Liberalism with Honor - Hardcover

Krause, Sharon R

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674007565 ISBN 13: 9780674007567

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2002

Synopsis

Why do men and women sometimes risk everything to defend their liberties? What motivates principled opposition to the abuse of power? In Liberalism with Honor, Sharon Krause explores honor as a motive for risky and difficult forms of political action. She shows the sense of honor to be an important source of such action and a spring of individual agency more generally.

Krause traces the genealogy of honor, including its ties to conscientious objection and civil disobedience, beginning in old-regime France and culminating in the American civil rights movement. She examines the dangers intrinsic to honor and the tensions between honor and modern democracy, but demonstrates that the sense of honor has supported political agency in the United States from the founders to democratic reformers such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Honor continues to hold interest and importance today because it combines self-concern and personal ambition with principled higher purposes, and so challenges the disabling dichotomy between self-interest and self-sacrifice that currently pervades both political theory and American public life.

About this title

About the Author

Sharon R. Krause is Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence and Professor of Political Science at Brown University.

Edition details

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0674007565
• ISBN 13: 9780674007567
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288