Self-Realization: Politics & the Good Life in Modern Times

This book elaborates a plausible and attractive conception of ‘self-realisation’ as an ideal of how one might live well by developing one’s talents and capacities, which is suitable for the modern age. This ideal is a valid concern for modern political theory in that it can contribute to how we can encourage our social and political institutions. It explains that the contention of self-realisation is a fitting concern for ‘modern times’, yet seeking a secularised conception, removing the monopoly certain Eastern philosophies seem to have adopted. The author demonstrates that utopian ethical and political thinking has value in enriching our imaginations, is not on a slippery slope towards a dangerously totalitarian ‘engineering of the soul’ and can be used to inspire incremental changes to existing institutions and practices in a robustly ‘down-to-earth’ conception of the politically feasible.