The paper analyzes the affiliated concepts of nature, mind, society and rights held by late-Victorian and Edwardian new liberals. The theory of society and rights developed by Edwardian intellectuals like L.T. Hobhouse, J.A. Hobson and Graham Wallas may be seen as an elaboration of J.S. Mill's ideas of both nature and liberty, modified by the fin de siecle's concepts of evolution, survival and the irrational. This progressive liberal view of nature and personality may be seen as a theoretical support for the idea of welfare rights. Though it was a particularly 'period' cluster of notions and many of its components seem archaic today, its residues may still be observed in widespread psychological concepts such as individual development, attachment and parental deprivation.
British liberal feminists were wont to align their call for women's
rights with an insistence on women's duties. These they in turn saw as
closely associated with civic virtue. Taking Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication
of the Rights of Women as its point of departure, this paper will consider
some of the assumptions that underwrote selected liberal feminists' understanding
of women's rights, women's duties, and civic virtue in the period ca. l790
-l9l4.
Liberty is one of the most universally acknowledged values in world
today. Every language in the world has its own corresponding word
for the English word ‘liberty’. The Japanese word for 'liberty' is
‘Jiyu’. But, once we compare the set of ideas of ‘Jiyu’ with that
of ‘liberty,’ we easily recognize that the two sets of ideas do not entirely
overlap each other. With this reflection in mind, the paper tries
to restate the characteristics of the Western concept of liberty.
It says that the core meaning of the term liberty in the West, from the
days of Ancient Greek ‘eleutheria’ up until at least the end of the eighteenth
century, has been one’s condition as well as ability to do something good
without being subjected to the will of others. It then asks whether
or not this essentially teleological concept of liberty has changed to
a more neutral one when, for example, B. Constant distinguished modern
liberty from the ancient one, or when Sir Isaiah Berlin proposed his concept
of negative liberty.
The British Idealist philosopher Bernard Bosanquet (1848-1923) elaborates
a theory of freedom which is structured around the metaphysical foundations
of his theorising. For him, freedom is an intrinsic quality of the nature
of the human being that, in its real or completed form, is associated with
the effort of the finite human individual to transcend the inherent limitations
of his/her constitution and to attain a state of ontological completion
or perfection. Freedom is not one's ability to get what one wants but the
ability to assert the essence of individuality in a complex relational
framework that spiritually defines the meaning of the self in its teleological
association to otherness. The paper endeavours to reconstruct Bosanquet's
theory of freedom and to examine its strengths and limitations as
an explanatory framework related to the metaphysics of the self.
Kant’s cosmopolitanism continues to be discussed in light of his theory
of international justice and thus is viewed as a label that simply describes
his call for an international federation of states in order to work toward
conditions of perpetual peace. Indeed, in his early political essays,
Kant himself uses the term cosmopolitanism in this manner. In his
later writings, however, including Toward Perpetual Peace and The Metaphysics
of Morals, Kant began to develop a more precise and theoretically distinctive
understanding of cosmopolitan justice. Kant began to articulate a
conception of “cosmopolitan right” [Weltbürgerrecht, or ius cosmopoliticum]
that was conceptually distinct from his two other concepts of “right”:
civil (or domestic) right, which secured both the rule of law and republicanism
at the level of a single state, and international right, which provided
normative criteria for inter-state relations. In this essay, I explain
how the understudied and still widely misunderstood concept of cosmopolitan
right in Kant’s political philosophy refers to the conditions of justice
that should obtain between states and foreigners and between subjects of
different lands. In light of this understanding of cosmopolitan right,
Kant criticized European imperialism and defended non-European peoples
against what he viewed as the arbitrary and destructive powers that were
being exercised by trading companies (such as the British East India Company),
explorers, and other (usually European) travellers who visited (and often
ultimately conquered) foreign lands. The moral and political issues
surrounding refugees and displaced peoples are the contemporary examples
that come closest to Kant’s concern to justify “a right to visit” foreign
lands as long as conditions of cosmopolitan right are respected as well
as the right to expect “hospitable” treatment as strangers and visitors
to foreign lands. This is an aspect of the history of rights and
liberalism that is often overlooked, yet it plays a crucial role in Kant’s
political thought. For Kant, rights should not be theorized only
at the level of a state or at the level of inter-state relations; for true
justice to emerge, rights must also be formulated to protect foreigners
in their interactions with states or quasi-sovereign powers and to protect
those who cross borders.