Research Catalog

Title

The anatomy of antiliberalism / Stephen Holmes.

Author

Holmes, Stephen, 1948-

Publication

Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1993.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Additional Authors

Vidal, Gore, 1925-2012

Description

xvi, 330 pages; 25 cm

Summary

• Liberal: spoken in a certain tone, heard more and more often lately, it summons up permissiveness, materialism, rootlessnes:, skepticism, relativism run rampant. How has liberalism, the grand democratic ideal, come to to be a dirty word? This book shows us what antiliberalism means in the modern world - where it comes from, whom it serves, and why it speaks with such a forceful, if everchanging, voice.
• In the past, in a battle pitting one offspring of eighteenth-century rationalism against another, Marxism has been liberalism's best known and most vociferous opponent. But with the fall of communism, the voices of ethnic particularism, communitarianism, and religions fundamentalism - a tradition Holmes traces to Joseph de Maistre - have become louder in rejection of the Enlightenment, failing to distinguish between the descendants of Karl Marx and Adam Smith. Stephen Holmes uses the tools of the political theorist and the intellectual historian to expose the philosophical underpinnings of antiliberalism in its nonmarxist guise. Examining the works of some of liberalism's severest critics - including Maistre, Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and Alasdair MacIntyre - Holmes provides, in effect, a reader's guide to antiliberal culture, in all its colorful and often seductive, however nefarious, variety.
• As much a mindset as a theory, as much a sensibility as an argument, antiliberalism appears here in its diverse efforts to pit "spiritual truths" and "communal bonds" against a perceived cultural decay and moral disintegration. This corrosion of the social fabric - rather than the separation of powers, competitive elections, a free press, religious tolerance, public budgets, and judicial controls on the police - is what the anitliberal forces see as the core of liberal politics. Against this picture, Holmes outlines the classical liberal arguments most often misrepresented by the enemies of liberalism and most essential to the future of democracy.
• . Constructive as well as critical, this book helps us see what liberalism is and must be, and why it must and always will engender deep misgivings along with passionate commitment.

Subjects

• Libéralisme
• Liberalism
• Kritiek (filosofie)
• Liberalisme
• Politische Philosophie
• Liberalismus
• Kritik
• 89.12 liberalism
• liberalism
• Libéralisme
• Association copies (Provenance)

Genre/Form

Association copies (Provenance)

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (pages 267-316) and index.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

Introduction: what is antiliberalism? -- Maistre and the antiliberal tradition -- Schmitt: the debility of liberalism -- Strauss: truths for philosophers alone -- MacIntyre: the antiliberal catechism -- Anti-prometheanism: the case of Christopher Lasch -- Unger: antiliberalism unbound -- The community trap -- Antiliberals as historians of liberal thought -- The "atomization" of society? -- Indifference toward the common good? -- The eclipse of authority? -- The public realm sacrificed to the private? -- Economic man? -- The selfishness of rights? -- Moral skepticism? -- The crimes of reason? -- Antonym substitution.

ISBN

• 0674031806
• 9780674031807
• 0674031857
• 9780674031852

LCCN

92041387

OCLC

• 27013031
• SCSB-10357796

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library