Sublime

Liberalism is also hard to place. It makes little sense to speak of when it began or how it developed, even though we can name philosophers who have articulated its essence, most of whom lived in the West in modern times. These thinkers include Mary Wollstonecraft, John Stuart Mill, John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, Francis Bacon, Thomas Paine, and

Ion

Modern liberalism has adopted the Jacobin spirit. Having dispensed with traditional moral norms, liberals have transformed the severe quality of conscience into a playpen of desire. Hav­ing denied a religious foundation for human rights, they have left individuals vulnerable to the despotic whims of the secular state. This outcome was predicted by

Gradually the spread of mental acquirements, and the increasing taste for literature and art, opened chances of success to talent; science became a means of government, intelligence led to social power, and the man of letters took a part in the affairs of the State.

In 1919, Lippmann wrote a despairing essay in the Atlantic Monthly titled “The Basic Problem of Democracy.” Democracy’s founding ideal—that of a well-informed citizenry capable of making reasoned judgments about national problems and plans—had come into being in a much simpler time, he argued, when most concerns were local and people had direct

In his magnum opus Human Action, Mises constructs a brilliant vision of how people can best live and work together. He begins by building on the answers to basic questions such as “How do we know things?” and “How do we know what’s true and what’s right?”

As with any great teacher, one can find the strongest evidence of Perry’s legacy in the success of his students: they became legislators, scholars, and businessmen. (CSB was coed, but Perry focused his efforts almost entirely on his male students; while he was ahead of his time in his thinking on disability, his views on gender were, unfortunately,