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Article: Liberalism's Hope and Despair: Lincoln's Peoria Speech of 1854.(Abraham Lincoln)
- Article from:
- Social Research
- Article date:
- June 22, 1999
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1999 New School for Social Research. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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The Problem of Extreme Moral Conflict
The hope of liberal politics is that it can establish a tradition of fair dealing among people of different interests and views. At a minimum, when liberalism moves us to recognize that we usually have overlapping values, and overlapping stakes, even with those with whom we are at the moment in conflict, it makes it worth our while to deal with each other fairly. But the hope of liberal politics is more than this: it is that the habit of insight into the situations of other people that dealmaking and compromise encourages in us will move us to treat the tradition of fair dealing as itself a common interest and as the basis of ...