Not Thinking like a Liberal
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- 26,99 €
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- 26,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
In a compelling meditation on the ideas that shape our lives, one of the world’s most provocative and creative philosophers explains how his eccentric early years influenced his lifelong critique of liberalism.
Liberalism is so amorphous and pervasive that for most people in the West it is background noise, the natural state of affairs. But there are nooks and crannies in every society where the prevailing winds don’t blow. Raymond Geuss grew up some distance from the cultural mainstream and recounts here the unusual perspective he absorbed: one in which liberal capitalism was synonymous with moral emptiness and political complacency.
Not Thinking like a Liberal is a concise tour of diverse intellectual currents—from the Counter-Reformation and communism to pragmatism and critical theory—that shaped Geuss’s skeptical stance toward liberalism. The bright young son of a deeply Catholic steelworker, Geuss was admitted in 1959 to an unusual boarding school on the outskirts of Philadelphia. Outside was Eisenhower’s America. Inside Geuss was schooled by Hungarian priests who tried to immunize students against the twin dangers of oppressive communism and vapid liberal capitalism. From there Geuss went on to university in New York in the early days of the Vietnam War and to West Germany, where critical theory was experiencing a major revival.
This is not a repeatable journey. In tracing it, Geuss reminds us of the futility of abstracting lessons from context and of seeking a universal view from nowhere. At the same time, he examines the rise and fall of major political theories of the past sixty years. An incisive thinker attuned to both the history and the future of ideas, Geuss looks beyond the horrors of authoritarianism and the shallow freedom of liberalism to glimpse a world of genuinely new possibilities.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
University of Cambridge philosopher Geuss (Who Needs a Worldview) mixes autobiography and political philosophy in this thought-provoking look at the influences and experiences that led him to question "liberal orthodoxy." Contending that liberal democratic capitalism has been "visibly unraveling" in recent decades, Geuss reflects on places and people who provided him with "a cognitive advantage" in resisting illusions such as liberalism's "fantasy" of the "entirely sovereign individual." An early influence was Father Béla Krigler, a Hungarian priest who taught Geuss at a Piarist boarding school near Philadelphia in the 1950s and '60s. Geuss learned from Krigler that "people often acted on beliefs they did not necessarily know they had," and that human reasoning and discussion were always limited by the specific circumstances in which they took place. Geuss also spotlights his mentors at Columbia University, including Robert Denoon Cumming, Sidney Morgenbesser, and Robert Paul Wolff, and cites authorial influences including Theodor Adorno, Martin Heidegger, and the poet Paul Celan. Though he doesn't propose an alternative to liberalism, Guess lucidly analyzes its shortcomings and sheds valuable light on how the critical mind is formed. This probing intellectual memoir will appeal to those who believe philosophy can change the world.