American Liberalism and Its Critics: Rawls, Taylor, Sandel and Walzer
American Liberalism and Its Critics: Rawls, Taylor, Sandel and Walzer

Summary/Abstract: “Since Tocqueville, the United States is often considered as the preferred land of liberal democracy, which, starting from the constitution of 1787, could have blossomed without encountering the obstacles that it had to overcome in the European countries. This theme, reformulated by Louis Hartz in his 1955 book, The Liberal Tradition in America, has long enjoyed an uncontested hegemony and it is to this characteristic which has been generally attributed the double absence in America of much of a real conservative tradition as of an important socialist movement. Many people have seen in this also the secret of the force and vitality of the new world. And yet, for several years, it appears that the Americans have been more and more critical vis-a-vis this predominance of democratic liberalism: because of this some people have researched other forms of identity and have started to scrutinize their past in order to discover signs of the presence of other traditions.“ […]

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