liberalism. His interpretation of the crowd also serves Hobson as a warning to social theory itself, which, he argues, should acknowledge its distance from the world it attempts to analyse. This perception of theory further acts to strengthen liberalism, as it points to the contingent, open-ended character of any view of society and hence favours dialogue and open expression of varying opinions.

From the State of Nature to Evolution in John Stuart Mill

John Stuart Mill’s familiar ideas, such as the harm principle, the emphasis on the liberty of thought and discussion, and the extension of politics into the family and education, are all linked to a developmental and open–ended view of nature. To ground this perception of nature, Mill makes use of contemporary notions of evolution. For Mill, nature encompasses human civilisation and its higher products such as morality and justice. However, Mill recognises no benevolent guiding hand in the physical world, which the idea of evolution enables him to understand as self–propelled. Destruction and pain are part of the overall developmental movement, so that human lives always stand the danger of being crushed by nature. To minimise such risks, humans should use the distinctive features of their species, such as reason and morality, thus continuing nature while transforming it.

Winnicott and the History of Welfare State Thought in Britain

Primarily appreciated for its contribution to the internal development of psychoanalytic theory and practice, Winnicott’s work may also be seen in the light of a broader debate within British society. Since the end of the Victorian era, liberal thinkers were searching for theoretical anchors to ground their project of expanding rights from entitlement to life, liberty, and property over to a new focus on welfare. These liberals had to reformulate the relationship between individual and society. Winnicott and the other object-relations authors could provide such thinkers with insights about the social determination of individuality at a crucial junction when the institutional foundations of the welfare state were being placed, and when alternative explanations of social determination, such as those based on evolutionary biology, seemed to be weakening.

First among Equals

Political Leadership in Liberal and Democratic Theory is concerned with what its editors view as a lacuna in liberal and democratic theory: with its overall egalitarianism and its insistence on the rule of law, liberal political theory neglects the question of leadership. Moreover, since the Second World War leadership as a political ideal has come under a cloud of opprobrium, while some social philosophers have been advancing an idealized notion of politics as an identity-forming grassroots activity in which the concept of political elite has no function. Leadership has thus been exiled to the study of public policy and management. At the same time, political theory has become so specialized that it refuses to take note of the comparative study of politics, and accordingly treats its own ideals as if they were facts. While in actual politics leaders are all too apparent, their work makes no impact on theory. The essays in Political Leadership explore the upshot of these developments and ways to redress them. Relating to most of the themes mentioned, John Horton’s ‘‘Political Leadership and Contemporary Liberal Political Theory’’ provides a useful introduction to the volume by focusing on the failure of liberals to consider leadership. This, for Horton, is a manifestation of a profounder failure—the near-absence of politics itself in current liberal theory. In itself, the inability to address leadership is not inherent to the liberal idea: with its firm belief in the possibility of human mastery over events, liberalism could have provided a lucid view of political agency. However, liberalism focuses on individual not collective agency and is therefore infused with a dislike for collective action and the use of power that emanates from it. Unable to concentrate on the means to achieve them, late-modern liberalism focuses on ends. It is overwhelmingly normative. It neglects the question of how and under what circumstances its ideals may be conceived, popularized, fought for and implemented—all through the friction of public life. Liberal theory speaks as if the norms have already been established, as if politics takes place within the margins determined by liberalism itself. Liberal theory thus shies away from actual decision making and at the same tome fosters distrust in and despair of leaders and their practices. To abate this tendency, Horton suggests turning from a liberalism of ideals to a liberalism of prices, which emphasizes not only the norm to be achieved but the risk and pain involved in achieving it. He attributes such a perspective to, among others, Judith Shklar and John Gray. Two other like-minded liberals, Max Weber and Isaiah Berlin, are the central focus of Peter Lassman’s ‘‘Political Leadership, Judgement, and the Sense of Reality.’’ For Weber, as Horton points out earlier, leadership was a key concept in modernity because of the combination of two factors: the unprecedented concentration of power in the state, on the one hand, and the plurality of values and perspectives, as well as the absence of a mediating authority that followed on disenchantment, on the other. Arbitrating values became a political task once the vacuum left by the loss of transcendental belief was filled by politics and

Liberalism, sociability, and object relations theory

This article argues that the notions developed by post-Kleinian object relations psychoanalysis are continuous with a certain British political tradition. British object relations authors think that the healthy personality necessitates a social-democratic political environment. Their ideas follow both historically and logically upon a set of notions about human development that resemble those held by advanced liberals and social democrats since the nineteenth century. Social democracy and advanced liberalism perceive sociability and community as goods that complement traditional liberals’ respect for autonomy and individual difference. Much of this outlook evolved from an earlier preoccupation with the exclusive discretion of already-existing individuals over portions of their lives. This concern has been gradually transformed into an interest in enhancing the conditions under which the autonomous personality may form.