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Democracy, Freedom and Coercion

Author: Alain Marciano

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

Published: 2007-01-01

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 1847207103

Democracy, Freedom and Coercion is a welcome addition to the public choice literature. It steps outside of the often used contractarian perspective and recognizes that all governments are ultimately based on coercion. . . the volume s chapters make important contributions that should be of interest to public choice scholars engaged in this research program. Benjamin Powell, Public Choice The big picture here is the tension between coercion and freedom within democracy. Each essay offers a view of this big picture through a different lens: empirical, theoretical, comparative, etc.; and also offers a different focus: on the conceptualisation and measurement of power, the legitimacy of economic democracy, the identification of the developing pattern of democracy, the impact of political violence etc. But the essays combine well so that together they illuminate the big picture from a variety of perspectives. Thought provoking and challenging an excellent read for anyone interested in the more detailed analysis of the issues that make up the big picture. Alan Hamlin, University of Manchester, UK So much of the academic analysis of democracy focuses on agreement and ignores the fact that all government action ultimately is backed by coercion. This volume offers a thoughtful examination of the inherent tensions between liberty and coercion that are an inevitable part of democratic government. Randall G. Holcombe, Florida State University, US States need to be strong in order to enforce private property rights; yet, this very strength can cause problems as representatives of the state can misuse it for their individual goals. This dilemma of the strong state has been occupying political philosophers for centuries. In this volume, to which economists but also political scientists have contributed, a number of new and unexpected variations on the topic are explored. This makes the volume an exciting read. Stefan Voigt, University of Marburg, Germany The contribution covers the niche between law and economics and the political theory of the state and its constitution. Now we can integrate traditional political theory into our doctoral seminars in law and economics a long overdue step ahead. Jürgen G. Backhaus, Erfurt University, Germany The essence of democratic power lies in the capacity to protect individual freedom while organizing the necessary coercion associated with any form of government. Yet, as the authors of this book maintain, developing coercion in order to protect freedom, and containing coercion in order to further protect freedom, is an arduous task, and one that faces any democratic Leviathan. The aim of this book is to explore this paradox and to analyse the intricate balance of freedom and coercion in developing states. In so doing it considers the legal and institutional conditions under which coercion and violence are admitted and/or permitted, and how these conditions should be organized in order to preserve and develop freedom as far as possible. Democracy, Freedom and Coercion comprehensively covers both private and public law, both applied and theoretical issues, and will therefore be of great interest to students studying law and economics. It will also serve as a reference tool to those academics in the field of legal competition, especially from the perspective of European issues.

Coercion and the State

Author: David A. Reidy

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2008-03-19

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 1402068794

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A signal feature of legal and political institutions is that they exercise coercive power. The essays in this volume examine institutional coercion with the aim of trying to understand its nature, justification and limits. Included are essays that take a fresh look at perennial questions. Leading scholars from philosophy, political science and law examine these and related questions shedding new light on an apparently inescapable feature of political and legal life: Coercion.

Liberty and Coercion

Author: Gary Gerstle

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2017-10-24

Total Pages: 470

ISBN-13: 0691178216

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How the conflict between federal and state power has shaped American history American governance is burdened by a paradox. On the one hand, Americans don't want "big government" meddling in their lives; on the other hand, they have repeatedly enlisted governmental help to impose their views regarding marriage, abortion, religion, and schooling on their neighbors. These contradictory stances on the role of public power have paralyzed policymaking and generated rancorous disputes about government’s legitimate scope. How did we reach this political impasse? Historian Gary Gerstle, looking at two hundred years of U.S. history, argues that the roots of the current crisis lie in two contrasting theories of power that the Framers inscribed in the Constitution. One theory shaped the federal government, setting limits on its power in order to protect personal liberty. Another theory molded the states, authorizing them to go to extraordinary lengths, even to the point of violating individual rights, to advance the "good and welfare of the commonwealth." The Framers believed these theories could coexist comfortably, but conflict between the two has largely defined American history. Gerstle shows how national political leaders improvised brilliantly to stretch the power of the federal government beyond where it was meant to go—but at the cost of giving private interests and state governments too much sway over public policy. The states could be innovative, too. More impressive was their staying power. Only in the 1960s did the federal government, impelled by the Cold War and civil rights movement, definitively assert its primacy. But as the power of the central state expanded, its constitutional authority did not keep pace. Conservatives rebelled, making the battle over government’s proper dominion the defining issue of our time. From the Revolution to the Tea Party, and the Bill of Rights to the national security state, Liberty and Coercion is a revelatory account of the making and unmaking of government in America.

Freedom and Political Order

Author: Linda C. Raeder

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2018-01-11

Total Pages: 195

ISBN-13: 1498566057

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Freedom and Political Order explores the traditional meaning of freedom in the American experience and its relation to other characteristically American values and institutions. Such an exploration necessarily touches upon relevant historical experience, but it extends beyond a history of freedom toward wider fields of inquiry, including and especially, moral and political philosophy. Political philosophers throughout the ages have been concerned with a question of perennial significance to human experience: what are the rules that ought to govern human relations in society or, less formally, how should human beings treat one another? Such a question is unavoidable for human beings. Its necessity derives from the nature of things, from the fact that human existence is essentially social or political existence. The rare Robinson Crusoe aside, ‘No man is an island’, and from birth to death every person encounters other human beings with whom he must interact. Every society has thus established rules regarding the ethical treatment of human beings, rules embodied in the various moral, legal, and political orders developed within human history. The formal discipline of political philosophy aims to explore and identify the proper substance of such rules. The philosophy of freedom elaborated herein is the traditional American response to the perennial question of politics so conceived. A comprehensive exploration of American political philosophy is by nature a work of scholarship. The book carefully examines the meaning of freedom and other natural rights; their relation to the Rule of Law; the nature and purpose of government as embodied in the American social contract; the relation between the liberal and democratic elements of American liberal democracy; and various assumptions underlying the Framers’ constitutional design. The study, however, is not intended exclusively for professional scholars but also for the general public and students of American government and society. Thomas Jefferson once pointedly warned that “a nation that expects to be ignorant and free . . . expects what never was and never will be.” The work thus aims not only to bring to light the fundamental values and institutions of traditional American society but, in so doing, assist in their preservation.

Isaiah Berlin and the Politics of Freedom

Author: Bruce David Baum

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 0415656796

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Since his death in 1997, Isaiah Berlin’s writings have generated continual interest among scholars and educated readers, especially in regard to his ideas about liberalism, value pluralism, and "positive" and "negative" liberty. Most books on Berlin have examined his general political theory, but this volume uses a contemporary perspective to focus specifically on his ideas about freedom and liberty. Isaiah Berlin and the Politics of Freedom brings together an integrated collection of essays by noted and emerging political theorists that commemorate in a critical spirit the recent 50th anniversary of Isaiah Berlin’s famous lecture and essay, "Two Concepts of Liberty." The contributors use Berlin’s essay as an occasion to rethink the larger politics of freedom from a twenty-first century standpoint, bringing Berlin’s ideas into conversation with current political problems and perspectives rooted in postcolonial theory, feminist theory, democratic theory, and critical social theory. The editors begin by surveying the influence of Berlin’s essay and the range of debates about freedom that it has inspired. Contributors’ chapters then offer various analyses such as competing ways to contextualize Berlin’s essay, how to reconsider Berlin’s ideas in light of struggles over national self-determination, European colonialism, and racism, and how to view Berlin’s controversial distinction between so-called "negative liberty" and "positive liberty." By relating Berlin’s thinking about freedom to competing contemporary views of the politics of freedom, this book will be significant for both scholars of Berlin as well as people who are interested in larger debates about the meaning and conditions of freedom.

Balance of Freedom

Author: Roger Michener

Publisher: Paragon House

Published: 1998-11-30

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 9780943852737

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"Can individual freedom and the social good be reconciled? Do liberal democracies require economic preconditions to function? Can liberal democracies escape a slow drift from individual freedom and control over private property to a large welfare state that regulates and taxes all ownership and activities? To what extent do laws intended to protect people from the arbitrary actions of government themselves lead to coercion and limit freedom? Do liberal universities produce men and women that sustain democracy or undermine it? Is there a moral vacuity in liberal democracy that will undermine its vitality?" "These questions and others like them refer to the fragile balance between conflicting principles that are demanded of modern government. Professor Michener has organized a discussion by American and European scholars of how the demands of freedom, on the one hand, and social obligation, on the other, are balanced by the primary institutions which maintain liberal democratic societies: the economy, the rule of law, and education. Their penetrating insights illuminate the debates which prevail in modern society." "The centerpiece of this book is a broad treatise by Edward Shils on the development of the modern university and its role in the creation and support of liberal democracies. Universities, while expected to educate men and women of the character democracy requires, have often been plagued by incivility." "Judge Robert Bork concludes with a view toward the prospects for democracy, noting that fractious pluralism and a cultural civil war are products of a liberalism emptied of meaning and moral purpose at its core."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Freedom

Author: Annelien De Dijn

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2020-08-25

Total Pages: 433

ISBN-13: 0674245598

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Winner of the PROSE Award An NRC Handelsblad Best Book of the Year “Ambitious and impressive...At a time when the very survival of both freedom and democracy seems uncertain, books like this are more important than ever.” —The Nation “Helps explain how partisans on both the right and the left can claim to be protectors of liberty, yet hold radically different understandings of its meaning...This deeply informed history of an idea has the potential to combat political polarization.” —Publishers Weekly “Ambitious and bold, this book will have an enormous impact on how we think about the place of freedom in the Western tradition.” —Samuel Moyn, author of Not Enough “Brings remarkable clarity to a big and messy subject...New insights and hard-hitting conclusions about the resistance to democracy make this essential reading for anyone interested in the roots of our current dilemmas.” —Lynn Hunt, author of History: Why It Matters For centuries people in the West identified freedom with the ability to exercise control over the way in which they were governed. The equation of liberty with restraints on state power—what most people today associate with freedom—was a deliberate and dramatic rupture with long-established ways of thinking. So what triggered this fateful reversal? In a masterful and surprising reappraisal of more than two thousand years of Western thinking about freedom, Annelien de Dijn argues that this was not the natural outcome of such secular trends as the growth of religious tolerance or the creation of market societies. Rather, it was propelled by an antidemocratic backlash following the French and American Revolutions. The notion that freedom is best preserved by shrinking the sphere of government was not invented by the revolutionaries who created our modern democracies—it was first conceived by their critics and opponents. De Dijn shows that far from following in the path of early American patriots, today’s critics of “big government” owe more to the counterrevolutionaries who tried to undo their work.

The Oxford Handbook of Freedom

Author: David Schmidtz

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 545

ISBN-13: 0199989427

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We speak of being 'free' to speak our minds, free to go to college, free to move about; we can be cancer-free, debt-free, worry-free, or free from doubt. The concept of freedom (and relatedly the notion of liberty) is ubiquitous but not everyone agrees what the term means, and the philosophical analysis of freedom that has grown over the last two decades has revealed it to be a complex notion whose meaning is dependent on the context. The Oxford Handbook of Freedom will crystallize this work and craft the first wide-ranging analysis of freedom in all its dimensions: legal, cultural, religious, economic, political, and psychological. This volume includes 28 new essays by well regarded philosophers, as well some historians and political theorists, in order to reflect the breadth of the topic. This handbook covers both current scholarship as well as historical trends, with an overall eye to how current ideas on freedom developed. The volume is divided into six sections: conceptual frames (framing the overall debates about freedom), historical frames (freedom in key historical periods, from the ancients onward), institutional frames (freedom and the law), cultural frames (mutual expectations on our 'right' to be free), economic frames (freedom and the market), and lastly psychological frames (free will in philosophy and psychology).

Ugly Freedoms

Author: Elisabeth R. Anker

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2021-10-25

Total Pages: 154

ISBN-13: 147802240X

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In Ugly Freedoms Elisabeth R. Anker reckons with the complex legacy of freedom offered by liberal American democracy, outlining how the emphasis of individual liberty has always been entangled with white supremacy, settler colonialism, climate destruction, economic exploitation, and patriarchy. These “ugly freedoms” legitimate the right to exploit and subjugate others. At the same time, Anker locates an unexpected second type of ugly freedom in practices and situations often dismissed as demeaning, offensive, gross, and ineffectual but that provide sources of emancipatory potential. She analyzes both types of ugly freedom at work in a number of texts and locations, from political theory, art, and film to food, toxic dumps, and multispecies interactions. Whether examining how Kara Walker’s sugar sculpture A Subtlety, Or the Marvelous Sugar Baby reveals the importance of sugar plantations to liberal thought or how the impoverished neighborhoods in The Wire blunt neoliberalism’s violence, Anker shifts our perspective of freedom by contesting its idealized expressions and expanding the visions for what freedom can look like, who can exercise it, and how to build a world free from domination.

When the State Speaks, What Should It Say?

Author: Corey Brettschneider

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2016-05-31

Total Pages: 231

ISBN-13: 0691171297

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How should a liberal democracy respond to hate groups and others that oppose the ideal of free and equal citizenship? The democratic state faces the hard choice of either protecting the rights of hate groups and allowing their views to spread, or banning their views and violating citizens' rights to freedoms of expression, association, and religion. Avoiding the familiar yet problematic responses to these issues, political theorist Corey Brettschneider proposes a new approach called value democracy. The theory of value democracy argues that the state should protect the right to express illiberal beliefs, but the state should also engage in democratic persuasion when it speaks through its various expressive capacities: publicly criticizing, and giving reasons to reject, hate-based or other discriminatory viewpoints. Distinguishing between two kinds of state action--expressive and coercive--Brettschneider contends that public criticism of viewpoints advocating discrimination based on race, gender, or sexual orientation should be pursued through the state's expressive capacities as speaker, educator, and spender. When the state uses its expressive capacities to promote the values of free and equal citizenship, it engages in democratic persuasion. By using democratic persuasion, the state can both respect rights and counter hateful or discriminatory viewpoints. Brettschneider extends this analysis from freedom of expression to the freedoms of religion and association, and he shows that value democracy can uphold the protection of these freedoms while promoting equality for all citizens.