Nature and Liberty

Liberal democracy is now being more widely adopted, so much so that the thesis that this regime stands at "the end of history" has become fashionable. Yet immense and unresolved internal problems arise in these regimes. InNature and Liberty, John Zvesper explores three of the most important conflicts within modern liberal politics those connected with ethnicity and race, sex and family life, and the bureaucratized government. He traces the difficulties that liberals have in dealing with these problems to the "physiphobia" the unreasonable fear of nature in contemporary liberal political theory. Zvesper examines the practical problems by using evidence from the political experience of the United States, a regime that has often been taken to illustrate the characteristic virtues and vices of liberal democracy. The book culminates in a critique of currently dominant liberal theories, and a sketch of the outlines of a more adequate theory. The thesis ofNature and Libertyis that contemporary liberal politics, both in practice and in theory, is too easily driven to libertarian and communitarian extremes, because contemporary liberals are too reluctant to have recourse to nature as a guide for political life. During the last quarter of the twentieth century there has been a resurgence of liberal political thinking, but most of this thinking has deliberately avoided the question of natural standards for political life. John Zvesper shows how this avoidance has been both practically destructive and theoretically unnecessary.