It is one thing to assert that ordered liberty is indispensible to the preservation of open markets and democratic political orders; it is another to explain what ordered liberty is and how it emerges and endures. If an explanation of any phenomenon should be on the level of the best science of the day, then a study of ordered liberty should ask some hard questions. How do advances in the neurosciences alter how we understand and talk about liberty? How do we break our dependence on the residual language of faculty psychology, e.g. talk of free will, volition, reason or rational intellect?...

Is general history (formerly called speculative philosophy of history) a legitimate field of inquiry today? Talk of historical progress is suspect, and the academic climate of opinion is unfavorable to normative judgments distinguishing between any sense and nonsense in our story. However, successive cultural integrations occur in accord with probability because their antecedent conditions are mutable; hence, we should not expect today's climate of opinion to be permanent or somehow superior. These basic insights prepare for the "fantasies" occurring in the concluding chapters. They are...