ABSTRACT

Joao Carlos Espada's provocative survey of a group of key Anglo-American and European political thinkers argues that there is a distinctive, Anglo-American tradition of liberty that is one of the core pillars of the Free World. Giving a broad overview of the tradition through summaries of the careers and ideas of fourteen of its key thinkers, neglected despite having been tremendously influential in the tradition of liberty, the author engages with current set ideas about the meaning of 'liberal' and 'conservative' to offer an engaging, intellectual case for liberal democracy.

chapter |14 pages

Introduction

Karl Popper, Winston Churchill and the ‘British Mystery'

part I|40 pages

Personal influences

chapter 1|15 pages

Karl R. Popper

The open society and its enemies

chapter 2|7 pages

Ralf Dahrendorf

Liberty and civil society

chapter 3|10 pages

Raymond Plant

Social welfare without class warfare

chapter 4|6 pages

Gertrude Himmelfarb and Irving Kristol

The moral imagination

part II|38 pages

Cold warriors

chapter 5|6 pages

Raymond Aron

The opium of the intellectuals

chapter 6|6 pages

Friedrich A. Hayek

The constitution of liberty

chapter 7|8 pages

Isaiah Berlin

Liberty and pluralism

chapter 8|9 pages

Michael Oakeshott

The conservative disposition

chapter 9|7 pages

Leo Strauss

Relativism and the crisis of modernity

part III|44 pages

Orderly liberty

chapter 10|14 pages

Edmund Burke

Liberty and duty

chapter 11|9 pages

James Madison versus Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Two views of self-government

chapter 12|19 pages

Alexis de Tocqueville

Democracy in America

part IV|22 pages

The spirit of liberty

chapter 13|20 pages

Winston S. Churchill

The English-speaking peoples and the free world

part V|42 pages

Politics of imperfection

chapter 14|9 pages

Limited and accountable government

chapter 15|13 pages

Two kinds of rationalism

chapter 16|9 pages

Liberty as conversation

chapter 17|9 pages

Postscript

On Britain and the European Union – the missing debate