The Skillful Self: Liberalism, Culture, and the Politics of Skill - Hardcover

Skillful Self is an excellent introduction to many contemporary theoretical debates in political theory. Stopford's strength as an author is to place the reader among the debates of contemporary political theory, to bring the reader along Stopford's dialectical back-and-forth development to his own conclusion. At the same time, the book crucially advances the debate over cultural poltiics by arguing that liberal principals of justice must be rooted in a richer conception of the self than what we find in the homo economicus model. * Review of Metaphysics * This is a book or remarkable breadth and depth. It sets out an examination of political philosophy that spans the North Atlantic, and it shows that in the depths of the common conception of government there is an unattended area that gets filled badly if it isn't filled well. Generically it's called culture, and what John Stopford specifically pleads for is a culture of skill. It's all done in a style that is both brisk and incisive. -- Albert Borgmann, The University of Montana; author of Real American Ethics; author of Holding on to Reality (1999)

Developing a political approach to culture that avoids both the pitfalls of neutralism and the perils of perfectionism is among the most urgent tasks facing contemporary liberal theory. Drawing on Rawls's political liberalism as well as recent work by capability theorists and major critics of liberalism,The Skillful Self makes the case for a liberal politics of skill in which the skillful self forms the focus of a nonperfectionist approach to culture and cultural policy.