ABSTRACT
For many years, the discussion of public affairs throughout the free world has been dominated by a controversy over economic planning. Anti-planners have warned that planning would inevitably suppress liberty as it had in Russia, while the planners have answered that these political consequences could and should be avoided. Liberalism differs from other systems of social relations in the nature of the authority to which it submits. However, any attempt by liberalism to define this authority ends by revealing a crucial ambiguity in the liberal position. Various writers, both in Britain and America, have accordingly acknowledged in recent years that traditions—specifically the traditional practices of freedom—can alone secure the continued existence of free institutions. Political and cultural freedom, in the absolute sense, is incompatible with the existence of fixed social relations. Burke's teaching, which appealed from the spoken to the unspoken rules of freedom, remained henceforth the silent presupposition of British liberalism.
