This first volume, History and its Betrayal, traces the development of major themes of liberalism from the increase in human population beyond the limits of the face-to-face society of tribalism and small groups up until the present day. It shows that the principles underlying liberalism are the evolutionary development of social organizations that have resulted from the complexity of human action rather than any conscious design or purpose.

This second volume, Basics of a Liberal Psychological, Social and Moral Order, overviews developments in the theory of spontaneously ordered complex phenomena, the psychology of inference and expectation, the nature of anticipatory systems in the psychological and economic domains, and the evolution of scientific thought and knowledge. The book applies these insights to the nature of markets and morals, what education should consist of, and the problems of alienation and our existential malaise as we move into an increasingly abstract society. In doing so it also shows the...

This book is a systematic and thorough analysis of what post-modernity is and how it emerged. It distinguishes between those who regard post-modernity as a theoretical approach and those who regard it as a culture, and argues that interpreting post-modernity as a culture is more fruitful. It discusses the three factors which led to its emergence, namely liberalism, capitalism, and secularism, highlighting their respective influence in generating the culture of post-modernity within neoliberal societies.

The volume provides a lengthy analysis of neoliberal post-modernity in...

This book provides an overview of some of the most important critics of “Enlightenment rationalism.” The subjects of the volume (including, among others, Pascal, Vico, Schmitt, Weber, Anscombe, Scruton, and Tolkien) do not share a philosophical tradition as much as a skeptical disposition toward the notion, common among modern thinkers, that there is only one standard of rationality or reasonableness, and that that one standard is or ought to be taken from the presuppositions, methods, and logic of the natural sciences.

The essays on each thinker are intended not merely to...

This book explores controversies surrounding free speech and open inquiry (FSOI) in various regions of the Anglophone world. The authors argue that the past decade has seen a noticeable erosion of FSOI across the globe, aided and abetted by university clerisies and state apparatuses. These groups’ policing of language and pandering to cancel culture, the authors argue, have narrowed the Overton window to the point of reinvigorating the push for blasphemy law within liberal democracies themselves and impeding certain avenues scientific research. While most books on the subject discuss the...

Classical liberalism has typically sought to maintain as much room as possible for the exercise of personal initiative in the face of the encroachment of states. This book explores these questions of coercion and authority in the context of the size and scope of the state and argues that the state and its agents should be held to the same moral rules as are the individuals it rules over. The book considers how a distinct feature of the state is its police or coercive power, about which one may ask how the state acquires it and what if anything would justify its use. It...

This book studies the ongoing transition from an industrial to a creative (or post-industrial) society and how the creative society depends on a ‘soft infrastructure’ of individualist values and institutions. It explains this by looking first at the key actors in the creative society: creative individuals and entrepreneurial individuals, using insights from social and cognitive psychology and the economic theory of entrepreneurship. It shows how individual creativity and entrepreneurship are supported by both cultural individualism, based on the work of political scientists Ronald...

This book offers an alternative to perspectives of distributive justice which fail to resolve economic inequality and exacerbate social problems by ignoring the real causes of inequality. The main impact of the book is to highlight the importance of self-ownership and private property, showing how market participation advances liberty and prosperity.

The idea that we should pay reparations to disadvantaged racial groups as compensation for historical injustice is deeply contested. The debates often focus on the practical implications of paying reparations, but overlook more...