Chandran Kukathas

This chapter uses the life of a Javanese woman at the end of the 19th century to explore the tensions between individual freedom and familial loyalty. In particular, it shows that although Kartini had the freedom to leave her family and shake off cultural expectations about women's role, she was ultimately unwilling to do so. The chapter argues that Kartini's dilemma tells against Okin's own proffered solution to the liberation of women from constricting cultures: state intervention to provide education. Kartini had an education, she had a desire to pursue her own goals, she had the resources to do so, and she had parental approval. What she did not have, The chapter concludes, was the social milieu that would allow her to pursue those ambitions and still enjoy both the approval of the community and a clear conscience.

In his major new work Chandran Kukathas offers, for the first time, a book-length treatment of this controversial and influential theory of minority rights. The author argues that the free society should not be seen as a hierarchy of superior and subordinate authorities but an archipelago of competing and overlapping jurisdictions.The idea of a liberal archipelago is defended as one which supplies us with a better metaphor of the free society than do older notions such as the body politic, or the ship of state. In challenging most of the existing theories of the multicultural society and answering his past critics, Kukathas has produced the book that no one with an interest in multiculturalism can afford to ignore.

This article examines the relationship between moral universalism and cultural difference. It analyses the problem of how to measure the claims of particular cultures against the demands of universal morality and discusses possible ways to resolve the tension between cultural minorities and the intrusion of the morality of Western liberalism. One prominent solution to this problem attempts to resolve it by identifying special rights to be accorded to cultural groups to enable them to hold on to their particular customs and traditions. The best-known and most influential theory here is that developed by Will Kymlicka, who put the case for the protection of cultural minorities in terms that were consistent with the universalist commitments of a liberal political outlook.

Such is the rhetorical appeal of the idea of liberty that a variety of political philosophies claim to honour it. Republicans and Marxists, no less than libertarians and liberals, maintain that they and they alone are the true defenders of freedom. The literature of contemporary political theory is thus replete with rival analyses of the meaning of liberty, and disputes about its measurement, distribution and institutional requirements. Our aim here is to gain some understanding of the meaning and the conditions of liberty by working through the thicket of contemporary argument, though we may have to rest content with a better knowledge of the terrain.

Abstract:Libertarianism is a political philosophy whose defenders have set its foundations in the principle of self-ownership. But self-ownership supplies an uncertain basis for such a theory as it is prone to a number of serious difficulties, some of which have been addressed by libertarians but none of which can ultimately be overcome. For libertarianism to be a plausible way of looking at the world, it must look elsewhere for its basic principles. In particular, it needs to rethink the way it understands property and its foundations.

This contribution argues that, despite its undeniable importance, the topic of justice has become an oversold theoretical and normative commodity. Theories of justice abound covering what seems to be nearly every aspect of human existence. Without criticizing the aim of improving these disparate aspects of human existence, a problem arises insofar as justice as a concept is overburdened; rather than resolving the problems it seeks to better, its conceptual proliferation seems to do little to improve actual human existence. The essay’s main contention is that if justice is seen a la Rawls as the keystone of moral and political thinking, and given its primacy among the virtues, any injustice found within our social institutions will not be tolerated. The result is that matters very basic to our lives, such as choosing whether to send one’s child to a private or public school, can be seen as a matter of justice or injustice, when, in fact, it is not. Hence, our conception of justice is sick and it needs a cure.

Philip Pettit and Quentin Skinner find Hobbes's understanding of freedom as non-interference inadequate because it fails to appreciate what is wrong with a life lived as a slave. Though their critiques have some force, however, Hobbes's view of freedom has virtues of its own. It is highly sensitive to the fact that freedom is a matter of degree. It is also unlikely to mistake freedom for something else, like security or dignity. Moreover, Hobbes is not as unmindful of the dangers of servility as many think