Böcker av Kevin Slack

A thorough examination of Benjamin Franklin's works on philosophy and politics, arguing that Franklin was a philosopher of natural rightBenjamin Franklin's writings on politics are voluminous, and his own politics are well known, yet scholars debate -- often fiercely -- whether he had a political philosophy and, if so, what it was. Benjamin Franklin, Natural Right, and the Art of Virtue is a study of Franklin's political and philosophical writings, tracing the development of his political thought and elucidating the political philosophy he came to embrace and put into practice. Kevin Slack argues that Franklin, despite his reputation as a wit and clever politician, examined the nature of politics, virtue, and morality more deeply than any scholar has given him credit for. Franklin, as Slack demonstrates, rejected metaphysics during a period of youthful skepticism, adopting radical skepticism, but later abandoned that view for a third alternative, Shaftesbury's common-sense philosophy. Engaging in a rigorous critique of religious and political authorities, Franklin rejected all authoritative claims but that of reason, which he used to investigate the nature of justice, or natural right. Slack shows here that Franklin was a thinker in the traditionof Socrates, and thus a political philosopher in the truest and highest sense. Kevin Slack is assistant professor of politics at Hillsdale College.

"Americans often use the words progressive, liberal, and radical without considering their historical and political origins. While each movement rejected the older American republican principles, there were differences between Teddy Roosevelt's Anglo-Protestant progressive social gospelers who battled the trusts and checked immigration, Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson's secular liberals who introduced state capitalism and a civil rights agenda, and the 1960s radicals who protested the Great Society and war in Vietnam. Rather than a peaceful outgrowth, each movement rose in criticism of the one before. This book succinctly and thoroughly clarifies progressivism, liberalism, and radicalism in the history of ideas. But its history of the rise of the Global American Empire is only complete with the story of its fall. The revolution of the 1960s birthed a class divide. Elites on the left and right turned against the industrial middle class to erect an oligarchy at home and globalization abroad. While the radicals ensconced themselves in bureaucracy and academia to complete their systems of Identity Politics, neoliberal elites introduced monopoly capitalism, open borders, and outsourcing. The neoliberals' economic and military failures marked a crisis of legitimacy. In the Great Awokening of Barack Obama's second term, the American oligarchs kissed the ring of Identity Politics and used the covid-19 pandemic and myths of insurrection to strip away the rights of American citizens. Today a kleptocracy of incompetent, corrupt, and degenerate rulers drain the wealthiest and most powerful empire in history"--