Description
Liberty: God's Gift to Humanityis a defense of liberalism, the political philosophy which holds that governments should be established for the protection of individual liberty. By means of revisiting the thinking of the men who created liberal theory over the past three centuries, author Chana Cox has demonstrated that historically the bond between liberalism and religion has been strong, and that liberals have embraced virtue, encouraged social control, and increased the common good.
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Cox (humanities, Lewis and Clark College) examines the bonds between liberalism and religion, asserting that when that bond is gone liberalism withers and religion becomes tyrannical. Working from the notion that liberalism establishes governments for the protection of individual liberty and that religion provides the framework of justice within that liberty, Cox works through the thought of Hobbes, Locke and their critics, the eighteenth century commitment to utilitarianism, Adam Smith's contributions to the idea that freedom is a science, the meeting of individual liberty and free market capitalism, the nineteenth century concept of unbound individualism, and the strange and often horrifying turns the concept of individualism took in the twentieth century. Cox closes with an evaluation of what we are likely to experience as we seek to resolve issues about culture and individualism. Annotation ©2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
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