The Theology of Liberalism
Political Philosophy and the Justice of God
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- 134,99 zł
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- 134,99 zł
Publisher Description
One of our most important political theorists pulls the philosophical rug out from under modern liberalism, then tries to place it on a more secure footing.
We think of modern liberalism as the novel product of a world reinvented on a secular basis after 1945. In The Theology of Liberalism, one of the country’s most important political theorists argues that we could hardly be more wrong. Eric Nelson contends that the tradition of liberal political philosophy founded by John Rawls is, however unwittingly, the product of ancient theological debates about justice and evil. Once we understand this, he suggests, we can recognize the deep incoherence of various forms of liberal political philosophy that have emerged in Rawls’s wake.
Nelson starts by noting that today’s liberal political philosophers treat the unequal distribution of social and natural advantages as morally arbitrary. This arbitrariness, they claim, diminishes our moral responsibility for our actions. Some even argue that we are not morally responsible when our own choices and efforts produce inequalities. In defending such views, Nelson writes, modern liberals have implicitly taken up positions in an age-old debate about whether the nature of the created world is consistent with the justice of God. Strikingly, their commitments diverge sharply from those of their proto-liberal predecessors, who rejected the notion of moral arbitrariness in favor of what was called Pelagianism—the view that beings created and judged by a just God must be capable of freedom and merit. Nelson reconstructs this earlier “liberal” position and shows that Rawls’s philosophy derived from his self-conscious repudiation of Pelagianism. In closing, Nelson sketches a way out of the argumentative maze for liberals who wish to emerge with commitments to freedom and equality intact.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Nelson (The Royalist Revolution), a Harvard professor of history and political philosophy, argues in this tantalizing analysis that liberalism has its roots in deep questions of theology. In particular, Nelson outlines the thinking of early modern philosophers such as John Locke, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who endorsed the principle of human freedom when considering how people choose to obey or deny moral laws. Human freedom was particularly crucial to Leibniz's understanding of theodicy or the "problem of evil," which attempts to answer why there are evil people if God exists. Tracing these ideas from the Enlightenment into the 20th-century work of John Rawls, Nelson pushes back against some of Rawls's conclusions regarding the "moral arbitrariness" of distribution (particularly the distribution of wealth and opportunity) and how institutions can deliver justice. In the end, Nelson's solution is what has been an underdeveloped path forward based on ancient Greek Pelagianism (which resisted a good-versus-evil dichotomy). While the work is brief, Nelson's historical arguments are thorough and detailed. He provides concrete examples and quotes illustrating each philosopher's position, and pulls from literary classics such as King Lear, which questions whether "the inequality of fortunes by human beings impeaches the justice of God." However, the prose can be arduous to follow, with dense writing overflowing with technical terminology. Scholarly readers already familiar with the philosophical concepts will glean much from Nelson's piquant argument.
