Narrative Power and Liberal Truth: Hobbes, Locke, Bentham, and Mill

Liberal political thought-from its origins in the seventeenth-century through today's rights discourse-is grounded in the ideal of the autonomous individual. As the theory holds, these individuals are "born in freedom" from religious, political, social or economic obligations and then construct these systems through individual and collective choices. Over the past thirty years, however, this understanding of freedom has been challenged from a variety of perspectives.

Eldon J. Eisenach has been at the forefront of that challenge, stressing the centrality of religious elements and assumptions in liberal writings that many scholars suppressed or ignored. In Narrative Power and Liberal Truth Eisenach brings together eleven of his previously published essays to demonstrate that many "postmodernist" ideas of persons and freedom are already present within the tradition of liberal political philosophy and that liberalism itself is more capacious of human experience and meanings than modern critiques allow.