[PDF] Negative Liberties eBook

Author : Darren W. Davis
Publisher : Russell Sage Foundation
Page : 293 pages
File Size : 23,41 MB
Release : 2007-03-02
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1610441516

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Did America's democratic convictions "change forever" after the terrorist attacks of September 11? In the wake of 9/11, many pundits predicted that Americans' new and profound anxiety would usher in an era of political acquiescence. Fear, it was claimed, would drive the public to rally around the president and tolerate diminished civil liberties in exchange for security. Political scientist Darren Davis challenges this conventional wisdom in Negative Liberty, revealing a surprising story of how September 11 affected Americans' views on civil liberties and security. Drawing on a unique series of original public opinion surveys conducted in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and over the subsequent three years, Negative Liberty documents the rapid shifts in Americans' opinions regarding the tradeoff between liberty and security, at a time when the threat of terrorism made the conflict between these values particularly stark. Theories on the psychology of threat predicted that people would cope with threats by focusing on survival and reaffirming their loyalty to their communities, and indeed, Davis found that Americans were initially supportive of government efforts to prevent terrorist attacks by rolling back certain civil liberties. Democrats and independents under a heightened sense of threat became more conservative after 9/11, and trust in government reached its highest level since the Kennedy administration. But while ideological divisions were initially muted, this silence did not represent capitulation on the part of civil libertarians. Subsequent surveys in the years after the attacks revealed that, while citizens' perceptions of threat remained acute, trust in the government declined dramatically in response to the perceived failures of the administration's foreign and domestic security policies. Indeed, those Americans who reported the greatest anxiety about terrorism were the most likely to lose confidence in the government in the years after 2001. As a result, ideological unity proved short lived, and support for civil liberties revived among the public. Negative Liberty demonstrates that, in the absence of faith in government, even extreme threats to national security are not enough to persuade Americans to concede their civil liberties permanently. The September 11 attacks created an unprecedented conflict between liberty and security, testing Americans' devotion to democratic norms. Through lucid analysis of concrete survey data, Negative Liberty sheds light on how citizens of a democracy balance these competing values in a time of crisis.

Author : Maria Dimova-Cookson
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 252 pages
File Size : 41,31 MB
Release : 2019-09-04
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0429766203

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This book argues that the distinction between positive and negative freedom remains highly pertinent today, despite having fallen out of fashion in the late twentieth century. It proposes a new reading of this distinction for the twenty-first century, building on the work of Constant, Green and Berlin who led the historical development of these ideas. The author defends the idea that freedom is a dynamic interaction between two inseparable, yet sometimes fundamentally, opposed positive and negative concepts – the yin and yang of freedom. Positive freedom is achieved when one succeeds in doing what is right, while negative freedom is achieved when one is able to advance one’s wellbeing. In an environment of culture wars, resurging populism and challenge to progressive liberal values, recognising the duality of freedom can help us better understand the political dilemmas we face and point the way forward. The book analyses the duality of freedom in more philosophical depth than previous studies and places it within the context of both historical and contemporary political thinking. It will be of interest to students and scholars of liberalism and political theory.

Author : C. Howard Diaz
Publisher : WestBow Press
Page : 110 pages
File Size : 15,11 MB
Release : 2012-06-29
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 1449760473

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A Thorough Examination of America’s Liberties C. Howard Diaz analyzes Constitution and Bill of Rights in new book, A Charter of Negative Liberties While listening to a speech from President Barack Obama, C. Howard Diaz was shocked when Obama referred to the Constitution as “a charter of negative liberties.” Diaz explains that he couldn’t believe a president of the United States would ever say anything like that. It was because of this that he started writing. The result? His new book, entitled A Charter of Negative Liberties: Defining the Bill of Rights and Other Commentary (published by WestBow Press). In A Charter of Negative Liberties, Diaz breaks down the Bill of Rights in layman’s terms and gives readers his explanations of how it, and the Constitution, are being misconstrued and abused. “I’m introducing the reader to the concept that the constitution and the Bill of Rights are documents that define political freedom and do not discuss any moral or social issues.” An excerpt from A Charter of Negative Liberties: Our forefathers, it is said, created the greatest document in the world when they conceived the Constitution. We the people in turn have spent the last couple of hundred years allowing a few to tear it apart with certain amendments and more recently with claims that the Constitution is old and outdated. Anyone who makes the claim that the Constitution is old and outdated is truly an enemy of the people. A Charter of Negative Liberties is a call to action for readers to learn more about the issues affecting America and raise their willingness to engage in a dialogue with more of an understanding of the government. “America has been tricked into believing our Constitution and Bill of Rights is somehow less relevant than it should be.”

Author : Cyrus R. K. Patell
Publisher : Duke University Press
Page : 265 pages
File Size : 50,44 MB
Release : 2001-05-28
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0822380676

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Since the nineteenth century, ideas centered on the individual, on Emersonian self-reliance, and on the right of the individual to the pursuit of happiness have had a tremendous presence in the United States—and even more so after the Reagan era. But has this presence been for the good of all? In Negative Liberties Cyrus R. K. Patell revises important ideas in the debate about individualism and the political theory of liberalism. He does so by adding two new voices to the current discussion—Toni Morrison and Thomas Pynchon—to examine the different ways in which their writings embody, engage, and critique the official narrative generated by U.S. liberal ideology. Pynchon and Morrison reveal the official narrative of individualism as encompassing a complex structure of contradiction held in abeyance. This narrative imagines that the goals of the individual are not at odds with the goals of the family or society and in fact obscures the existence of an unholy truce between individual liberty and forms of oppression. By bringing these two fiction writers into a discourse dominated by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Isaiah Berlin, John Rawls, George Kateb, Robert Bellah, and Michael Sandel, Patell unmasks the ways in which contemporary U.S. culture has not fully shed the oppressive patterns of reasoning handed down by the slaveholding culture from which American individualism emerged. With its interdisciplinary approach, Negative Liberties will appeal to students and scholars of American literature, culture, sociology, and politics.

Author : Cyrus R. K. Patell
Publisher : Duke University Press
Page : 268 pages
File Size : 16,68 MB
Release : 2001-05-28
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780822326694

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DIVA revisionary view of the history of liberalism in the USA, and an assessment of its viability in the present./div

Author : Bruce Baum
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 277 pages
File Size : 30,84 MB
Release : 2013-03-05
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 1135132380

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Since his death in 1997, Isaiah Berlin’s writings have generated continual interest among scholars and educated readers, especially in regard to his ideas about liberalism, value pluralism, and "positive" and "negative" liberty. Most books on Berlin have examined his general political theory, but this volume uses a contemporary perspective to focus specifically on his ideas about freedom and liberty. Isaiah Berlin and the Politics of Freedom brings together an integrated collection of essays by noted and emerging political theorists that commemorate in a critical spirit the recent 50th anniversary of Isaiah Berlin’s famous lecture and essay, "Two Concepts of Liberty." The contributors use Berlin’s essay as an occasion to rethink the larger politics of freedom from a twenty-first century standpoint, bringing Berlin’s ideas into conversation with current political problems and perspectives rooted in postcolonial theory, feminist theory, democratic theory, and critical social theory. The editors begin by surveying the influence of Berlin’s essay and the range of debates about freedom that it has inspired. Contributors’ chapters then offer various analyses such as competing ways to contextualize Berlin’s essay, how to reconsider Berlin’s ideas in light of struggles over national self-determination, European colonialism, and racism, and how to view Berlin’s controversial distinction between so-called "negative liberty" and "positive liberty." By relating Berlin’s thinking about freedom to competing contemporary views of the politics of freedom, this book will be significant for both scholars of Berlin as well as people who are interested in larger debates about the meaning and conditions of freedom.

Author : Matthew H. Kramer
Publisher : OUP Oxford
Page : 496 pages
File Size : 45,80 MB
Release : 2008-05-29
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0191562866

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At least since the publication of Isaiah Berlin's famous essay "Two Concepts of Liberty" nearly half a century ago, political philosophers have argued vigorously over the relative merits of "positive" and "negative" accounts of freedom. Matthew Kramer writes squarely within the negative-liberty tradition, but he incorporates a number of ideas that are quite often associated with theories of positive liberty. Much of The Quality of Freedom is devoted to elaborating the necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of particular freedoms and unfreedoms; however, the book's cardinal objective is to establish the measurability of each person's overall freedom and of each society's aggregate freedom. On the one hand, Kramer contends that the existence of any particular instance of liberty or unfreedom is a matter of fact that can be confirmed or disconfirmed without any reliance on evaluative or normative considerations. On the other hand, he argues that the extent of each person's overall freedom or unfreedom cannot be ascertained entirely in the absence of evaluative assumptions. By combining those two positions and developing them in detail, Kramer pits himself against all positive accounts of liberty and most negative accounts. In the course of so doing, he aims to demonstrate the rigorous measurability of overall liberty - something that many writers on freedom have casually dismissed as impossible. Although Kramer concentrates principally on constructing a systematic analysis of sociopolitical freedom, he engages critically with the work of many of the leading contemporary writers on the topic.

Author : Y?ld?z Silier
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 193 pages
File Size : 16,56 MB
Release : 2017
Category : Liberty
ISBN : 1351786954

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Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Original Title Page -- Original Copyright Page -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- Part I The Negative Conception of Freedom -- Chapter 1 Hayek's Notion of Freedom -- Chapter 2 Constraints on Freedom -- Chapter 3 Free Action, Free Person and Free Society -- Chapter 4 Limits of Negative Freedom in Capitalism -- Chapter 5 The Hybrid View -- Part II The Positive Conception of Freedom -- Chapter 6 Green's Notion ofFreedom -- Chapter 7 Kant on Rational Self-Determination -- Chapter 8 Hegel on Concrete Freedom -- Chapter 9 Communitarians on the Social Context of Freedom -- Chapter 10 Freedom as the Power for Self-Determination -- Chapter 11 The Historical Account: Freedoms and Unfreedoms in Capitalism -- Conclusion -- Bibliography -- Index

Author : José Jorge Mendoza
Publisher : Lexington Books
Page : 159 pages
File Size : 33,55 MB
Release : 2016-12-27
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 1498508529

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In The Moral and Political Philosophy of Immigration: Liberty, Security, and Equality, José Jorge Mendoza argues that the difficulty with resolving the issue of immigration is primarily a conflict over competing moral and political principles and is thereby, at its core, a problem of philosophy. Establishing the necessity of situating the public debate on immigration at the center of philosophical debates on liberty, security, and equality, this book brings into dialog various contemporary philosophical texts that deal with immigration to provide some normative guidance to future immigration policy and reform. As a groundbreaking work in social and political philosophy, it will be of great value not only to students and scholars in these fields, but also those working in social science, public policy, justice studies, and global studies programs whose work intersects with issues of immigration.