- Title Pages
- Acknowledgments
-
Introduction Preamble -
1 Liberalism -
2 Freedom -
3 Culture and Anxiety -
4 The Liberal Community -
5 Liberal Imperialism -
6 State and Private, Red and White -
7 The Right to Kill in Cold Blood -
8 Hobbes’s Political Philosophy -
9 Hobbes and Individualism -
10 Hobbes, Toleration, and the Inner Life -
11 The Nature of Human Nature in Hobbes and Rousseau -
12 Locke on Freedom -
13 Mill’s Essay On Liberty -
14 Sense and Sensibility in Mill’s Political Thought -
15 Mill in a Liberal Landscape -
16 Utilitarianism and Bureaucracy -
17 Mill and Rousseau: Utility and Rights -
18 Bureaucracy, Democracy, Liberty -
19 Bertrand Russell’s Politics -
20 Isaiah Berlin -
21 Popper and Liberalism -
22 Alexis de Tocqueville -
23 Staunchly Modern, Nonbourgeois Liberalism -
24 Pragmatism, Social Identity, Patriotism, and Self-Criticism -
25 Deweyan Pragmatism and American Education -
26 John Rawls -
27 Locke and the Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie -
28 Hegel on Work, Ownership, and Citizenship -
29 Utility and Ownership -
30 Maximizing, Moralizing, and Dramatizing -
31 The Romantic Theory of Ownership -
32 Justice, Exploitation, and the End of Morality -
33 Liberty and Socialism - Index
Maximizing, Moralizing, and Dramatizing
Maximizing, Moralizing, and Dramatizing
- Chapter:
- (p.573) 30 Maximizing, Moralizing, and Dramatizing
- Source:
- The Making of Modern Liberalism
- Author(s):
Alan Ryan
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
This chapter describes a “dramatistic,” “dramatic,” or “dramaturgical” approach to the study of social interaction. It asks whether the dramaturgical model insists on the theatricality of social life merely in the sense of insisting that people fill roles just as persons act parts in a play. This is the question of whether the crucial element in the dramaturgical picture is that cluster of insights that goes under the general heading of “role distance.” The chapter considers the peculiarities of rational explanation and about the role of reconstructions of “the thing to do” other than the role of explaining an action or series of actions by focusing on voting behavior in the terms proposed by Anthony Downs's An Economic Theory of Democracy. It also examines some recent accounts of the phenomenon of suicide, along with the rationality principle, which Karl Popper calls “false but indispensable” to the social sciences.
Keywords: dramaturgical approach, social interaction, social life, roles, role distance, voting behavior, Anthony Downs, suicide, rationality principle
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- Title Pages
- Acknowledgments
-
Introduction Preamble -
1 Liberalism -
2 Freedom -
3 Culture and Anxiety -
4 The Liberal Community -
5 Liberal Imperialism -
6 State and Private, Red and White -
7 The Right to Kill in Cold Blood -
8 Hobbes’s Political Philosophy -
9 Hobbes and Individualism -
10 Hobbes, Toleration, and the Inner Life -
11 The Nature of Human Nature in Hobbes and Rousseau -
12 Locke on Freedom -
13 Mill’s Essay On Liberty -
14 Sense and Sensibility in Mill’s Political Thought -
15 Mill in a Liberal Landscape -
16 Utilitarianism and Bureaucracy -
17 Mill and Rousseau: Utility and Rights -
18 Bureaucracy, Democracy, Liberty -
19 Bertrand Russell’s Politics -
20 Isaiah Berlin -
21 Popper and Liberalism -
22 Alexis de Tocqueville -
23 Staunchly Modern, Nonbourgeois Liberalism -
24 Pragmatism, Social Identity, Patriotism, and Self-Criticism -
25 Deweyan Pragmatism and American Education -
26 John Rawls -
27 Locke and the Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie -
28 Hegel on Work, Ownership, and Citizenship -
29 Utility and Ownership -
30 Maximizing, Moralizing, and Dramatizing -
31 The Romantic Theory of Ownership -
32 Justice, Exploitation, and the End of Morality -
33 Liberty and Socialism - Index
