Liberalism and the New Europe (Avebury Series in Philosophy)

This book examines some of the central intellectual assumptions of liberalism and offers a critique of selected examples of its political practice. In including an international and multidisciplinary range of articles with a common philosophical theme, it seeks to raise questions about the development of liberalism in ’post-communist’ Europe. It will thus be of interest to political and moral philosophers; political and social scientists; and those interested in current sociological and political developments in central and eastern Europe. Among the issues discussed are the bases of liberalism’s conceptions of rationality and the individual; its relations with feminism and democracy; its claim to political victory, as viewed from the UK and the Czech Republic; its understanding of welfare, the environment and the economy; and some examples of its allegedly non-ideological neutrality, in relation to British higher education, the Czech civil service and the place of women in Lithuanian society.