Beyond Classical Liberalism: Freedom and the Good

This book brings together diverse sets of standpoints on liberalism in an era of growing skepticism and distrust regarding liberal institutions.

The chapters in the book:

• Relate concerns for liberal institutions with classical themes in perfectionist politics, such as the priority of the common good in decision-making or the role of comprehensive doctrines
• Analyze how perfectionist intuitions about the political life affect our concepts of public reason or public justification
• Outline various moral duties we have toward other persons that underlie the liberal institutions or notions of rights functioning across the contemporary political landscape
• Explore various aspects of pluralism from within influential religious or philosophical traditions, applying insights from those traditions to issues in contemporary politics

The comprehensive book will be of great interest to scholars, students, and researchers of politics, especially those in political philosophy and political theory.

James Dominic Rooney, OP, is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Hong Kong Baptist University. He works primarily in metaphysics, medieval philosophy, philosophy of religion, and Chinese philosophy, with research interests in natural law theory, social ontology, the ethical and political implications of pluralism, and how norms of practical reason affect public reason theories of justification. He has published in Faith and Philosophy, dialectica, American Journal of Jurisprudence, Journal of Church and State, International Philosophical Quarterly, and other venues. His most recent book is Material Objects in Confucian and Aristotelian Metaphysics: The Inevitability of Hylomorphism (2022).

Patrick Zoll, SJ, is Professor of Metaphysics at the Munich School of Philosophy in Germany. He published a monograph on the debate between anti-perfectionist and perfectionist liberals which won the renowned Karl Alber Prize 2016 and was nominated for the Deutscher Studienpreis 2016: Perfektionistischer Liberalismus (2016). His other publications appeared in several journals: Journal of Ethics & Social Philosophy, Heythrop Journal, Faith and Philosophy, and Zeitschrift für Theologie und Philosophie. His most recent book is What It Is to Exist: The Contribution of Thomas Aquinas’s View to the Contemporary Debate (2022).