Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- About the Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction: The Making and Unmaking of Boundaries
- THE JEWISH TRADITION
- THE CONFUCIAN TRADITION
- THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
- THE NATURAL LAW TRADITION
- THE ISLAMIC TRADITION
- THE LIBERAL TRADITION
- 12 The Making and Unmaking of Boundaries: What Liberalism Has to Say
- 13 Liberalism and Boundaries: A Response to Allen Buchanan
- THE INTERNATIONAL LAW TRADITION
- CONCLUSION
- Index
13 - Liberalism and Boundaries: A Response to Allen Buchanan
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 November 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- About the Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction: The Making and Unmaking of Boundaries
- THE JEWISH TRADITION
- THE CONFUCIAN TRADITION
- THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
- THE NATURAL LAW TRADITION
- THE ISLAMIC TRADITION
- THE LIBERAL TRADITION
- 12 The Making and Unmaking of Boundaries: What Liberalism Has to Say
- 13 Liberalism and Boundaries: A Response to Allen Buchanan
- THE INTERNATIONAL LAW TRADITION
- CONCLUSION
- Index
Summary
It is not easy to give a clear account of what liberalism has to say about the making and unmaking of boundaries. This is not because liberal political philosophers, taken individually, have not developed clear positions, but because liberalism itself is so protean a phenomenon that any general statement one makes is likely to bring counter-examples instantly to mind. So a first step might be to find a way of classifying different versions of liberalism. One familiar contrast is the political division between classical (minimal-state, free market) and modern (welfare-state, interventionist) forms of liberalism. Another is the philosophical division between rights-based, contractarian, utilitarian, perfectionist, and other modes of justifying liberal principles. However, for present purposes, I believe that a third kind of distinction may prove to be more illuminating. One could call this a methodological distinction, a contrast in the way liberals see the whole enterprise of constructing a liberal political theory. The contrast I want to draw here is between forms of liberalism that are essentially individualistic and those that we might like to call sociological.
Individualistic liberals see their task as one of designing a social order that respects the free agency of individuals. They begin with persons viewed as having certain capacities, notably the capacity for autonomous choice, and ask what kind of social and political relations will show proper respect for such persons. Very often this involves endowing individuals with inalienable rights that protect their capacities, though it is not essential to this view that it be rights-based.
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- States, Nations and BordersThe Ethics of Making Boundaries, pp. 262 - 272Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003
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