We have to read this book called Political Philosophy: Fourth Edition by Adam Smith. We have to write an argumentative essay about the topic above (ill add the page 129 to the instructions). So since the book cost money and I don’t think you’ll be able to get a free copy of it online I am fine with citing anything you use from the book after you are done with the essay. If you do want to cite other websites or anything they have to be legit website like galileo but if you just want to stick to the book you can. I have trouble writing about philosophy because I just do not understand it, so thank for being able to help me on this.
THIS IS THE PAGE WE MUST WRITE ABOUT:
Furthermore, the liberal state may itself be regarded as inimical to a more particularistic or localized form of community. This will happen whenever that state’s commitment to individual freedom and autonomy requires it to interfere with a community’s own preferred way of doing things. Should members of a religion be permitted to raise their children as they wish, protecting them from the spiritually impoverished and grotesquely sexualized mass culture? Or is the state justified in protecting the autonomy of its (future) citizens by requiring that they be educated in such a way that they are genuinely (not just formally) free to leave that community if they wish? Can a cultural group – say the Francophone community in Quebec – deny individuals living within ‘its’ city the freedom to advertise their businesses in English? Can Native American communities collectively decide to prevent their individual members from selling land to outsiders? Putting it in general terms, should we tolerate groups that regard the survival and flourishing of a particular culture as more important than individual autonomy? Or should we uphold the rights of all citizens to revise and question traditional cultural practices? For those whose primary focus is on the value of religious, ethnic, linguistic or cultural communities, the liberal state may look more like the enemy than the embodiment of ‘community’.
Similar issues arise when we consider attempts by the liberal state to inculcate its preferred shared values in its citizens, educating children to be tolerant, to value individual liberty, and to treat with mutual respect others who have different views about how to live their lives. Attempts by the British government to require schools to promote what the then Prime Minister David Cameron called ‘muscular liberalism’ have been controversial partly because they seem aimed particularly at Muslims, partly because the ideas promoted have been officially designated as ‘British values’. For some, that attempt to claim as ‘British’ what are in fact civic values appropriate to all liberal polities is confused and politically counterproductive. (More on this in the next section.) But the main problem does not depend on any confusion. However the values in question are described, parents who do not subscribe to the liberal vision of politics may object to the state’s demands that their children be educated to respect those whose practices – such as homosexuality, or ridiculing religion – the parents themselves find abhorrent. They may experience those demands, made in the name of liberal community, precisely as failures to respect the community that matters most to them.
Communitarian arguments in political philosophy have focused on the moral and political significance of groups or collectives. They pose deep challenges to views conventionally associated with liberalism. But it would be wrong to think that liberals deny that significance altogether. One fruit of the communitarian critique has been an increased sensitivity to the way in which individual well-being depends on group-level factors, such as culture. The Canadian philosopher Will Kymlicka (b. 1962), for example, has argued that the very autonomy that liberals care so much about depends upon cultural membership, on individuals being brought up within a reasonably rich and secure cultural structure. Someone raised within a community that is withering away before her eyes lacks meaningful options and will be unable to make informed and reflective judgements about how she is to live her life. On this view, liberals have reason to help minority groups, such as the Inuit or French Canadians, protect their community’s way of life where they face an unfair struggle against the dominant culture.
On the one hand, then, liberals are concerned to protect individuals from too much community – from practices that stifle the individual’s freedom to choose for herself how she lives her life. On the other hand, liberals may acknowledge the importance of cultural self-preservation and accord minority groups collective rights against the majority where that is required by their commitment to individual autonomy. The multicultural nature of the advanced democracies poses deep challenges to the liberal framework, challenges that I have no more than sketched out here. Freeing liberalism from communitarian misunderstanding and misrepresentation allows us to see more clearly the force and significance of those challenges, and to confront what is genuinely valuable in communitarian thinking.