Word: lockean
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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WALZER'S political universe is existential and consensual. He takes the Lockean consent-of-the-governed (if not quite the social contract) as a real and serious matter. This seriousness focuses the essays on a procedural rather than substantive ethics. As a tool of analysis, consensual theory can say little about those whose consent is tacit. A silent majority is negative data. Walzer necessarily concentrates on those whose moral initiatives are obvious and visible, as with the radical or dissenting intellectual. Inevitably, and perhaps for the best, he describes a political world as confronted by people like himself...
...even national characteristics in deciding the future of societies. The concepts that people have of national characteristics, of course, are often mere caricatures, but they generally contain some truth, of a subtler variety than meets the eye. The American devotion to individualism and freedom can be exaggerated; yet the Lockean principles of individual liberty and ordered freedom that underlie the U.S. Constitution and indeed U.S. society are related to the American character and the American ideal. The line leading from the czars to Stalin to the Kremlin's present rulers is by no means straight. Still...