The Last Liberal Other Essays

A Collection Of Sparkling Articles By Ramachandra Guha Who Has Been Described In The New York Times As Perhaps The Last Among India`S Non-Fiction Writers. The Essays Pertain To People And Places And Literature And Life-Includes Essays On Gandhi, Nehru, Rajaji, B.P. Koirala And Many Others.

The Liberal Imagination is one of the most admired and influential works of criticism of the last century, a work that is not only a masterpiece of literary criticism but an important statement about politics and society. Published in 1950, one of the chillier moments of the Cold War, Trilling’s essays examine the promise —and limits—of liberalism, challenging the complacency of a naïve liberal belief in rationality, progress, and the panaceas of economics and other social sciences, and asserting in their stead the irreducible complexity of human motivation and the tragic inevitability of tragedy. Only the imagination, Trilling argues, can give us access and insight into these realms and only the imagination can ground a reflective and considered, rather than programmatic and dogmatic, liberalism. Writing with acute intelligence about classics like Huckleberry Finn and the novels of Henry James and F. Scott Fitzgerald, but also on such varied matters as the Kinsey Report and money in the American imagination, Trilling presents a model of the critic as both part of and apart from his society, a defender of the reflective life that, in our ever more rationalized world, seems ever more necessary—and ever more remote.

The Western Ideology brings together for the first time Andrew Gamble’s writings on political ideas and ideologies, which illustrate the main themes of his writing in intellectual history and the history of ideas, including economic liberalism and neoliberalism, and critiques from both social democratic and conservative perspectives.

Comprising essays by Michael W. Doyle, Liberal Peace examines the special significance of liberalism for international relations. The volume begins by outlining the two legacies of liberalism in international relations - how and why liberal states have maintained peace among themselves while at the same time being prone to making war against non-liberal states. Exploring policy implications, the author focuses on the strategic value of the inter-liberal democratic community and how it can be protected, preserved, and enlarged, and whether liberals can go beyond a separate peace to a more integrated global democracy. Finally, the volume considers when force should and should not be used to promote national security and human security across borders, and argues against President George W. Bush’s policy of "transformative" interventions. The concluding essay engages with scholarly critics of the liberal democratic peace. This book will be of great interest to students of international relations, foreign policy, political philosophy, and security studies.

Over the past twenty years, the debate between neutrality and perfectionism has been at the center of political philosophy. Now Perfectionism and Neutrality: Essays in Liberal Theory brings together classic papers and new ideas on both sides of the discussion. Editors George Klosko and Steven Wall provide a substantive introduction to the history and theories of perfectionism and neutrality, expertly contextualizing the essays and making the collection accessible to everyone interested in the interaction between morals and the state.

Contentious debates over the benefits—or drawbacks—of a liberal education are as old as America itself. From Benjamin Franklin to the Internet pundits, critics of higher education have attacked its irrelevance and elitism—often calling for more vocational instruction. Thomas Jefferson, by contrast, believed that nurturing a student’s capacity for lifelong learning was useful for science and commerce while also being essential for democracy. In this provocative contribution to the disputes, university president Michael S. Roth focuses on important moments and seminal thinkers in America’s long-running argument over vocational vs. liberal education. Conflicting streams of thought flow through American intellectual history: W. E. B. DuBois’s humanistic principles of pedagogy for newly emancipated slaves developed in opposition to Booker T. Washington’s educational utilitarianism, for example. Jane Addams’s emphasis on the cultivation of empathy and John Dewey’s calls for education as civic engagement were rejected as impractical by those who aimed to train students for particular economic tasks. Roth explores these arguments (and more), considers the state of higher education today, and concludes with a stirring plea for the kind of education that has, since the founding of the nation, cultivated individual freedom, promulgated civic virtue, and instilled hope for the future.

“Socher is one of the sharpest observers of Jewish America in our times. These essays, tracing a journey from a yeshiva to Oberlin College and from Franz Kafka to Rabbi Kook, are a loving, cutting, whimsical, and wise look at a Jewish moment that he senses might be ending.”—Matti Friedman, author of Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel How did Humphrey Bogart end up telling Lauren Bacall a Talmudic story in the film Key Largo, and what does that have to do with Plato’s theory of recollection—or American Jewish assimilation? Precisely what poem of Robert Frost’s inspired Nabokov’s Pale Fire, and how did Walter Benjamin learn about the remarkable stones of Sinai? Abraham Socher wears his learning lightly. These witty and original essays embody the spirit of the liberal arts, but the highlight of this collection may be his devastating account of the illiberal arts at work in Oberlin College, where he taught for eighteen years.

Democracy rests on an idea of equality, that everyone counts the same. But capitalism breeds inequality. The transgression of economic power into the domain of democratic politics has become so great that the people's democracy is being destroyed before our very eyes.