Status Updates From The Political Theory of Lib...

I liked the Nod to James Baldwin (I like his writing), WEB Du Bois. However, I noticed a few absences, like Michael Harrington, founder Democratic Socialists of America, I would count him in this tradition.

The next three chapters are on twentieth Century figures two of whom I am quite familar Bertrand Russell and John Rawls. I also learned of a new figure MacPherson. I like MacPherson's distinction between "possesive" liberalism as the bad face of liberalism and developmental liberalism dedicated to human flourishing. I also was familiar with Rawls and find his original position and contract theory compelling

A chapter on John Stuart Mill & one on Marx & Marxist critique. John Stuart Mill is the first explicitly liberal socialist, calling for a liberal order that isn't based on possessive liberalism with its emphasis on property. And any socialist thinker will have to contend with Marx and his analysis of bourgeois political culture & Capitalism. I think a liberal socialism that contends with Marx's critique is tenable.

So far covering early thinkers like Hobbes and Locke as precursors and then developmentally more liberal left characters like Thomas Paine and Mary Woolstoncraft Shelley. I like that Thomas Paine gives us an important tool of desublimization of tradition and the denaturalization of hierarchial order. These are key to get rid of the mists of believing in a sublime natural order so that one can change the world.