‘The clash of civilisations is not between Christianity and Islam, it is between nations that encourage religious diversity and those which practise religious intolerance. It is between those who favour open debate and those who think free speech is anathema.’
Sunday Times, Sunday 17 September 2007. Full text at the Times Online website.
‘Liberalism emerges from a long-standing rule of law, shaped by the Enlightenment view of citizenship, and dependent upon the shared customs, shared language, and shared culture of a people who have lived together in a common home and acquired the habit of defending it. But it is virtually unknown among people who are seeking territory, and who have conscripted their gods to fight for it. The book of Joshua tells the story of such a people, and it contains in its bloodthirsty pages not a single liberal sentiment. The one gesture of kindness that the book records towards the indigenous people is bestowed on those who had betrayed their native city to its foes. This reward offered for the basest form of treachery indicates how far the Israelites were, in their need, from any liberal view of the human condition.’
Roger Scruton, 'The New Criterion', Volume 25, September 2006. Full text at The New Criterion website.
‘Since the publication of Alasdair MacIntyre's ‘After Virtue’, Michael Sandel's ‘Liberalism and the Limits of Justice’, Michael Walzer's ‘Spheres of Justice’, and Charles Taylor's writings on "atomism", there has arisen a quite stimulating controversy over the deficiencies or otherwise of contemporary liberalism...
Sandel, in his justly celebrated book, argues that the fatal flaw of liberal theory is an incoherent theory of the self. The liberal vision of the individual as the autonomous chooser of his or her own purposes presupposes that the chooser is sufficiently sovereign over, and therefore distanced from, the choices that compose his or her identity that none of them must be regarded as binding. However, this conception of the self is incoherent, for a self that is as open-ended as the liberal conception requires would be not so much free as identityless. Only a "thickly constituted self" shaped in its very being by traditions, attachments, and more or less irrevocable moral commitments can actually make choices that count.’
Ronald Beiner, ‘What's the Matter with Liberalism’. Full text at the California Digital Library.