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.

The Spirit of the Laws—Montesquieu’s huge, complex, and enormously influential work—is considered one of the central texts of the Enlightenment, laying the foundation for the liberally democratic political regimes that were to embody its values. In his penetrating analysis, Thomas L. Pangle brilliantly argues that the inherently theological project of Enlightenment liberalism is made more clearly—and more consequentially— in Spirit than in any other work. In a probing and careful reading, Pangle shows how Montesquieu believed that rationalism, through the influence of liberal institutions and the spread of commercial culture, would secularize human affairs. At the same time, Pangle uncovers Montesquieu’s views about the origins of humanity’s religious impulse and his confidence that political and economic security would make people less likely to sacrifice worldly well-being for otherworldly hopes. With the interest in the theological aspects of political theory and practice showing no signs of diminishing, this book is a timely and insightful contribution to one of the key achievements of Enlightenment thought.

This is a new release of the original 1943 edition.

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.

Even before the emergence of the civil rights movement, African American religion and progressive politics were assumed to be inextricably intertwined. Savage counters this assumption with the story of a highly diversified religious community whose debates over engagement in the struggle for racial equality were as vigorous as they were persistent.

Leading theorists explore the concept of political liberalism.

The widespread abandonment of the search for foundations by John Rawls, Richard Rorty, Michael Oakeshott, and the deconstructionists has been interpreted as signifying the absence of any sustaining inner resources. The result has been the confusion of contemporary liberal democratic self-understanding, which cannot make sense of its own extraordinary historical success nor apparently prevent the evident unraveling of its own moral code.

This first comprehensive commentary on The Spirit of the Laws uncovers and explicates the plan of Montesquieu's famous but baffling treatise. Pangle brings to light Montesquieu's rethinking of the philosophical groundwork of liberalism, showing how The Spirit of the Laws enlarges and enriches the liberal conception of natural right by means of a new appeal to History as the source of basic norms.