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While aligned with John Neville Figgis' pluralism and Marxist socialism, Harold Laski endorsed liberal and democratic values. However, he synthesised several elements from older liberal theories in a way that diluted the division to which these theories had adhered, namely that between the private and the political spheres. The resulting combination preserves privacy's status as the realm where individuals are free to pursue their separate ends, but enables essentially private activities based in voluntary social spaces to infuse the space of politics. From this emerged a vision of liberal democracy, in which freedom plays out in multiple private spaces that do not require an autonomous civic arena to complement them. The combination was reached within the contexts of mid-century thinking about the welfare state and a broader project of reformulating democracy by reducing its equation with representation. Keywords: Harold Laski, liberalism, pluralism, private-public distinction, welfare state, Harold J. Laski was a noted public intellectual in mid-twentieth century Britain. A chair of the Labour Party during that party's transformative tenure in power in the immediate post-war period, [...]

In the past few decades, liberal and democratic thought has been subjected to attacks from the adherents of nationalism, populism, and social radicalism. Much of these attacks involve suspicions about liberalism's association with the contents and purveyors of structured knowledge, scientific and humanistic alike. I suggest that an examination of the history of liberal beliefs may add to our understanding of what is at stake. Such an examination may reveal how liberal thought in the twentieth century shifted away from its earlier individualist and constitutional position towards the pluralist position that grants a special place to educated knowledge, to experts and professionals, and thus invites allegations of elitism. In particular, I focus on the differences between the ideas that conventional liberal authors elaborated during early modernity and the nineteenth century, on the one hand, and the version of liberal values and the polity based on them that were tacitly adopted during the mid-twentieth century, on the other hand. The examination involves highlighting the common denominators of mid-century authors on right, left, and centre, such as Laski, Popper and Hayek, as well as asking what in their shared worldview could attract allegations of elitism from later generations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the discipline of political philosophy and its relevance in society. While political philosophy is often seen as disconnected from the real world and not widely consulted by non-specialists, it can still provide insights into the attitudes of philosophers and the societal context in which they exist. The article discusses the shift in political philosophy towards a focus on ethics and the normative turn, where ethics is prioritized over other considerations. It compares the approaches of philosophers like John Locke and John Rawls, highlighting the move towards more abstract and theoretical arguments in contemporary political philosophy. The text also explores the potential elitism of political philosophy, but argues that its focus on rights and limitations on government power prevent it from becoming a ruling class. It suggests that political philosophy reflects the preferences of the middle class, who prioritize expertise and abstract justice. Ultimately, the aim of political philosophy is to assert its own status and elevate the role of the referee above that of the participant. [Extracted from the article]

The mid-century object relations approach saw the category of schizoids as crucial to its own formation. Rooted in a developmental phase where the perception of the mother as a whole and real person had not yet been secured, the schizoid constitution impeded relationships and forced schizoids to communicate through a compliant persona while the kernel self remained isolated. Fairbairn, Winnicott, and Guntrip thought that schizoid features underlay many other pathologies that earlier, Freudian psychoanalysis had misidentified. To correct this, a move to the attachment-oriented theory was necessary, triggering the development of the object relations perspective as a distinct and independent approach. While playing this role in the development of object relations theory, the schizoid category also attracted a note of disapproval. Fairbairn, Winnicott, and Guntrip described schizoids as harmful to society through their everyday actions and through the ideas they propagated. This judgemental nuance highlights an aspect of the alliance between object relations theory and the contemporary welfare state ideology. Culminating in the Beveridge plan, that ideology framed citizenship as comprehensive engagement with society on multiple levels. Citizenship was not just a political activity but also a personally rewarding one, as it allowed expression to each person's wishes in ways that benefited others. Inability to engage and be rewarded in this way marked obstinate classes and produced rigid and conservative ideologies that opposed the welfare state. Object relations theory described the schizoid condition along similar lines and castigated its consequences for similar reasons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay explores liberal feminism by matching Wollstonecraft's and J.S. Mill's works against radical feminist criticism. Though censured by radicals for perceiving society in binary terms modeled on the male-female distinction, liberal feminists subscribe to a worldview that is variegated and dynamic. Liberal feminism does not oppose nature to culture or individuality ot society, but rather sees the ability to achieve autonomous personhood as dependent on social conditions. This insight underpins liberal feminism's attitude to the status of women: to form as rational agents, humans have to be provided with social safeguards such as education and the vote. Far from being starkly individualistic, this agenda is based on liberal feminisms perception of individual rationality as a social product.

John Stuart Mill's familiar ideas, such as the harm principle, the emphasis on the liberty of thought and discussion, and the extension of politics into the family and education, are all linked to a developmental and open-ended view of nature. To ground this perception of nature, Mill makes use of contemporary notions of evolution. For Mill, nature encompasses human civilisation and its higher products such as morality and justice. However, Mill recognises no benevolent guiding hand in the physical world, which the idea of evolution enables him to understand as self-propelled. Destruction and pain are part of the overall developmental movement, so that human lives always stand the danger of being crashed by nature. To minimise such risks, humans should use the distinctive features of their species, such as reason and morality, thus continuing nature while transforming it.

Donald Winnicott's notion that individuality is produced by society, and that production inevitably involves power asymmetry is reviewed. Winnicott's outlook touches on ideas of welfare and distribution, especially those concerning relationship between market and social agencies, and between the household and state.

Popper's attitude to nationalism can be analysed by comparison with the position taken by Hayes and Kohn, who distinguished between a communal, malevolent form of nationalism, and a civic and constitutional variant that could coexist with liberalism. By contrast, Popper welcomes communal affiliations whose diversity he perceives as essential to liberalism, while rejecting sovereignty, whether or not invested in a representative body, as a threat to the liberal open society. This perspective reverses the normative priorities that Hayes and Kohn attribute to liberalism. Its basis is Popper's adherence to a pluralist liberalism, which centres on protecting social ties rather than on representation and state organs. This denotation of liberalism competes with the legalist individualism that Hayes and Kohn identify with liberalism and therefore accommodates nationalism differently. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

George Orwell perceived the possibility of a postwar united Europe, based on regional integration along social-democratic lines, as a means of survival in a world struggle rather than as a preamble to peace. This was the logical conclusion of his understanding of political realism: his endorsement of its assumption that violence is endemic to social life and that the force-wielding sovereign cannot be done away with. Yet Orwell also had reservations about realism. He argued that a purely realist analysis that was not normatively connected to any values outside itself would go astray because analysts would be unable to factor in their own positions and would thus lose the analytic distance from their objects of study. Orwell was thus as suspicious of a politics managed by experts as of the utopian anticipation of a violence-free world. His world-view, rooted in realist necessity while leaving room for the values of democracy and socialism, offered a vision of a postwar united Europe that fostered the spirit of solidarity and could endure the existential struggles of world politics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]