Reading For Liberalism

Founded in 1868, the Overland Monthly was a San Francisco–based literary magazine whose mix of humor, pathos, and romantic nostalgia for a lost frontier was an immediate sensation on the East Coast. Due in part to a regional desire to attract settlers and financial investment, the essays and short fiction published in the Overland Monthly often portrayed the American West as a civilized evolution of, and not a savage regression from, eastern bourgeois modernity and democracy. Stories about the American West have for centuries been integral to the way we imagine freedom, the individual, and the possibility for alternate political realities. Reading for Liberalism examines the shifting literary and narrative construction of liberal selfhood in California in the late nineteenth century through case studies of a number of western American writers who wrote for the Overland Monthly, including Noah Brooks, Ina Coolbrith, Bret Harte, Jack London, John Muir, and Frank Norris, among others. Reading for Liberalism argues that Harte, the magazine’s founding editor, and the other members of the Overland group critiqued and reimagined the often invisible fabric of American freedom. Reading for Liberalism uncovers and examines in the text of the Overland Monthly the relationship between wilderness, literature, race, and the production of individual freedom in late nineteenth-century California.

William Frank Buckley Jr.’s third book, originally published in 1959, is an urbane and controversial attack on the manners and meaning of American Liberalism in the 1950s. His thesis is that the leading American liberals can be shown, in their speeches and statements, in the tacit premises that underlie their words and deeds, to be suffering from a long, but definable list of social and philosophical prejudices. “Up From Liberalism” examines the root assumptions of the Liberalism of his era and asks the startling question: do the actions of prominent liberalism derive from the attributes of Liberalism? “This book of mind and heart, wit and eloquence, by the chief spokesman for the young conservative revival in this country, must be read and understood, to understand what is going on in America.”—Senator Barry Goldwater “A guide for Americans who want to stay free in a country where pressures against individual freedom are coming from every direction.”—Charleston Nines & Courier “He is at top form...clear and penetrating...A slashing attack against the thinking of today’s pseudo-liberals.”—Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph “The most exciting book of the Fall.”—New York Mirror “Mr. Buckley is one of the most articulate of the critics of today’s liberalism and deserves to be heard.”—Washington Star “Buckley brilliantly excoriates a philosophy he calls liberalism.”—Newsweek “A skilled debater, a trenchant stylist...a man of agile and independent mind...He belongs in the great American tradition of protest and he deserve his audience.”—New York Herald Tribune

"The Lost History of Liberalism challenges our most basic assumptions about a political creed that has become a rallying cry - and a term of derision - in today's increasingly divided public square. Taking readers from ancient Rome to today, Helena Rosenblatt traces the evolution of the words "liberal" and "liberalism," revealing the heated debates that have taken place over their meaning. In this timely and provocative book, Rosenblatt debunks the popular myth of liberalism as a uniquely Anglo-American tradition centered on individual rights. It was only during the Cold War and America's growing world hegemony that liberalism was refashioned into an American ideology focused so strongly on individual freedoms."--

Reading Rasmussen and Den Uyl is a collection of interpretive and critical essays by philosophers and political scientists which explores central themes in liberalism and its ethical and metaphysical grounding. The volume contains a reply essay by Rasmussen and Den Uyl.

A compelling history of liberalism from the nineteenth century to today Despite playing a decisive role in shaping the past two hundred years of American and European politics, liberalism is no longer the dominant force it once was. In this expanded and updated edition of what has become a classic history of liberalism, Edmund Fawcett traces its ideals, successes, and failures through the lives and ideas of exemplary thinkers and politicians from the early nineteenth century to today. Significant revisions—including a new conclusion—reflect recent changes affecting the world political order that many see as presenting new and very potent threats to the survival of liberal democracy as we know it. A richly detailed account of a vulnerable but critically important political creed, this book reminds us that to defend liberalism it is vital to understand its character and history.

`The author has provided us with a masterful overview and critique of liberal theorizing of the past quarter-century. While dealing exhaustively and fairly with each of a variety of broadly liberal approaches, Gaus also presents a compelling argument for his own preferred "justificatory" approach. His analyses range across familiar territory - Berlin, Gauthier, Baier, Habermas, social choice theory, Rawls, and so on - and are always illuminating and, taken together, provide both the newcomer and the old-hand much to ponder′ - Fred D′Agostino, University of New England, Armidale `[A]ll that man is and all that raises him above animals he owes to his reason′ - Ludwig von Mises Contemporary Theories of Liberalism provides students with a comprehensive overview of the key tenets of liberalism developed through Hobbes, Locke, Kant and Rawls to present day theories and debates. Central to recent debate has been the idea of public reason. The text introduces and explores seven dominant theories of public reason, namely, pluralism, Neo-Hobbesianism, pragmatism, deliberative democracy, political democracy, Rawlsian political liberalism and justificatory liberalism. As a proponent of justificatory liberalism, Gaus presents an accessible and critical analysis of all contempoary liberal political theory and powerfully illustrates the distinct and importsant contribution of justificatory liberalism. Contemporary Theories of Liberalism is essential reading for students and academics seeking a deeper understanding of liberal political theory today.

Winner of the Frank S. and Elizabeth D. Brewer Best First Book Prize of the American Society of Church History Society for U. S. Intellectual History Notable Title in American Intellectual History The story of liberal religion in the twentieth century, Matthew S. Hedstrom contends, is a story of cultural ascendency. This may come as a surprise-most scholarship in American religious history, after all, equates the numerical decline of the Protestant mainline with the failure of religious liberalism. Yet a look beyond the pews, into the wider culture, reveals a more complex and fascinating story, one Hedstrom tells in The Rise of Liberal Religion. Hedstrom attends especially to the critically important yet little-studied arena of religious book culture-particularly the religious middlebrow of mid-century-as the site where religious liberalism was most effectively popularized. By looking at book weeks, book clubs, public libraries, new publishing enterprises, key authors and bestsellers, wartime reading programs, and fan mail, among other sources, Hedstrom is able to provide a rich, on-the-ground account of the men, women, and organizations that drove religious liberalism's cultural rise in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Critically, by the post-WWII period the religious middlebrow had expanded beyond its Protestant roots, using mystical and psychological spirituality as a platform for interreligious exchange. This compelling history of religion and book culture not only shows how reading and book buying were critical twentieth-century religious practices, but also provides a model for thinking about the relationship of religion to consumer culture more broadly. In this way, The Rise of Liberal Religion offers both innovative cultural history and new ways of seeing the imprint of liberal religion in our own times.

Presents the issue of Christianity and Liberalism in such as way that the reader may be aided in deciding it for himself. The principal concern is to show that the liberal attempt at reconciling Christianity with modern science has really relinquished everything distinctive of Christianity, so that what remains in in essentials only that same indefinite type of religious aspiration which was in the world before Christianity came upon the scene.