Liberal Beginnings

Ira Katznelson is Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History, Columbia University. His most recent books are When Affirmative Action Was White (2005) and Desolation and Enlightenment: Political Knowledge After Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Holocaust (2003), which received the David and Helene Spitz Prize and the David Easton Award. Andreas Kalyvas is Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics at The New School for Social Research and the Eugene Lang College for Liberal Arts. He is the recipient of the 2002 Leo Strauss Award for the best doctoral dissertation in the field of political philosophy and the author of Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary: Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, Hannah Arendt (2008).

• 1. Beginnings; 2. The rhetoric of the market: Adam Smith on recognition, speech, and exchange; 3. Adam Ferguson's agonistic liberalism: modern commercial society and the limits of classical republicanism; 4. After the king: Thomas Paine's and James Madison's institutional liberalism; 5. Embracing liberalism: Germaine de Stael's farewell to republicanism; 6. On the liberty of the moderns: Benjamin Constant and the discovery of an immanent liberalism; 7. After republicanism: a coda.

“This is a terrific book. It offers a persuasive reconstruction of liberalism as a complex tradition of political thought, and underscores the importance of such historical understanding to the revitalization of contemporary political theory and contemporary political science." -Jeffrey C. Isaac, Indiana University, Bloomington