Avital Simhony

Avital Simhony's present research project is a book entitled "Liberalism, Rightly Understood: The Tradition from T.H. Green to John Rawls." Challenging the conventional wisdom—that whatever else liberalism is, it is, beyond question, a type of individualism—is Professor Avital's task. To accomplish this task is to cast liberalism in new progressive light, largely unseen by standard scholarship. The main thesis of the book is that liberal mutualism, not liberal individualism, runs through modern liberalism’s main protagonists from T. H. Green through L. T. Hobhouse, John Dewey, Joseph Raz, John Rawls and others of their ilk. These leading liberal theorists advocate—unlike libertarianism with its one-sided individualism, and socialism with its over socialized sociability—a kind of mutualism: a normative theory premised on the claim that individuality and sociality are essentially complementary, each shaping the other and dependent on it, each incapable of independent existence. For liberals believe that every individual’s personality is woven of both individuality and sociality. How does the mutualist supposition shape modern liberalism? What would be the most effective approach to getting a good handle on liberal mutualism?