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Autonomy and Liberal Democracy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Sanford Lakoff
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Extract

Continuing philosophic doubt concerning the moral foundations of human rights threatens to undermine the growing belief in liberal democracy. This doubt has its roots in the reaction against the Enlightenment and is evident even in John Rawls's retreat from the apparent universalism of his theory of justice. There are good grounds, however, for regarding the traditional Western belief in moral and political autonomy as a sound basis for human rights and liberal democracy.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 52 , Issue 3 , Summer 1990 , pp. 378 - 396
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1990

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References

Notes

1. Ever the Orlando Furioso of American expatriates, he adds: “It is a TV-revolution we are witnessing, a rush towards the ‘California-promise’ that America has offered to the common man on this tired earth. American standards of dress, nourishment, locomotion, entertainment, housing are today the concrete Utopia in revolutions…. The new temples to liberty … will be McDonald's and Kentucky Fried Chicken” (George Steiner, “The State of Europe,” Granta 30 (Winter 1990): 130). Anthony Lewis, who brought Steiner's remarks to American attention in The New York Times (1 June 1990), rightly criticizes Steiner for being “far too cynical in his dismissal of the longing for political freedom.”

2. Fukuyama, Francis, “The End of History?” The National Interest, no. 16 (Summer 1989), pp. 3–18.Google Scholar

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4. See Rawls, John, “Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory: The Dewey Lectures 1980,” Journal of Philosophy 77, no. 9 (09 1980): 515–57.Google Scholar

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8. Ibid., p. 230.

9. Ibid., p. 227.

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12. The division was first noted by Ernest Lavisse, a contemporary observer, in 1899. See Brédin, Jean–denis, The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus, trans. Mehlman, Jeffrey (New York: George Braziller, 1986), p. 538.Google Scholar

13. Megill, Allan, Prophets of Extremity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 340.Google Scholar

14. Farrar, Cynthia, The Origins of Democratic Thinking: The Invention of Politics in Classical Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 103.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid., p. 104.

18. Ibid., p. 105.

19. Ibid., p. 106.

20. Cassirer, Ernst, Kant's Life and Thought, trans. Haden, James (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981), pp. 243–44.Google Scholar Quotation from Kant is from the Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, first section.

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24. Pennock, J. Roland, Democratic Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 219.Google Scholar For a similar view redefining the link between liberalism and autonomy, see Raz, Joseph, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), esp. pp. 400–429.Google Scholar

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