The decent society
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
The decent society
Harvard University Press, 1996
Available at 20 libraries
Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. 293-299) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Avishai Margalit builds his social philosophy on this foundation: a decent society, or a civilized society, is one whose institutions do not humiliate the people under their authority, and whose citizens do not humiliate one another. What political philosophy needs urgently is a way that will permit us to live together without humiliation and with dignity. Most of the philosophical attention nowadays is drawn to the ideal of the just society based on the right balance between freedom and equality. The ideal of the just society is a sublime one but hard to realize. The decent society is an ideal which can be realized even in our children's lifetime. We should get rid of cruelty first, advocated Judith Shklar. Humiliation is a close second. There is more urgency in bringing about a decent society than in bringing about a just one. Margalit begins concretely where we live, with all the infuriating acts of humiliation that make living in the world so difficult. He argues in the spirit of Judith Shklar and Isiah Berlin.
This is a social philosophy that resists all those menacing labels that promote moral laziness, just as it urges to get beyond the behaviour that labels other human beings. Margalit can't be earmarked as liberal or conservative. If a label is necessary, then the most suitable is George Orwell's "humane socialism", a far cry from "Animal Farm" socialism with its many tools of oppression. How to be decent, how to build a decent society, emerges out of Margalit's analysis of the corrosive functioning of humiliation in its many forms. This book springs from Margalit's experience at the borderlands of conflicts between Eastern Europeans and Westerners, between Palestinians and Israelis.
Table of Contents
- Part 1 The concept of humiliation: humiliation
- rights
- honour. Part 2 The grounds of respect: justifying respect
- the sceptical solution
- being beastly to humans. Part 3 Decency as a social concept: the paradox of humiliation
- rejection
- citizenship
- culture. Part 4 Putting social institutions to the test: snobbery
- privacy
- bureaucracy
- the welfare society
- unemployment
- punishment.
by "Nielsen BookData"