Political vices

Historically speaking, our vices, like our virtues, have come in two basic forms: intellectual and moral. This book analyzes a set of specifically political vices that have not been given sufficient attention within political theory, but that nonetheless pose enduring challenges to the sustainability of free and equitable political relationships of various kinds. Political vices like hubris, willful blindness, and recalcitrance are persistent dispositions of character and conduct that imperil both the functioning of democratic institutions and the trust that a diverse citizenry has in the ability of those institutions to secure a just political order of equal moral standing, reciprocal freedom, and human dignity. Political vices create not just the basic conditions for systemic cruelty and injustice in human affairs but indifference to these conditions as well. As a consequence, political vices represent a standing challenge to the principles and values of liberal democracy. In Political Vices Mark Button addresses two blind spots in political theory. First he shows that we can't fully understand ongoing challenges for advanced liberal democracies without grasping the ways in which patterns of political conduct subvert values such as equality, inclusion, and reciprocity. Second, without understanding the ways in which political vices are created and sustained through the mutually constitutive relationship between institutions and political character we can't adequately respond to enduring forms of injustice. Drawing on a wide range of intellectual resources, including ancient Greek tragedy, social psychology, moral epistemology, and democratic theory, Political Vices gives new consideration to a list of "deadly vices" that contemporary political societies can neither ignore as a matter of personal "sin" nor publicly disregard as a matter of mere bad choice, and it provides a democratic account that outlines how citizens can best contend with out most troubling political vices without undermining core commitments to liberalism or pluralism. -- from dust jacket.

States of character : toward a theory of political vice -- The anti-politics of hubris : vice of sovereignty -- Accounting for moral blindness : vice of wholeness -- Political recalcitrance : vice of exceptionalism -- After vice : the call of accountability.