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important for political thought and political practice, but which itself is deeply unsettling to many. Indeed, as we shall see, it is even unsettling to many value pluralists. The second is that an examination of the concept of freedom may well provide the key to understanding the trajectory we have uncovered in Shklar's work: that is, her transition over time from value pluralism to value monism. We have already seen how the liberalism of fear is based on not just a value monist approach to moral conflict but also a value monist conception of freedom
narrative frameworks. 13 The critical theory of rupture and collective memory that I present in this chapter is an exercise in theoretical development, not in hermeneutical interpretation. I therefore treat the thinkers of the Frankfurt School as part of a unified tradition that seeks to transmit ‘a relatively coherent body of political thought and practice from one generation to the next.’ This move is not meant to deny their disagreements. Despite their differences and internal squabbles, I argue that the members of the Frankfurt School all ‘adopted some form of
the purpose of “guiding behaviour efficiently.” See J. Raz, The Authority of Law: Essays on Law and Morality (Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 223. 60 M. Oakeshott, Lectures in the History of Political Thought (Imprint Academic, 2006), p. 473. 61 Oakeshott, On Human Conduct , pp. 180–181. 62 Ibid. , p. 165. 63 Ibid. , p. 141. 64 It would indeed go against the entire tenor of his thought. See M. Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics (Methuen, 1962), in particular the essays “Rationalism in Politics” ( ibid. , 1) and “The Tower of Babel
, ‘Theories of the Media, Theories of Society.’ For an important corrective, see: James Curran, ‘Stuart Hall Redux: His Early Work, 1964–1984’, in Stuart Hall: Conversations, Projects, and Legacies , ed. Julian Henriques, David Morley and Vana Goblot (London: Goldsmiths Press, 2017). 70 Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Viking, 1961), 197–226. Cf. Hannah Arendt, ‘Society and Culture
form of a ‘mobile thought’ rather than a static, ‘theoretical’ one. 63 The will to political creativity is the theme here; a will to expand possibilities of movement, that is, to invent a permanently mobile political thought; or, as in the concepton of Gilles Deleuze, ‘if oppression is so awful, it is because of how it limits movement, rather than because it violates eternal values’. 64 Enlightenment is itself transformation. There is an etymological link between the German term Aufklärung and the idea of a kind of ‘exit’ or ‘way out’. 65 Enlightenment
We have been examining the two opposing approaches to moral conflict that predominate in political thought. For value pluralists, in a situation of moral conflict, when moral claims demand different and incompatible things from us, there is no general rule for its resolution. In contrast, value monists maintain that they have in fact identified the general rule needed to resolve any such conflict. Now, one of the issues about which these two positions sharply diverge concerns the nature and status of our obligation to obey the law. What is
that I have sometimes been guilty of purveying something rather too close for comfort to this somewhat blinkered story myself – Horton , ‘ Toleration ’, in D. Miller (ed.), The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Political Thought ( Oxford : Basil Blackwell , 1986 ). It also seems to play a role in shaping Susan Mendus ’s account in Toleration and the Limits of Liberalism ( London : Macmillan , 1989 ). 3 In Forst’s view, it is Bayle who makes the crucial move that enables the emergence of the respect conception of toleration that Forst himself champions. It
challenge of Proast (who was himself only rehearsing St Augustine) who argued that intolerance could indirectly serve to secure the good by creating the conditions under which the right doctrines might be adopted. Bayle’s greatness has, for most of the history of political thought, gone unrecognised. One of Forst’s most important contributions has been to recover his insights and to try to incorporate them into a modern analysis. So far so good. Sadly, however, Forst goes one step too far (or has one thought too many). Having rescued Bayle’s contribution from relative
incisive examination by Uday Mehta of the focal presence of the Indian colony in the shaping of the very premises of dominant political thought in nineteenth-century Britain, revealing the significance of empire in structuring the “anthropological” propensities of liberal theory. At stake are liberal thought’s fundamental “strategies of exclusion,” resting on projections of the
Introduction Which methodological and substantive issues should define the contours of a critical theory of society in the twenty-first century, and why does the relation between critical theory and sociological theory need to be re-articulated today? Some observers may wish to argue that the need for a critical theory of society has in fact gone with the publication of Jürgen Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action (1981) and the alleged linguistic turn in social and political thought. Advocates of this assessment maintain that critical theory provided