Liberal Moments: Reading Liberal Texts

Review 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, UKThis 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 Product Description Liberalism today has perhaps more supporters and adversaries than any other political movement. This volume traces liberalism's 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 author's 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. About the Author Dr Kahan is the author of Aristocratic Liberalism (Oxford, 1992) and Liberalism in Nineteenth Century Europe (Palgrave, 2003). He was also co-editor of The Tocqueville Reader (Wiley, 2002).John MorrowisProfessor of Political Studies and Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic) at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He has been a Bye Fellow at Robinson College, Cambridge, a visiting lecturer in the History Faculty at the University of Cambridge, and a visiting fellow at both the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh and the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC.