- Hardcover: 400 pages
- Publisher: University of Missouri (Mar 20 1997)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0826210821
- ISBN-13: 978-0826210821
- Product Dimensions: 2.4 x 1.7 x 0.4 cm
- Shipping Weight: 807 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
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Product Description
Review
"David Walsh has brought to his topic not only the breadth of learning of an accomplished scholar but the spiritual sensitivity of a mature personality. This is very rare at any time and is virtually nonexistent today. Accordingly, The Growth of the Liberal Soul promises to be a major addition to political philosophy. The topic is important and Walsh's analysis of it is superb."--Barry Cooper
Product Description
In The Growth of the Liberal Soul, David Walsh confronts a core difficulty of the liberal democratic tradition in explaining and justifying itself. Acknowledging the incompleteness of liberal order as a theoretical explication of its underlying beliefs, Walsh analyzes contemporary debates about the foundations of liberal democratic politics. The widespread abandonment of the search for foundations by John Rawls, Richard Rorty, Michael Oakeshott, and the deconstructionists has been interpreted as signifying the absence of any sustaining inner resources. The result has been the confusion of contemporary liberal democratic self-understanding, which cannot make sense of its own extraordinary historical success nor apparently prevent the evident unraveling of its own moral code. It is this state of crisis from which Walsh's study takes its point of departure.
Unique in combining contemporary political relevance with historical depth, The Growth of the Liberal Soul brings together two approaches that are often treated separately. Walsh elaborates on the existential core of the liberal political tradition by way of an investigation of the historical sources and the raging contemporary debates.
While many scholars have been content to call attention to the dependence of liberal politics on transcendent faith, Walsh studies the progress of experiential reality by which that connection is concretely effected in life. The Growth of the Liberal Soul will be of interest to all readers, especially those interested in the relationship between religion and politics.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting meditation on liberalisms crisis of faith,
By Excerpt from "The Independent Review" (Oakland, CA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Growth of the Liberal Soul (Hardcover)
"There is first of all the difficulty of being heard at all," David Walsh writes in the introduction to his new book on the liberal political tradition, "The Growth of the Liberal Soul." Indeed, Walsh does not enjoy much name recognition in academic political theory, and copies of his book are hard to find. He does not improve his predicament by warning that his distinctive approach to liberal political thought has few if any practitioners today and saying that the "only demonstration" of his thesis consists in patiently "undertaking the journey" traced by the whole book. But as one who was lucky enough to come across Walsh's book and accompany him on the journey, I wish to testify that his contribution to liberal thought should be widely read and taken seriously.According to Walsh, liberal politics is in deep crisis. Liberalism has more or less managed to hold centrifugal forces--namely, those of religion, class, and race--within itself since John Locke's time. But Walsh says that the present crisis is new: "The corrective centripetal forces have all but disappeared" (p. 15). The latitudinarian Judeo-Christian consensus that long served as the moral core of liberal society is now pushed to the margins in service of the dogma of diversity. The prospect of equal opportunity and endless economic growth, which has quelled class divisions for three centuries, now entails great sacrifices of certainty and security. Where once Martin Luther King, Jr., stirred Americans "to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands," God is no longer so publicly available to help bring the races together. Hence the rancor and hollowness of public life have increased.... Much has happened since Locke's time to loosen liberalism from its religious mooring, but Walsh argues that liberalism cannot completely break with its founding father's religious understanding of freedom and remain liberalism. Liberalism is ample enough to honor some non-Christian faiths and even classical Greek philosophy, but the minimum consensus of liberal society must be that each and every human being has a sacred, otherworldly essence--a soul--that is capable of participating in an eternal and divine perspective through moral growth. This intimation of divinity, in human beings and in human life, is the necessary justification for individual dignity and freedom.
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