Liberal Moments: Reading Liberal Texts

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This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Liberalism today has perhaps more supporters and adversaries than any other political movement. This volume traces liberalisms global ascent through essays about some of the thinkers and actors who participated in its rise and spread. The essays included here present for the first time in one place the geographic and ideological diversity of liberal thought and practice as it developed since the eighteenth century. By exploring thinkers as diverse as Montesquieu, Abraham Lincoln, Jacob Burckhardt, Khayr al-Din, Hu Shih, John Rawls, and Czeslaw Milosz, this volume contributes toward a better understanding of liberalisms past and present. Each chapter opens with a critical passage from the author under consideration and explores the authors significance for liberalism. By facilitating a direct encounter with influential authors and texts, the volume serves as an introduction both to the multiple dimensions of liberalism and to reading texts in political thought. By engaging with particular liberal moments, the essays allow readers to create and explore conversations among liberalisms across time and space. It thus encourages a broader and more nuanced understanding of the nature and history of liberalism. Stimulating, accessible and interdisciplinary, Liberal Moments will appeal to students and scholars in the history of political thought, intellectual history and beyond.

Reviews

This is an outstanding collection of essays on the 'great thinkers' of the 'liberal tradition'. Introductory, yet also sophisticated, they should be of excellent use to both beginners and more advanced readers. * Helena Rosenblatt, Professor of History, the Graduate Center, CUNY, USA *
Liberal Moments is unique in what it offers the reader. The range of authors, genres, disciplines, continents and countries covered is spectacular, as is the imaginativeness of the whole project. Written by distinguished and internationally renowned specialists in each case, the essays in the volume provide most valuable food for thought. * Georgios Varouxakis, Professor of the History of Political Thought, Queen Mary University of London, UK *

Author Bio

Ewa Atanassow is Junior Professor at Bard College Berlin. She is the co-editor of Tocqueville and the Frontiers of Democracy (2013). Alan S. Kahan is Professor of British Civilization at the Universit de Versailles/St. Quentin-en-Yvelines, and a member of the faculty at Sciences Po St. Germain-en-Laye, France. He is the author of Mind versus Money: The War Betwen Intellectuals and Capitalism (2010), Alexis de Tocqueville (2010) in Bloomsbury's Major Conservative and Libertarian Thinkers series, Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century Europe (2003) and Aristocratic Liberalism (1992).