Zimbabwe: The Death of a Dream, Lessons for South Africa

Jim Peron

James Peron

Amagi

Forty years after its original publication, Liberty Fund brings back to print Henry Veatch’s path-breaking popular presentation of virtue ethics. This modern interpretation of Aristotelian ethics is a natural for undergraduate philosophy courses. It is also an engaging work for the expert and the beginner alike, offering a middle ground between existential and analytic ethics. Veatch argues for the existence of ethical knowledge, and he reasons that this knowledge is grounded in human nature. Yet he contends that the moral life is not merely one of following rules or recipes, nor is human well-being something simple. Rather, the moral life, which Veatch calls rational or intelligent living,” is the life of practical wisdom where individual judgment of the particular and the contingent is paramount. Veatch’s Rational Man offers a pluralistic understanding of human well-being without lapsing into moral relativism. For those interested in morality and liberty, Rational Man offers fertile ground for developing an account of free and responsible persons. It has profoundly influenced the work of Den Uyl, Campbell, Machan, Miller, Mack, and many others. Henry Babcock Veatch (19111999) was born in Evansville, Indiana, and educated at Harvard. He was recognized as one of the leading neo-Aristotelian philosophers of the twentieth century. Besides Rational Man, he was the author of Intentional Logic; Realism and Nominalism Revisited; Aristotle: A Contemporary Appreciation; and many others.

Rational Man: A Modern Interpretation of Aristotelian Ethics

Politics & Social Sciences

Veatch, Henry Babcock

Philosophy

The Present Age challenges readers to reexamine the role of the United States in the world since World War I. Nisbet criticizes Americans for isolationism at home, discusses the gutting of educational standards, the decay of education, the presence of government in all facets of life, the diminished connection to community, and the prominence of economic arrangements driving everyday life in America. This work is deeply indebted to the analyses of Tocqueville and Bryce regarding the threats that bureaucracy, centralization, and creeping conformity pose to liberty and individual independence in the western world. The Present Age relates a tragedy—the unprecedented militarization of American life in the decades after 1914, as the result of the necessary resistance to National Socialist and Communist totalitarianism that fed into and reinforced the profound tendencies toward centralization within modern society. Robert Nisbet (1913–1996), former professor of sociology at Columbia University, is the author of Sociology as an Art Form; The Social Philosophers; Prejudices: A Philosophical Dictionary; The Sociological Tradition; History of the Idea of Progress; and Twilight of Authority, also published by Liberty Fund.

The Present Age: Progress and Anarchy in Modern America

History

NISBET, ROBERT

Americas

Christianity and Classical Culture is considered one of the great works of scholarship published in the last century. The theme of Christianity and Classical Culture is the fundamental change in thought and action that occurred from the reign of Augustus to the time of Augustine. The classical world sought to practice politics and understand the world in purely rational terms, but the difficulties of this program were already evident as Christianity began developing a completely new understanding of the human world. It is from this revolution in ideas that our modern world was forged. W. H. Auden wrote of an earlier edition in The New Republic: “Since the appearance of the first edition in 1940, I have read this book many times, and my conviction of its importance to the understanding not only of the epoch with which it is concerned, but also of our own, has increased with each rereading.” Charles Norris Cochrane (1889–1945) was educated at the University of Toronto and Oxford (Corpus Christi College) and taught at the University of Toronto.

Christianity and Classical Culture: A Study of Thought and Action from Augustus to Augustine

Cochrane, Charles Norris

World

Liberty and American Experience in the Eighteenth Century presents ten new essays on central themes of the American Founding period by some of today’s preeminent scholars of American history. The writers explore various aspects of the zeitgeist, among them Burke’s theories on property rights and government, the relations between religious and legal understandings of liberty, the significance of Protestant beliefs on the founding, the economic background to the Founders’ thought on governance, moral sense theory contrasted with natural rights, and divisions of thought on the nature of liberty and how it was to be preserved. The articles provide a rich basis for discussion of the American Founding, its background, and its development over the first few decades of the United States’ existence. David Womersley is Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. His most recent book is Divinity and State.

Liberty and American Experience in the Eighteenth Century

With The Moral Foundation of Democracy, John H. Hallowell makes a significant argument in favor of the importance of moral values in the orderly functioning of modern democracies. Hallowell begins with a survey of the role that classical liberalism and faith in man as a reasonable, moral, and spiritual actor played in the emergence of democratic self-government. He sharply criticizes positivist thought and moral relativism as direct challenges to the notion that transcendent truths guide individuals in their actions and influence how people participate in a democratic society. Hallowell reminds us that at its core, a well-functioning democracy must be based on a fundamental respect for the dignity of the individual. John H. Hallowell taught political science for forty years at Duke University and was chair of the department from 1964 to 1971. He died in 1991. In addition to this work, Hallowell also wrote The Decline of Liberalism as an Ideology (1943) and Main Currents in Modern Political Thought (1950).

The Moral Foundation of Democracy

Hallowell, John H.

Constitutionalism: Ancient and Modern explores the very roots of liberty by examining the development of modern constitutionalism from its ancient and medieval origins. Derived from a series of lectures delivered by Charles Howard McIlwain at Cornell University in the 1938–39 academic year, these lectures provide a useful introduction to the development of modern constitutional forms. Charles Howard McIlwain won the Pulitzer Prize in 1924 for his constitutional analysis of the American Revolution.

Constitutionalism: Ancient and Modern

McIlwain, Charles Howard

Legal History

In this work William Henry Chamberlin offers his perspective as a seasoned journalist on the United States’ involvement in World War II. Written only five years after the unconditional surrenders of Germany and Japan, the book is a window into its time. William Henry Chamberlin (18971969) was an American journalist best known for his writings on the Cold War, Communism, and U.S. foreign policy.

America’s Second Crusade

Chamberlin, William Henry

Military

The Roots of Liberty is a critical collection of essays on the origin and nature of the often elusive idea of liberty. The essays address early medieval developments, encompassing such seminal issues as the common-law mind of the sixteenth century under the Tudor monarchs, the struggle for power and authority between the Stuart kings and Parliament in the seventeenth century, and the role of the ancient constitution in the momentous legal and constitutional debate that occurred between the Glorious Revolution and the American Declaration of Independence. Ellis Sandoz is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Eric Voegelin Institute at Louisiana State University.

The Roots of Liberty: Magna Carta, Ancient Constitution, and the Anglo-American Tradition of Rule of Law

In The Representation of Business in English Literature, five scholars of different periods of English literature produce original essays on how business and businesspeople have been portrayed by novelists, starting in the eighteenth century and continuing to the end of the twentieth century. The contributors to Representation help readers understand the partiality of the various writers and, in so doing, explore the issue of what determines public opinion about business. Arthur Pollard (1922-2001) was Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Hull in Hull, East Yorkshire, England. John Blundell is General Director of the Institute of Economic Affairs, London.

The Representation of Business in English Literature

Business & Money

Economics

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