Freedom, Capitalism and Religion
Progressive Essays and Thinking on Capitalism and Freedom and Religion
Check out my Blog. Topics I've written about include:
Is There A Right To Die?...
Does Dick Have a Right to His Gun?...
The Right to Smoke in Belmont...
Why Have Liberals Abandonned the Concept of Liberty?
Are Natural Rights Central to the Constitution?
Natural Rights and the Image of God...
The Separation of Church and State
Are We the Workmanship of God?....
Liberty and the Public Good...
Who is a Real Liberal?
About my background
This site is created and maintained by Howard Schwartz, Ph.D. Please feel free to send me your thoughts or ideas: hsaccount@yahoo.com
Historical and Theoretical Essays
I explore and contest the right wing and libertarian view of liberty in a series of essays published on this website. The essays fall into two categories: historical and theoretical perspectives.
History and Liberty
The Theory and Philosophy of Liberty
History and Liberty
There is an interesting and complex relationship between the historical understanding of liberty and rights and the theoretical question of how a liberal society should implement freedom. These essays explore the intersecting historical and theoretical issues involved in thinking about liberty in a free society.
Natural Rights, Jefferson, and the Declaration of Independence.
One of the central questions under debate in recent years concerns the notions of rights embodied in American writings leading up to and embodied in the Declaration of Independence. These essays challenge what have come to be settled ways of thinking about American rights and the Declaration. The essays argue that the pre-revolutionary writers were in fact ambivalent about natural rights in some significant ways and had diverging ideas about the foundation of American rights.
These historically oriented essays, which are part of a book in progress, have implications for the larger way in which Americans think about the rights embodied in the Constitution and American life.
"Thomas Jefferson's Alternative Theory of Rights and the Declaration of Independence" /
"Thomas Jefferson's Alternative Theory of Rights and the Declaration of Independence"
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"Early Ambivalence Towards Natural Rights Theory in the Colonies Before the Revolution"
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"Diverging Theories of Natural Rights Before the Revolution."
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"Precariousness of History:What Do We Know about Jefferson on Locke?"
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The First Contintenal Congress and the Attempt To Achieve Consensus
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Theoretical Essays (thematically)
These essays explore more theoretical questions about the nature of liberty--what it means and should mean to a society that cares about freedom and responsibility. The essays critique the simplistic understandings of liberty that assume freedom necessarily means small government, maximal individual choice and unconstrained markets.
Thematically, the essays cover the following topics.
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"Liberty and the Public Good: Endorsing Suicide and Slavery as Part of a Free Society" (spoof on libertarians and utilitarians view of liberty)
"Why Can't My Daughter Drive A Tank? Reflections on the Meaning of Liberty and Freedom in a Civil Society."
argument that all laws infringe liberty and therefore appeals to "rights" by themselves are meaningless without a framework for deciding what's in and not in liberty.
"Liberty is not Freedom To Do What You Like:
How Notions of Public Good Constrain Liberty In John Locke and the Early Liberty Tradition."
shows that the liberty tradition took values like the public good seriously in understanding the meaning of liberty in a civil society
Why “Market Liberals” Are Not “The True Liberals”
contests the view that market liberals are "the true liberals"
"To Whom is the Corporation Responsible?"
explores notions of corporate social responsibility and particularly the dilemma of defining who are the stakeholders in a corporation
Rethinking Liberty: Reclaiming a Progressive and Liberal View of Liberty These ideas are developed in my blog and in a series of essays on related topic. The right wing conception therefore arrives at problematic conclusions about the nature of modern life and the place of the individual and modern soul in it. An Alternative view of Liberty It is both sides of this equation to which this site is dedicated. It explores and contests the contentions of the right wing conception of liberty. It shows that they are constructions, just like other constructions and ideas, that presuppose a worldview. But more than that they are ideas that are destructive for the modern individual and modern society. It is time to call a spade a spade.
Too much right wing discourse today in political discussion and on the Internet assumes that liberty means, and has always meant, free markets, minimal government and maximum individual rights.
This view represents a mistaken understanding of the liberty tradition and has destructive consequences for modern life.
It is time to contest this view of liberty by offering a more thoughtful and complex understanding of liberty. The alternative view sees liberty and economic freedom as two separate and not necessarily identical traditions that have been conflated.
The alternative view argues:
The Right Wing Misconception of Liberty
The right wing conception of liberty is a distortion of the liberty tradition and a misunderstanding of liberty. This conception relies on:
There are a vast number of intersecting ideas that constitute and prop up the right wing views of liberty. These ideas are partly conceptual, partly historical, and partly philosophical. They are presented of course as "Truth" and as woven into the fabric of reality. But they are of course not. They are one set of constructions of religion, the individual and society. There are others that are more persuasive.
Time To Call A Spade A Spade
It is time to call a "spade a spade." The right wing has had too much control in public discourse of the definitions and conceptions of liberty, religion, and God. It is time for liberals and progressives to fight back and to say "Enough is Enough." The right wing republican view of liberty is just that: a view. And there are other more compelling views.
An alternative view of liberty does not end up with a view that liberty necessarily means "I can do what I want" or "small government". It does not see government as by definition the enemy that is robbing me of my natural rights. It sees instead liberty as one conceptual construction in the modern world along with others that are equally important and critical, such as "responsibility." The alternative view of liberty does not see the rights of people defined once and forever in the past in documents like the Declaration of Independence or the Bible. It sees instead a history of reflections on the meaning of rights and responsibilities that is an ongoing process as society encounters new challenges that it has to deal with.
