Liberalism, Conservatism, and the Role of Reason

P ERHAPS the outstanding characteristic of recent American political thought has been its concern with the relation of political theory to epistemology and value theory. This tendency is reflected the development of the view that democratic theory requires and is compatible only with the assumptions and outlook of philosophical relativism and the opposing view that philosophical absolutism provides its necessary foundations. This distinction seems, at the same time, to have come largely to distinguish current liberalism from neo-conservatism their approaches to the problem. Under the influence of the development of positivism generally the liberal view of democracy has come increasingly to rest on philosophical relativism.' As a consequence liberalism often is taken to mean that any concept of the public interest is incompatible with democracy.2 Democracy is held to rest, on the contrary, on the compromise or balance of conflicting group interests. The idea of a public interest is held to be inadmissible because the conflicting values of individuals or groups are, in the last analysis, subjective preferences and thus rationally incommensurable. Compromise, on this view, emerges as the only alternative to coercion the accommodation of conflicting interests where it is divergent values that are at stake

Classical liberalism · Compromise · Conservatism · Democracy · Economics · Epistemology · Law and economics · Liberalism · Moral relativism · Political philosophy · Political science · Politics · Positive economics · Positivism · Relativism · Social science · Sociology · Value (mathematics) · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Law · Philosophy · Political Philosophy and Ethics

• The archaeology of American liberalism

  John G Gunnell•Journal of Political Ideologies•2001

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• Cultural Relativism and the Theory of Value

  Open Access•Gladys Parker Foster, Sir John Lubbock•American Journal of Economics and…•1991

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