Liberalism with Honor

Why do men and women sometimes risk everything to defend their liberties? What motivates principled opposition to the abuse of power? In this text, Sharon Krause explores honour as a motive for risky and difficult forms of political action. She shows the sense of honour to be an important source of such action and a spring of individual agency more generally. Krause traces the genealogy of honour, including its ties to conscientious objection and civil disobedience, beginning in old-regime France and culminating in the American civil rights movement. She examines the dangers intrinsic to honour and the tensions between honour and modern democracy, but demonstrates that the sense of honour has supported political agency in the United States from the founders to democratic reformers such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Martin Luther King, Jr. Honour continues to hold interest and importance because it combines self-concern and personal ambition with principled higher purposes, and so challenges the disabling dichotomy between self-interest and self-sacrifice that pervades both political theory and American public life.