Liberty Matters: Rationalism, Pluralism, and the History of Liberal Ideas (May 2016)

Jacob T. Levy argues in his recent book, Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom (OUP 2014), that there is a deep and recurring tension within liberal theories of freedom, between on the one hand a family of views concerned with the risk of tyranny posed by the modern, centralized and centralizing, Weberian state, and on the other a family of views that see the graver threats to liberty as arising from customary, local, religious, traditional, and decentralized authority. He describes these views as “competing liberal social theories of power” and explores their deep origins within the classical liberal tradition which goes back several centuries. He is joined in this month’s discussion by Gary Chartier, Professor of Law and Business Ethics at La Sierra University in Riverside, California; Jeremy Jennings, Professor of Political Theory at King’s College London; and Chandran Kukathas, the Chair in Political Theory at the London School of Economics.

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