Liberalism With Honor

by Krause, Sharon R.

• ISBN13: 9780674007567
• ISBN10: 0674007565
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-04-15
• Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr

Summary

Why do men and women sometimes risk everything to defend their liberties? What motivates principled opposition to the abuse of power? In Liberalism with Honor, Sharon Krause explores honor as a motive for risky and difficult forms of political action. She shows the sense of honor to be an important source of such action and a spring of individual agency more generally. Krause traces the genealogy of honor, including its ties to conscientious objection and civil disobedience, beginning in old-regime France and culminating in the American civil rights movement. She examines the dangers intrinsic to honor and the tensions between honor and modern democracy, but demonstrates that the sense of honor has supported political agency in the United States from the founders to democratic reformers such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Martin Luther King, Jr. Honor continues to hold interest and importance today because it combines self-concern and personal ambition with principled higher purposes, and so challenges the disabling dichotomy between self-interest and self-sacrifice that currently pervades both political theory and American public life.

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
Liberal Inspirations	1	(31)
Political Agency and the Need for Inspiration	8	(13)
Excavating Honor	21	(11)
Honor and the Defenses of Liberty in the Old Regime	32	(35)
The Place of Honor in the Old Regime	34	(9)
Honor's High Ambitions	43	(4)
Reverence and Reflexivity	47	(10)
The Partiality of Honor	57	(4)
Recognition and Resistance	61	(6)
Honor and Democracy in America	67	(30)
The Conflict between Honor and Democracy	71	(7)
Honor and Self-Interest Well Understood	78	(7)
``A Little of Their Greatness''	85	(12)
The Love of Fame and the Southern Gentleman	97	(35)
Honor and the Love of Fame at the Founding	100	(20)
Slavery and the Southern Gentleman	120	(12)
Honor and Democratic Reform	132	(49)
Lincoln's Principled Ambition	132	(12)
Frederick Douglass: The Soul of Honor	144	(15)
Honor and Self-Sovereignty: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony	159	(9)
Honor in the Civil Rights Movement	168	(13)
Conclusion: Pluralism, Agency, and Varieties of Democratic Honor	181	(12)
Notes	193	(54)
Bibliography	247	(18)
Index	265