Desiring Justice: Norms, Motives, and Action in Liberal Politics
FAIN: FT-51805-03
Sharon R. Krause
President and Fellows of Harvard College (Cambridge, MA 02138-3800)
This book-length project investigates the relationship between norms, motives, and political action in liberal-democratic polities, engaging contemporary debates in political theory and drawing on the moral and political writings of two eighteenth-century philosophers, Hume and Montesquieu. Far more than either one, the predominant theories of justice today set impartial reason at odds with affective sentiment and desire. Desiring Justice explores the possibility that affective sentiments and desires may be constitutive elements of justice and not merely its external supports, and considers how far such an approach could be compatible with the moral universalism of liberal justice and the freedom of liberal citizens.