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Liberalism and empire: a study in nineteenth-century British liberal thought
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ISBN: 0226518817 0226518825 Year: 1999 Publisher: Chicago, Ill. University of Chicago Press

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The Anxiety of Freedom : Imagination and Individuality in Locke's Political Thought
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ISBN: 0801427568 1501726390 9781501726392 9780801427565 1501726404 1501726382 Year: 2018 Publisher: Cornell University Press

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The enduring appeal of liberalism lies in its commitment to the idea that human beings have a "natural" potential to live as free and equal individuals. The realization of this potential, however, is not a matter of nature, but requires that people be molded by a complex constellation of political and educational institutions. In this eloquent and provocative book, Uday Singh Mehta investigates in the major writings of John Locke the implications of this tension between individuals and the institutions that mold them. The process of molding, he demonstrates, involves an external conformity and an internal self-restraint that severely limit the scope of individuality.Mehta explores the centrality of the human imagination in Locke's thought, focusing on his obsession with the potential dangers of the cognitive realm. Underlying Locke's fears regarding the excesses of the imagination is a political anxiety concerning how to limit their potential effects. In light of Locke's views on education, Mehta concludes that the promise of liberation at the heart of liberalism is vitiated by its constraints on cognitive and political freedom.


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Thinking in Dark Times : Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics

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Hannah Arendt is one of the most important political theorists of the twentieth century. In her works, she grappled with the dark events of that century, probing the nature of power, authority, and evil, and seeking to confront totalitarian horrors on their own terms. This book focuses on how, against the professionalized discourses of theory, Arendt insists on the greater political importance of the ordinary activity of thinking. Indeed, she argues that the activity of thinking is the only reliable protection against the horrors that buffeted the last century. Its essays explore and enact that activity, which Arendt calls the habit of erecting obstacles to oversimplifications, compromises, and conventions. Most of the essays were written for a conference at Bard College celebrating the 100th anniversary of Arendt’s birth. Arendt left her personal library and literary effects to Bard, and she is buried in the Bard College cemetery. Material from the Bard archive—such as a postcard to Arendt from Walter Benjamin or her annotation in her copy of Machiavelli’s The Prince—and images from her life are interspersed with the essays in this volume. The volume will offer provocations and insights to Arendt scholars, students discovering Arendt’s work, and general readers attracted to Arendt’s vision of the importance of thinking in our own dark times.

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Thinking in Dark Times

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