Liberalism Defended: The Challenge of Post-Modernity,

by Douglas B. Rasmussen and Douglas J. Den Uyl (1998)

Liberalism is today under serious intellectual attack. It is said to undermine its own principles, to have lost any strong claims to universal validity, and to foster injustice and inhumanity. Professors Rasmussen and Den Uyl take up this challenge to liberalism. They show that liberalism is not locked into traditional ways of understanding itself and has the capacity to enrich itself by intellectual traditions not usually associated with liberalism.

Rather than resorting to moral skepticism or moral minimalism, Rasmussen and Den Uyl employ a distinction between normative and 'metanormative' principles. The latter are more directly tied to politics and concern principles that establish social/political conditions under which full moral conduct can take place. The authors support their distinction through a novel use of neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics, and they show its importance when they specifically address the positions of two leading critics of liberalism - John Gray and Alasdair MacIntyre.

Read Reviews of this Paper:

Tibor R. Machan, Auburn University
David Gordon, The Mises Review, Spring 1999