Abstract
This chapter surveys the historical and political processes that have produced and informed the centrality of freedom in Western liberal philosophy. It begins with an analysis of the freedom argument, its roots, rationale, and manifestation in modern liberal practices. The chapter argues that in the processes of reformulating the notion of the good-life argument of classical liberalism, justice was alienated from the realm of politics and amalgamated into the fringe of ethics. The history of these composite and complex categories matters in understanding the problem of globalized liberalism. Political Islam idealizes literal conceptions of justice and equality, while neo-liberalism upholds individual freedom in its extreme forms of inequality and the mere pursuit of happiness.
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Notes
- 1.
I have heard this simplistic answer from many Islamist interviewees in Sudan, Tunisia, Yemen, and Egypt.
- 2.
Aristotle, The Politics. Edited and translated by Ernest Barker (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946) Book III, chap. ix, p. 1280b.
- 3.
Al-Sheikh Abu ‘Abbas Ahmad ibn Khalid al-Nasiri, Kitaab al-IStiqSaa: li Akhbaar Duwal al-Maghrib al-AqSa. Volume 7 (Morocco, Casablanca: Dar al-Kitaab, 2013), 114–115.
- 4.
Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Anchor books, 2000).
- 5.
J. L. Mackie, Ethics (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 169.
- 6.
Ibid., 170.
- 7.
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (Glasgow: Collins Sons & Co. Ltd, 1962), 135.
- 8.
Cass R. Sunstein, John & Harriet: Still Mysterious, The New York Review of Books, April 2, 2015.
- 9.
Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 29.
- 10.
Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002) 111.
- 11.
Michael Walzer, Thinking Politically: Essays in Political Theory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 68.
- 12.
A good example of this may be Manifest Destiny as American settlers pushed Native Americans from their lands in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries onward.
- 13.
Quoted in Emmanuel Levinas Basic Philosophical Writings. Edited by Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996), 161.
- 14.
It is true that slavery was condemned absolutely only in the 1800s (referring to the Catholic Church—Pope Gregory XVI and Pope Leo XIII), but there were movements in Christianity that started to work against it much earlier.
- 15.
Brad Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Belknap Press, 2012), 253.
- 16.
Review Bryan Turner, Citizenship and Capitalism: the Debate Over Reformism (London: Allen and Unwin, 1986).
- 17.
Hillaire Belloc, The Servile State (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1946).
- 18.
Bryant Turner, “Outline of a Theory of Citizenship,” In Sociology (1990) (24): 190.
- 19.
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 11.
- 20.
Alan Brown, Modern Political Philosophy (London: Penguin Books, 1987), 58.
- 21.
Op. cit., Rawls, 118.
- 22.
Ziyad Husami, “Marx on Distributive Justice,” In Marx, Justice, and History, (Ed.) Marshall Cohen, Thomas Nagel, and Thomas Scanlon (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2014), 42.
- 23.
This is generally true of modern Western thought, but not of traditional Western thought. Figures such as Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas advocated an idea of objective good and evil, right and wrong.
- 24.
The Collected Dialogues of Plato. Edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (New York: Pantheon Books, 1961), 174.
- 25.
Idem.
- 26.
Thabo Mbeki and Mahmood Mamdani “Courts Can’t End Civil Wars,” In New York Times, Feb. 5, 2014. Accessed on March 11, at http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/06/opinion/courts-cant-end-civil-wars.html?_r=0.
- 27.
A.B.K. Kasozi, The Social Origins of Violence in Uganda 1964–1985 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), 30+.
- 28.
Miriam Cooke, Tribal Modern: Branding New Nations in the Arab Gulf (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014).
- 29.
Ibid., 23.
- 30.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2000), Volumes One, Part I, Chap. 3.
- 31.
John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government and Letters on Toleration are the founding documents of liberalism. As observed by John Quiggin, Locke was against the doctrine of freedom, a defender of expropriation and enslavement. Read John Quiggin, “Locke Against Freedom,” In Published in Reason For Revolt Jacobin on June 25th, 2015. Accessed on April 25, 2017 at https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/06/locke-treatise-slavery-private-property/.
- 32.
Falguni A. Sheth, Toward a Political Philosophy of Race (New York: Suny Press, 2009), 81.
- 33.
Roger W. Wilkins, Jefferson’s Pillow: The Founding Fathers and the Dilemma of Black Patriotism (New York: Beacon Press, 2002).
- 34.
John T. Noonan, Persons and Masks of the Law (Berkeley: University of California, 2002), 21.
- 35.
John Hope Franklin, The Militant South (1800–1861) (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press., 1956), 98.
- 36.
John Noonan, Persons and Masks of the Law (Los Angeles: University of California Press), 49.
- 37.
Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York, 1994), 416.
- 38.
For more details on Arab economic setback, read Gilbert Achcar, The People Want (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 7–35.
- 39.
United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
- 40.
Patrick Cockburn, “Emir of Qatar Deposed by his Son,” In The Independent: December 07, 2014. Accessed on December 7, 2014 at http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/emir-of-qatar-deposed-by-his-son-1588698.html.
- 41.
Based on author’s calculation of data from database: World Development Indicators of 2013.
- 42.
Even the attempt of Southern Yemen to establish a Marxist state in 1969 was a short-lived experience.
- 43.
Hazem Beblawi “the Rentier States in the Arab World.” In Hazem Beblawi and Giacomo Luciani (Eds.), The Rentier State (New York: Croom Helm, 1987), 51.
- 44.
President Bush cited in Peter Nolan, Capitalism and Freedom: The Contradictory Character of Globalisation (London: Anthem Press, 2008), 17.
- 45.
Quoted in Ebe Chandler McCabe Jr., Celtic Warrior Descendants: A Genetic and Cultural History of a Rural American Family (iUniverse, 2011), 120.
- 46.
Natan Sharansky, The Case for Democracy: the Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror (New York: Public Affairs, 2004).
- 47.
Ibid., 96.
- 48.
Daniel Brumberg, Amy Hawthorne, Carothers, and Ottaway, “Democratic Mirage in the Middle East,” In Critical Mission (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2004).
- 49.
Adam Hanieh, Lineages of Revolt Issues of Contemporary Capitalism in the Middle East (Illinois: Haymarket Books Chicago, 2013), 146.
- 50.
Ibid., 47.
- 51.
Ibid., 2.
- 52.
David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); see Chap. 4.
- 53.
Ibid., 80.
- 54.
John Rapley, Globalization and Inequality: Neoliberalism’s Downward Spiral (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers Inc., 2004), 63–64.
- 55.
Amartya Sen, op. cit.
- 56.
Steven Weinberg, Facing Up: Science and Its Cultural Adversaries (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 120.
- 57.
Guy Gran, Development by People: Citizen Construction of a Just World (Praeger Publishers Inc., 1983).
- 58.
David Harvey, op. cit., 177.
- 59.
Bush, George W. “Address to a Joint Session of Congress.” Washington Post. The Washington Post, September 20, 2001. Web. 28 August 2015. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpsrv/nation/specials/attacked/transcripts/bushaddress_092001.html.
- 60.
Alexis de Tocqueville, op. cit., 57.
- 61.
Quoted in Abdul Wahab Abdussalam Tawila and Muhammad Amin Shakir Halwani, ‘Alamiyyatu al-Islam Wa Rasail al-Nabiy ila al-Muluk wa al-Umara (Damascus: Dar al-Qalam, 2003), 112.
- 62.
See Hafiz Ibn Kathir, Al-Bidaya wa al-Nihayah (Beirut: Maktabat al-Ma’arif, 1990): Volume 6: 75.
- 63.
Loren D. Lybarger, Identity and Religion in Palestine: The Struggle between Islamism and Secularism in the Occupied Territories (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2012).
- 64.
Read “The Popular Discourses of Salafi Radicalism and Salafi Counter-radicalism in Nigeria: A Case Study of Boko Haram.” In Brill Journal of Religion in Africa, 2012: 42 (2): 118–144.
- 65.
Amidu Sanni “Jihadist and Salafi Discourses in Sudanic Africa: Boko Haram and the Emerging Terror Network in Muslim West Africa.” In Dirasat: No 17. King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies: November 2016.
- 66.
Sarah Eltantawi, Shari’ah on Trial: Northern Nigeria’s Islamic Revolution (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017).
- 67.
Thomas Olesen, “From National Event to Transnational Injustice Symbol: The Three Phases of the Muhammad Cartoons Controversy.” In Lorenzo Bosi, Chares Demetriou, and Stefan Malthaner (Eds.), Dynamics of Political Violence: A Process-Oriented Perspective on Radicalization and the Escalation of Political Conflict (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), pp. 217–236.
- 68.
Reproduced, permission of the publisher, from Poetry of the Taliban, edited by Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn, London, Hurst, 2012.
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Lo, M. (2019). From Liberal Freedom to Neo-liberal Inequality: The History of the Freedom Agenda. In: Political Islam, Justice and Governance. Political Economy of Islam. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96328-0_2
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