Tag Archives: Liberalism

Red Tory

February 20, 2009 – 6:58 pm

Phillip Blond is sitting in his London office. “I think mine is a genuinely radical project,” he says. “Lots of people on the left have said to me that if the Tories do what I’m telling them to, they’ll vote for them.”
My profile of Phillip Blond, proponent of the “Red Tory” thesis and David Cameron’s [...]

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Religion and the public sphere

May 29, 2007 – 8:12 pm

Chris Dillow reminds us that secularists seek not to extirpate religious belief but to keep it out of the public sphere (a distinction that’s mostly lost on Richard Dawkins, incidentally). At least, that’s the moral I draw from his attempt to answer a “tricky question” raised by Johann Hari about the Christian roots of Gordon [...]

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Dworkin on democracy

December 22, 2006 – 4:37 pm

This review of Ronald Dworkin’s book Is Democracy Possible Here? (the “here” being the US) will appear in the next issue of The Philosophers’ Magazine.
Ronald Dworkin, Is Democracy Possible Here? Principles for a New Political Debate, Princeton University Press, £12.95/$19.95 (hb)
Ten years ago, the political philosopher Michael Sandel published a book entitled Democracy’s Discontent. American [...]

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God and equality—again

March 1, 2006 – 10:40 pm

Ophelia Benson has just noticed that some time ago, in response to this post of hers, I suggested it was just ahistorical to deny that liberal conceptions of equality have Christian antecedents. Having digested my remarks, she now says this:
I don’t deny, in the passage [from Locke's Second Treatise] Jonathan quotes, that the Christian ‘view [...]

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God and equality

January 13, 2006 – 10:09 am

Ophelia Benson has a “fit” (her word) about this passage from a piece by Stephen Beer in yesterday’s Guardian:
Western liberal democracy owes much to the Christian view that all have equal worth before God, which in our political system reads as democracy and equality before the law; and those ideals have often been applied because [...]

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The Liberalism of Fear

November 22, 2005 – 8:40 pm

My review of a new collection of essays on politics and political philosophy by the late Bernard Williams will appear in the next issue of The Philosophers’ Magazine:

Bernard Williams was working on a book about politics when he died in June 2003. In the Beginning Was the Deed gathers together several of the essays [...]

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A conversation with John Gray

July 14, 2005 – 10:17 am

Two years ago, I interviewed John Gray for The Philosophers’ Magazine just after the publication of his short book, Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern. Our conversation was wide-ranging and, since some of it touches on the distinctive nature of Islamist ideology, it seemed a good idea to post the transcript [...]

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Getting liberal toleration right

April 28, 2005 – 10:15 pm

I’ve only just caught up with this splendid piece by Michael Lynch in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Lynch is concerned to correct a misapprehension about the fundamental liberal principles of equality and tolerance—a misapprehension under which he correctly sees some liberals, as well as their conservative and communitarian critics, labouring:
In my view, the reason [...]

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Religion and democracy

January 25, 2005 – 10:08 pm

“Is religious identity special?” This is a question Amy Gutman poses in her excellent new-ish book, Identity in Democracy. And of course it’s a question many people have been asking themselves recently.
Gutman is not only concerned with religion in this book, but more generally with the “uneasy place” that “identity groups” of different kinds occupy [...]

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