Establishes the intellectual foundations of a new movement in American thought: communitarianism. Emerging in part as a response to the excesses of American individualism, communitarianism seeks to restore the balance between individual rights and social responsibilities.

Modernity as the fruit of the Enlightenment is a theme that has been explored and analyzed for decades, both in Western and non-Western academia. There is strong consensus that one of the major foundations of this now three-hundred-year-old "project" is the understanding of the human individual as an autonomous actor, one capable of enormous discoveries through the application of rational intellect in his discovery and analysis of the natural world. It seems, however, that the Enlightenment framework, which has dominated modernity, could contain the seeds of its own undoing, and that this is evident in the loss of trust in civil society. This raises a question: Does modernity as the fruit of Enlightenment contain the elements necessary to deal with the loss of trust, both interpersonal and institutional, facing Western liberal democracy? If not, what possibilities does the Enlightenment framework offer as a corrective to human autonomy and its social consequences, especially for civil society, and its foundation in trust? If a new framework for human social relationships can be established, it would not need to discard the gains of the past centuries of modernity, but would serve as a corrective to it, both for cultures strongly shaped by Western modernity and for cultures that are seeking or are pressured to reach modernity at all costs. This framework would need to address both the communal (the nature of society) and the singular (the individual) without sacrificing either to the other. This work represents a fresh look at the societal consequences of the Enlightenment and proposes an alternative framework in terms of covenant.

This text provides a major study for all those working in the fields of 16th- and 17th-century political and social thought.

Philip Selznick's study of moral and social theory establishes the intellectual foundations of an important new movement in American thought: communitarianism. Emerging in part as a response to the excesses of American individualism - particularly rampant during the 1980s - communitarianism seeks to restore the balance between individual rights and social responsibilities. The Moral Commonwealth attempts to explain and justify this communitarian turn and give it a liberal interpretation.

Shows how Kant's basic position applies to and clarifies present-day problems of war, race, abortion, capital punishment, labor relations, the environment, and marriage.

Modern, liberal democracies in the West living under the rule of law and protection of human rights cannot articulate the very values from which they derive their legitimacy. These pre-political and pre-legal preconditions cannot be guaranteed, let alone be enforced by the state, but constitute nevertheless its moral and spiritual infrastructure. Until recently, a common background and horizon consisted in Christianity, but due to secularisation and globalisation, society has become increasingly multicultural and multireligious. The question can and should be raised how religion relates to these sources of normative order in society, how religion, politics and law relate to each other, and how social cohesion can be attained in society, given the growing varieties of religious experiences. In this book, a philosophical account of this question is carried out, on the one hand historically from Plato to the Enlightenment, on the other hand systematically and practically.

This study investigates the thinking of European authors from Vitoria to Kant about political justice, the global community, and the rights of strangers as one special form of interaction among individuals of divergent societies, political communities, and cultures. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, it covers historical material from a predominantly philosophical perspective, interpreting authors who have tackled problems related to the rights of strangers under the heading of international hospitality. Their analyses of the civitas maxima or the societas humani generis covered the nature of the global commonwealth. Their doctrines of natural law (ius naturae) were supposed to provide what we nowadays call theories of political justice. The focus of the work is on international hospitality as part of the law of nations, on its scope and justification. It follows the political ideas of Francisco de Vitoria and the Second Scholastic in the 16th century, of Alberico Gentili, Hugo Grotius, Samuel Pufendorf, Christian Wolff, Emer de Vattel, Johann Jacob Moser, and Immanuel Kant. It draws attention to the international dimension of political thought in Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Hume, Adam Smith, and others. This is predominantly a study in intellectual history which contextualizes ideas, but also emphasizes their systematic relevance.