Saw this recommending on Marginal Revolution and just bought it to read. I’ve recently been reading quite a bit about liberalism, and classical liberalism specifically. This provided quite a bit of awareness for me on the tensions between economic development and freedom.
As I think about classical liberalism these days, it’s a sharp edge to the easy answers and extremes that I feel the culture trying to swaddled itself up in. I just don’t think it works to be extreme, over a sustained period of time anyways.
If I am going to be extreme about something, and I do think there are times or periods where it’s right to be so, I want to be extreme about self-determination as a starting point and then work ‘backwards’ or ‘down’ from there.
What I mean is, I think starting with freedom – and by freedom I don’t mean “whatever” – is the best way to organize a society to give it the best chance at its participants having a shot at The Good Life. I also happen to see this being very Christian in nature; natural law, human flourishing, and care for the neighbor being the best organizing methods.
I have lots of underlines and scribbles in the book, so I won’t recount them here. What I will do is copy what I wrote in the front of the book upon finishing it:
Classical Liberalism seems to me the best moral & economic philosophy because it’s the only one you can enforce while elevating the human experience.
Something like: All political ideologies require enforcement at scale. Classical Liberalism is the one requiring the least amount of coercion and violence, and at the same time, giving those made in God’s image (all of Us) an opportunity to live the good life.
I’ll keep working on my thinking around this, but for now I feel comforted (in contrast to the “two-party system”) by thinking of myself as a classical liberal and a communitarian. And a Christian.