ABSTRACT
Rousseau's "institutional liberalism" in which law and order rather than norms and sanctions hold sway, comes to define this delicate balance of two abstractions. If Rousseau provides the motif of liberty, Hobbes offers the leitmotiv of order. Law and Order is a set of serious lectures. It is a classical reformulation of the liberal European option—without the usual sentimental blather with which these reformulations are sometimes presented and with a serious, measured tone. Dahrendorf is a rare bird: a hard-boiled utopian whose belief in the future is strengthened by the catastrophes of the recent past. Dahrendorf is perhaps too modest in disclaiming any desire to offer a program of radical liberalism. This is a solid contribution to the liberal imagination, at a moment in time when one might have begun to despair of the relevance or potential for such a great instauration coming from such an intellectual and political source.
