Recovering The Liberal Spirit

Liberalism is often castigated for being spiritually empty and unable to provide meaning for individuals. Is it true that there simply is no spiritual side to liberalism? In Recovering the Liberal Spirit, Steven F. Pittz develops a novel conception of spiritual freedom. Drawing from Nietzsche and his figure of the "free spirit," as well as from thinkers as varied as Mill, Emerson, Goethe, Hesse, C. S. Lewis, and Tocqueville, Pittz examines a tradition of individual freedom best described as spiritual. Spiritual freedom is an often overlooked category of liberal freedom, and it provides a path to meaning without a return to communal or traditional life. While carefully considering Progressive and Communitarian counterarguments Pittz argues for both the possibility and the desirability of a free-spirited life. Citizens who are "free spirits" deliver great benefits to liberal democracies, primarily by combatting dogmatism and fanaticism and the putative authority of public opinion.

Excerpt from The Liberal Tradition: A Study of the Social and Spiritual Conditions of Freedom N ow once again the familiar cycle of depression, militarism, war has further raised the temperature and shortened the perspec tive. In time of stress we naturally counteract our suffering with the thought Of better days to come; and as the strain increases we advance the date. We draw spiritual as well as financial drafts upon the future, never doubting that they will be honored at maturity. In proportion as the means we must now employ are costly and terrible, so the more clear and close must be the vision Of our ends. Thus readily we credit the assurances Of politicians that the immediate sequel to a tornado Of destruction will be a more abundant life for everybody, and mortgage our incomes, our property, and the blood of our children to a dream: lucky indeed we Shall be if that dream does not again become a nightmare. For purposes of war it is enough that we will the supreme end, vic tory, leaving the means - the strategy and tactics - to our gen erals; but for purposes Of peace free people must master means as well as ends. For the means will Shape the ends - as the history of modern Germany reminds us. In the battle of the faiths that is now actively involved, as it Was three centuries ago, in the battle Of the nations, those whose position is weak or ill defined will stand no chance at all. The faith Of the liberal is the hardest to define because it is the boldest and the biggest. Rationalist utopias can exhibit (on paper) all the scientific neatness Of the prison, the hospital, or the factory: lib eralism does not propose to model the life of society on the prison or the hospital, and even looks askance at too many factories. Coi lectivists are fond Of the argument We did it in war, why can't we do it in peace? Liberals do not propose to model the life Of society on the army or the Wehrwirtschaft. In all the hard bright schemes that have crystallized out Of modern materialism the ordi nary human being is put in his place with a platonic knee, or some thing more urgent, at his back; the reason being that there is so much more to human nature than what the doctrinaires have any use for. But out Of that more come both the folly and the wisdom, the passion and the insight, the virtue and the fun Of human life; and the liberal will never sacrifice the full range Of personal living to the symmetry of a mere political or economic system. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

This book is the first systematic, multicountry exploration of far-right Newspeak. The contributors analyze the ways in which contemporary far-right politicians, intellectuals, and pundits use and abuse traditional liberal concepts and ideas to justify positions that threaten democratic institutions and liberal principles. They explore cases of both far-right and right-wing thought in eastern and western Europe, the United States, and Canada. Subjects include well-known figures, such as Marine Le Pen, Tucker Carlson, Peter Thiel, Nick Griffin, Thierry Baudet, Jordan Peterson, Russell Brand, and Viktor Orbán, and lesser-known names, such as the Czech politician Tomio Okamura and the Internet personality "Raw Egg Nationalist." The contributors examine these figures’ claims about hot-button issues, including immigration, Islam, race, Covid-19 policies, feminism, monetary policy, and free speech. The book demonstrates that mainstream politicians and intellectuals are at risk of losing control over the definitions of the very concepts, including equal rights, racial and ethnic diversity, and political tolerance, that undergird their vision of liberal democracy. It will be of interest to scholars, journalists, policymakers, political scientists, historians, political theorists, sociologists, and general audiences concerned about the sophisticated efforts of far-right and right-wing politicians and pundits to undermine the foundations of liberal democracy.

Leading theorists explore the concept of political liberalism.

One of the world's leading historians examines the great Indian liberal tradition, stretching from Rammohan Roy in the 1820s, through Dadabhai Naoroji in the 1880s to G. K. Gokhale in the 1900s. This powerful new study shows how the ideas of constitutional, and later 'communitarian' liberals influenced, but were also rejected by their opponents and successors, including Nehru, Gandhi, Indian socialists, radical democrats and proponents of Hindu nationalism. Equally, Recovering Liberties contributes to the rapidly developing field of global intellectual history, demonstrating that the ideas we associate with major Western thinkers – Mills, Comte, Spencer and Marx – were received and transformed by Indian intellectuals in the light of their own traditions to demand justice, racial equality and political representation. In doing so, Christopher Bayly throws fresh light on the nature and limitations of European political thought and re-examines the origins of Indian democracy.

The crises of the twentieth century - wars, genocide, the proliferation of atomic weapons, the rise and fall of communism, the breakup of the family - have shaken our faith in modernity and in the fundamental conceit upon which it is grounded: that human beings are capable of providing their own moral and political order. Ideologies based on this conceit have at their heart the revolt against God that has so characterized modern history, and these ideologies have failed us. Walsh contends that the solution is to recover the spiritual foundations of freedom and order. To make his case, he draws lessons from the intellectual pilgrimages of four contemporary thinkers who overcame the modern spirit of revolt against God: Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn, Camus, and Voegelin. He shows how each confronted the full consequences of secular messianism and found within his own experience the means of overcoming it. In the process of mounting a critique of modernity and articulating the direction in which the alternative lies, the four recovered what is in essence philosophic Christianity. They show us that beyond nihilism, beyond the revolt against God, there is the existential rediscovery of transcendent truth. Walsh believes liberal democracy is redeemable, but that its redemption hinges on our return to a proper understanding of human nature and to a spiritual foundation based on Christian principles. We must first recognize, however, that without God, without moral absolutes, without divine order, we can not resolve our worldwide modern crisis.