A Critique of Pure Tolerance
A01=Ira Katznelson
Activism
Adam Michnik
Allan Bloom
Antagonistic contradiction
Anti-communism
Author_Ira Katznelson
Bernard Crick
C. Wright Mills
Capitalism
Carlo Rosselli
Category=JPA
Category=JPFF
Category=JPFK
Civil society
Colonialism
Communism
Communitarianism
Counter-revolutionary
Decolonization
Democratic liberalism
Eduard Bernstein
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Eric Hobsbawm
Existentialism
Francis Fukuyama
Herbert Marcuse
Ideology
Imperialism
Individualism
Ira Katznelson
John Rawls
John Stuart Mill
Liberal socialism
Liberalism
Margaret Levi
Marxism
Newspeak
On Liberty
Original position
Orwellian
Overlapping consensus
Perry Anderson
Political Liberalism
Political philosophy
Politics
Popular sovereignty
Post-structuralism
Postmodernism
Public sphere
Racism
Ralf Dahrendorf
Religion
Right to property
Right-wing politics
Robert Nozick
Robin Blackburn
Secularism
Secularization
Social liberalism
Sovereignty
Soviet Empire
Suspension of disbelief
The Closing of the American Mind
The End of Ideology
The Open Society and Its Enemies
The Road to Serfdom
The Wretched of the Earth
Toleration
Totalitarianism
Two Cheers for Democracy
Two Treatises of Government
Utilitarianism
Veil of ignorance
Welfare state
Product details
- ISBN 9780691004471
- Weight: 312g
- Dimensions: 197 x 254mm
- Publication Date: 13 Sep 1998
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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This book is a profoundly moving and analytically incisive attempt to shift the terms of discussion in American politics. It speaks to the intellectual and political weaknesses within the liberal tradition that have put the United States at the mercy of libertarian, authoritarian populist, nakedly racist, and traditionalist elitist versions of the right-wing; and it seeks to identify resources that can move the left away from the stunned intellectual incoherence with which it has met the death of Bolshevism. In Ira Katznelson's view, Americans are squandering a tremendous ethical and political opportunity to redefine and reorient the liberal tradition. In an opening essay and two remarkable letters addressed to Adam Michnik, who is arguably East Europe's emblematic democratic intellectual, Katznelson seeks to recover this possibility. By examining issues that once occupied Michnik's fellow dissidents in the Warsaw group known as the Crooked Circle, Katznelson brings a fresh realism to old ideals and posits a liberalism that "stares hard" at cruelty, suffering, coercion, and tyrannical abuses of state power.
Like the members of Michnik's club, he recognizes that the circumference of liberalism's circle never runs smooth and that tolerance requires extremely difficult judgments. Katznelson's first letter explores how the virtues of socialism, including its moral stand on social justice, can be related to liberalism while overcoming debilitating aspects of the socialist inheritance. The second asks whether liberalism can recognize, appreciate, and manage human difference. Situated in the lineage of efforts by Richard Hofstadter, C. Wright Mills, and Lionel Trilling to "thicken" liberalism, these letters also draw on personal experience in the radical politics of the 1960s and in the dissident culture of East and Central Europe in the years immediately preceding communism's demise. Liberalism's Crooked Circle could help foster a substantive debate in the American elections of 1996 and determine the contents of that desperately needed discussion.
Ira Katznelson is Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History at Columbia University.
