POLI 260 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Billiard Ball, Transnationalism, Invisible Hand
20 Apr 2018
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Document Summary
There are many variants of liberalism (often known as pluralism) but the main themes that run through liberal thought are: human beings are perfectible, democracy is necessary for the perfectability to develop, ideas matter. Much more than military terms, liberals stress the importance of economic and technological issues. Fundamentally, liberals do not think that sovereignty is as important in practice as realists think it is in theory. Interdependence between states is a critically important feature of world politics. Liberals reject the notion that war is the natural condition of world politics. Liberals also question the idea that the state is the main actor on the world political stage. No such thing as a national interest, as it represents the result of whatever bureaucratic organizations dominate the domestic decision-making process. Liberals argue that power politics is itself the product of ideas, and crucially, ideas can change.
