Liberalism with Honor

Sharon R. Krause

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780674007567
• eBook ISBN: 9780674249196
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

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

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Liberal Inspirations
• 2. Honor and the Defense of Liberty in the Old Regime
• 3. Honor and Democracy in America
• 4. The Love of Fame and the Southern Gentleman
• 5. Honor and Democratic Reform
• 6. Conclusion: Pluralism, Agency, and Varieties of Democratic Honor
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index