The Propriety of Liberty (ebook)

Argumento de The Propriety of Liberty (ebook)

"This is a challenging but also deeply rewarding book. Kelly's command of the literature, the intelligence of his argument, and the level of detail that he offers are truly impressive. The book overflows with interesting insights."--Helena Rosenblatt, Journal of Modern History

"This book emphatically establishes Duncan Kelly's rise to prominence as one of the most subtle scholars of political thought of his generation. Combining his exemplary dual skills as political theorist and historian of ideas, he casts a fresh look over the idea of liberty as a feature of responsible individual agency, uniting the personal and the political. Taking the reader through the works of major political philosophers from Locke to T. H. Green, Kelly offers a challenging counterweight to standard liberal accounts of the evolution of liberty. An intellectual feast to savor."--Michael Freeden, University of Oxford

"Duncan Kelly, an established interpreter of German social thought, here deploys the tools of intellectual history and political theory to reconstruct a vibrant Anglo-French tradition of thinking about situated freedom and responsibility. We can escape sterile categories of liberal and republican, ancient and modern, and negative and positive liberty, Kelly shows, by resuscitating a discourse concerned with responsible agency: the exercise of rational freedom, motivated by the passions, and bounded by historically constituted and shared understandings of justice. The Propriety Of Liberty combines meticulous historical scholarship with ambitious arguments demonstrating the continued salience of these complex and often misunderstood ideas."--James T. Kloppenberg, author of The Virtues Of Liberalism

"The Propriety of Liberty is an erudite and original study of an immensely important yet neglected aspect of the history of liberty in early modern and modern political thought: the relationships among liberty, character formation, and propriety. I recommend it to anyone interested in the history of these interconnected concepts."--James Tully, University of Victoria

"This deep, rich, and original book carves out a distinctive approach to freedom which will reshape the current contours of inquiry. In addition, it offers fresh and subtle interpretations of selfhood and self-ownership, and of the relationships between passions, persons, publicity, and judgement."--Hannah Dawson, University of Edinburgh

"This is an excellent book. Broad in scope and admirably steeped in the literatures it treats, Kelly's recovery of a tradition of theorizing about liberty as propriety will be of interest to a wide range of political theorists, historians of ideas, and philosophers engaged in questions of freedom and agency."--Ryan Patrick Hanley, Marquette University

"In the face of these obstacles, Kelly not only constructs a synthetic counter-narrative, he does so while embedding each writer in an almost unmanageably large body of current secondary scholarship and within the entire history of political thought. The result is an admirable demonstration of the power of intellectual history in the service of political theory. . . . Finally, this fine work makes the larger argument that political theory must incorporate all three of its 'languages'--philosophy, history and theology--into the moral psychology of freedom."--Eldon J. Eisenach, History of Political Thought Journal

"The Propriety of Liberty is a signal achievement in clarifying the contours of modern political and moral thinking about individual freedom and responsible agency in society."--Hussein Banai, Political Studies Review0Acknowledgements ix
Abbreviations xiii

Introduction: The Propriety of Liberty 1
The Self at Liberty 6
Liberty and Political Theory 9
Structure 12

Chapter One: "That glorious fabrick of liberty": John Locke, the Propriety of Liberty and the Quality of Responsible Agency 20
Propriety, Prudence and Interpretation 21
John Locke and Pierre Nicole: Language, Prudence and
the Propriety of the Passions 24
Liberty and the Will 41
Persons, Passions and Judgement 46
Liberty and Personal Identity 53

Chapter Two: Passionate Liberty and Commercial Selfhood: Montesquieu's Political Theory of Moderation 59
Justice 61
Lessons in Classics: Politics, Friendship and Despotism 68
The Passions of the Soul and the Actions of the Machine 82
Moderation and Soulcraft: The Action of Passionate
Selfhood 88
Legislative Passions and Civil Religion 94
Commercial Society and Political Liberty 105

Chapter Three:"The True Propriety of Language": Persuasive Mediocrity, Imaginative Delusion and Adam Smith's Political Theory 117
Persuasive Agency 119
Sympathy and Propriety 128
A Passion for Justice: Smith's Political Theory 141
The Origins of Government and the Paradoxes
of Political Liberty 159
Conclusions 167

Chapter Four: Taking Things as They Are: John Stuart Mill on the Judgement of Character and the Cultivation of Civilization 173
Liberty by Example 175
Greek Legacies 186
Civilization, Civility, Cooperation 194
Excursus: Republicanism, Radicalism and Representation 204
The Politics of Civilization 210
Propriety in Time 218

Chapter Five: Idealism and the Historical Judgement of Freedom: T. H. Green and the Legacy of the English Revolution 223
Character and Action 226
Reformation and Revolution 234
Enthusiasm and Reform 241
Real Freedom 244
Political Theology 249
The Revolutionary Inheritance 255

Chapter Six: Coda: Liberty as Propriety 259
Problems of Self-Ownership 261
Responsible Agency 269
State Propriety 273

Bibliography 277
Index 341