Customer Reviews

History of European Liberalism

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How to build an English garden: you start 300 years ago. Guido de Ruggiero does not quote this old canard but it is a pretty good summary of his views in this book, which cries out to be reprinted. It's about the best succinct summary I ever saw on the topic of how liberal society/government comes into being. He shows compellingly how liberal society is something grown, not created and how 'new' states (including, in his own time, Italy) that merely try to copy some Western example are headed for trouble. As a quick summary of English/British history it is dazzling. As a short course in academic political theory, it would be a good crammer for an exam. It would be an excellent pendant to Richard Pipes' discussion of the "patrimonial" tradition in Russia (in Pipes' 'Russia Under the Old Regime,' which I also review in its place). One detects a strong aroma of this book between the pages of Fareed Zakaria's much-publicized recent book, 'The Future of Freedom.' It is interesting to speculate on how de Ruggiero might have influenced debate on Iraq has he been in wide circulation over the past year or so.

You could spend a year on this book in class. It has something interesting on every page. It does not use the idea of liberalism prevalent in the United States that is opposed to conservatism, but defines a liberal government as one which helps the individual develop his or her full range of potentialities. It covers, in depth, the history of liberalism from within various european countries, including Italy, England, France and Germany. This book was used as a text for our class in The Philosophy of Politics taught at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale in 1978 by Dr. James A. Diefenbeck (Harvard PhD 1950).
Diefenbeck (1917-2005) also wrote the book, Rights, Politics and Economics, which boils down about 2000 years of western philosophical political thought including that of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, HD Thoreau (showing how we can achieve Thoreau's goals within the US Political system, which works, proof of which is the fact that we got out of the Vietnam and Iraq wars).
I would like to spend a year on this book, and so, if there is a teacher out there who has mastered it, I would like to hear from him or her.

DR