The Radical Critique of Liberalism: In Memory of a Vision

Despite political theorists' repeated attempts to demonstrate their incoherence, liberal values appear to have withstood the test of time. Indeed, engagement with them has become the meeting point of the different political philosophical traditions. But should radical critique justifiably become a thing of the past? Should political philosophy now be conducted in the light of the triumph of liberalism? These are the wider questions that the book takes up in an attempt to demonstrate the intellectual power of systemic critique in the tradition of Hegel. Working through the theories of prominent liberal theorists, John Rawls, Jeremy Waldron, Charles Larmore and Will Kymlicka, the author demonstrates that an adequate appreciation of the deep structural flaws of liberal theory presupposes the application of critical reconstructionism, a philosophical methodology that has the power to reveal the systemic interconnections within and between the varieties of liberal inquiring practices. In the absence of such a methodology liberalism's radically aspiring critics, whether communitarian, feminist, discourse ethicist, post-Marxist or postcolonial, have yet to trace the individualist commitment of liberal theory back to its source in liberal inquiring practices.