Fundamentalism as a Response to Liberalism

Paper Summary:

This paper, based on Macedo, refers to Rorty and others, to explain present antipathy between liberalism and fundamentalism. The writer points out that liberalism has usually found its solution in all matters of religion in toleration, but fails to recognize that liberalism represents a kind of fundamentalism. The writer makes reference to Fromm and uses an example from Martin Luther King Jr. Further, the writer describes kinds of fundamentalism and what they may indicate of liberalism's failings.

From the Paper:

"Liberalism has results other than the growing freedom or happiness posited by Utilitarian and later thought. Fundamentalism, as discussed by Macedo among others, indicates liberalism's failings when approaching human anxieties that may be expressed in a `return to the past' as held up by fundamentalism. Macedo states that religious toleration, at first, does not seem to have much to do with contemporary political philosophy as it expects a firm separation of the religious and the secular. However, large questions facing political philosophy in the present happen to have to do with matters of not just religion but religious fundamentalism."

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