So as the grandchild of the author I'm a little biased, but this is an excellent book.

Joseph Hamburger, who passed away in 1997, has left us a rich legacy by virtue of his trenchant analysis of the complete Mill. While most scholars have focused on On Liberty and his essay on Utilitarianism, Hamburger has chosen to focus on the entire corpus of Mill's work.

Hamburger is the only scholar who has successfully argued that Mill, long considered amongst the pantheon of great liberal thinkers, offers us a look at the conservative strain of Mill's thought. This is arrived at through a close textual analysis of Mill's less well-known but no less salient work, thereby giving us a more balanced view of this important 19th century thinker. A must read for those who wish to understand Mill as he understood himself.

Paul Kens has written a lively, entertaining, and scholarly intellectual biography of one of the most fascinating justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, Stephen J. Field. Kens traces Field's career from his days as a young attorney just landed in gold-rush-crazed San Francisco in 1849, to his appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court less than fourteen years later, and on to the end of the century. Along the way, Kens discusses the political and economic events that shaped the thinking of Field and those with whom he did intellectual battle. Throughout, the book deals with an issue central to law in the economic realm: Does the economic power with which society might legitimately be concerned stem from government alone, or do other, private sources of power warrant a governmental response? Field clearly answered this question in one way, whereas for much of their history Americans have answered it in another. It may be a question that, every generation or so, Americans must answer anew....

Kens provides a balanced view. It would be easy to characterize Field as an apologist for the wealthy establishment--and he was so characterized by contemporary critics. But that characterization was not correct. Field's logic led him to take politically unpopular stands, especially with respect to issues of race, immigration, and corporate power. His concern about the potential abuse of government caused him to defend a strong role for federal judicial oversight of state legislation--recognizing that state legislatures might be even more likely than Congress to adopt special-interest legislation.

I read this book while studying about the Knights of the Golden Circle. This is a must read for anyone wanting to know of the history of the Knights of the Golden Circle.

Mexican anarchist Ricardo Flores Magon lived with facts and so he died, defending the most illustrious concepts of anarchy suffering hunger, and poverty, finally executed in a Missouri jail. I really suggest this book, 'cause inside it theere are many teachings of how human beings can depend on imagination, not in plitical parties.

Today, it seems everyone from Patrick Buchanan to Jessie Jackson are extoling the ideal of "social justice." But where did this insidious concept emerge. In the third and final installment in Hayek's Law, Legislation and Liberty series, Hayek delivers a knock out blow to the the notions of "social justice" or "distributive justice." He examines its socialistic roots and intellectual origins, which ensued after the egalitarian fervor in post-1791 Europe. He critiques new economic and social policy, which has emerged in the wake of the "social justice" phenemenon.

¿Por qué esta obra es tan importante y el autor, uno de los más serios de este siglo? Porque se trata de una comprension cabal del funcionamiento de nuestra civilización occidental. El libro (los tres volúmenes)es una desmitificación de ciertos conceptos harto conocidos, de clara tendencia socialista, a través de los cuales se ha pretendido transformar sociedades enteras. El concepto de justicia social es uno de ellos, en virtud del cuál se han encarado acciones políticas con resultados conocidos por todos. Esta obra de Hayek es la obra de alguien que ha entendido profundamente al ser humano y su sociedad, y que ha comprendido que es un estado de libertad su ámbito natural. La teoría de la Evolución, parece confirmarle esto al autor. De todos modos, uno se encontrará con grandes argumentos y exposiciones a partir de los cuáles, si es que todavía no se ha convencido de las bondades del liberalismo; tendrá un gran motivo para empezar a hacerlo.

This is it, folks -- the point at which classical and modern liberalism began to diverge. Everybody in either camp is indebted, in one way or another, to the great Thomas Hill Green. And sooner or later, everybody in either camp will have to come to terms with him.

Now, in my own not entirely humble opinion, Green's criticisms of other liberal theorists are well-founded and he himself has gotten the philosophical foundations just about exactly right. Basically, his claim is that (my paraphrase) the source of our rights against one another, as well as the source of the state itself, is our possession of an ideal common end in which the well-being of each of us is coherently included.

He develops this account very painstakingly, and one of the joys of reading it is watching him make sense of Rousseau's tortured notion of the "general will." By the time Green is through rescuing this doctrine from Rousseau, it becomes something altogether respectable: that (my paraphrase again) there is an overarching ideal end at which our actions aim, and it is that end which we _would_ have if all of our present aims were thoroughly modified and informed by reflective reason.

I say "_would_ have" with some reservations, since for Green (as for Bosanquet and Blanshard, who followed him here) there is a clear sense in which we _really_ have this ideal end. But this point takes us afield into Green's metaphysics, which are better covered in his _Prolegomena to Ethics_.

As I said, this volume marks the watershed between classical and modern liberalism. Green is often associated with the "modern" side of the divide, but today's reader will be surprised to see just how "classical liberal" Green was (in, e.g., his opposition to paternalistic government and in a good many other respects). Why, heck, there are passages that could have been lifted from David Conway's _Classical Liberalism: The Unvanquished Ideal_.

It does seem, though, that in allowing a positive role for the governmental institutions of a geographically-demarcated State, he has started down the slippery slope to the modern welfare-warfare state. Like Hegel before him and like Bosanquet after him, Green usually means by "state," not the bureaucratic machinery of a territorial government, but the whole of society including _all_ of its "institutions of governance." But -- also like Hegel and Bosanquet -- he does not always keep these two things firmly distinguished, and at times he is clearly thinking specifically of the governmental institutions of a territorial nation-state rather than what some of us would call the "market."

He is also a bit unclear on the ground of "rights." W.D. Ross rightly takes him to task for this in _The Right and the Good_: Green writes on one page that we have _no_ rights until these are recognized by society, and then turns around and writes as though "society" is recognizing rights we _already_ have. To my mind Ross clearly has the better of the argument here, though the problem is not, I think, terribly hard to fix.

On the whole, then, it is probably no wonder that Green and his crowd set into motion -- whether inadvertently or otherwise -- a stream of "liberalism" that would eventually find a far, far larger role for the State than any that Green himself would have approved. But to my mind, these difficulties are removable excrescences, not the heart of his theory. (And it is also worth bearing in mind that Green provides moral grounds for _resisting_ the State: he acknowledges that no actual State is really ideal and, insofar as it falls short of the ideal, should be brought firmly into the service of our common end.)

The theory itself seems to me to be sound. In fact, despite the aforementioned disagreements and several others, I would nominate this volume as perhaps _the_ single greatest work on liberal political theory.

Again, at some point every "liberal" of any stripe will have to come to terms with Green's ideas (perhaps in highly mutated form). And if, with minor tweezing, Green's basic outlook is sound, it also -- suitably adjusted -- forms the proper basis for the classical-liberal commonwealth.

It therefore behooves classical liberals and libertarians to get the word directly from Green himself. Those other "liberals" aren't _entirely_ wrong.

It can be very difficult to understand libertarianism as a political party these days because, as with the other parties, famous canidates of third parties (like Harry Browne, Ross Perot, and Jesse Ventura) have somewhat blurred the ideas presented in the philosophy behind it with modern issues, as they should in order to be viable candidates. So when John Hospers presents the ideas of Libertarianism from his viewpoint, in a book written about 1 year before running against Jimmy Carter for president as a Libertarian, it is easy to see where a government like this would have changed America. Sewn seemlessly with dozens of quotes and historical references this book leaves little room to argue that the premise couldn't work. How well it might work is still left to the reader. This book goes bounds beyond politics and enters realms of insightful philosophic depth. Most importantly it is an idea of governing people, as if their lives and happiness do matter more than anything else, more than economy, more than delutions of patriotism. I give it all 5 stars because this book is highly accessable to anyone, unless they typicly enjoy hard to understand political books where government acts in itself and not for it's people.

Christopher Hill analyses the most traumatic event in English history - the loss of Land Rights by a large part of the English population around the seventeenth century. Under the Enclosures and other related Acts, large landowners seized land hitherto under common ownership, forcing the villagers to migrate to shanty towns on the edges of cities, to wait, handily, as a pool of cheap labour for the burgeoning industrial capitalist economy, a picture now all too readily associated with the third world in this century.

The results were very similar to those found today in third world countries where indigenous peoples are deprived of their cultural heritage and their physical means of survival, by the seizing of their garden, grazing, and hunting lands, and Hill follows - as well as the cargo cults of the time - the libertarian reactions to this dispossession: the Diggers, Levellers, pirates (research Burroughs must have drawn on for his fine last book "Ghost of! Chance"), and the very considerable literary rebellion against the beginnings of what, with the final flowering of agribusiness, is today referred to as "The Killing of the Countryside" (Graham Harvey, Cape.)

This reminder of the depth and strength of the English libertarian tradition is extremely timely in a world that again gives us the poor dispossessed and legislated against under Globalisation - the expropriated Third World not just in Bougainville or the Amazon, but in James Kelman's Glasgow or Loach's Liverpool. It is small wonder that we are again seeing Levellers and Diggers. They belong to a long and deeply ingrained English tradition, as does Christopher Hill and his considerable body of work on this period, of which this book is a brilliant, readable and heartfelt synthesis.