In the past two decades, as the tsunami of globalism followed Marxism's collapse, and the seemingly ubiquitous and transparent principle of 'the market' came to forge a direct link between worldwide economic activity and individual livelihoods, the ideology called liberalism has offered an influential framework for the analysis of society and its diverse issues, from human cloning to cultural pluralism. In this comprehensive, historical, and contemporary exploration of liberalism's many facets and its prominent thinkers (both Western and Japanese), author Kazuo Seiyama critiques the triumphs and shortcomings of that ideology, while aiming to dispel common misapprehensions about the ideas of its foremost theorist, John Rawls.

About Editors and Authors

SEIYAMA Kazuo is a Japanese sociologist, Professor at Kwansei Gakuin University and Professor Emeritus at the University of Tokyo. He specializes in mathematical sociology. He received a PhD in Sociology from the University of Tokyo in 1996, and has conducted analysis of the social stratification and inequality of Japanese society using statistics derived mainly from the SSM survey (the National Survey of Social Stratification and Social Mobility).