Customer Reviews

The Triumph of Liberty: A 2,000 Year History Told Through the Lives of Freedom's Greatest Champions

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For anyone with an interest in history and an appreciation for the defining struggle of the 20th century (man against state), these vignettes provide both an inspiration and a warning. The inspiration is from the raw courage, conviction, and strength of these people; the warning is that many paid a heavy price and that the struggle for freedom is renewed with every generation. You don't have to be a libertarian or Republican to enjoy this; the context of these struggles is not always strictly poltical per se, but nearly all these men and women had allegiance to, and drew strength from, a higher ideal then man. Raoul Wallenberg's story alone is worth the price.

I am so tired of being told what we have done wrong. Here, finally, a historian gives us a narrative of human triumph. After all, we know very well that as a group and as individuals we often behave badly, make mistakes, and choose to pursue grubby, greedy goals. But not always. How refreshing it is to find an historian willing to celebrate individuals who have devoted their lives to pursuing noble ambitions. I liked it for the same reasons that I liked Diana Muir's recent Bullough's Pond with its unabashed celebration of the entreprenurial spirit. I won't quibble with the triumphalist tone, this book is frank about its goals and they are what make reading it fun. I will complain only that the sketches are a bit, well, sketchy. I would have found longer, more thoughtful portraits even more compelling, even if they had given us to understand that even these exemplary men and women were complex, had difficulties and sometimes got it wrong. What is important is that this book holds up for our admiration a group of people who devoted their lives to making our world better.

The subject matter here simply can't be beat. The biographies are universally well-written and often shed light on people you thought you knew well (for example, the Jefferson profile). Powell has also done us a great service by bringing to light some lesser-known individuals whose actions deserve more attention than they get in the usual history books (e.g. Edward Coke). Everyone will disagree with some of the opinions here, but that is only further evidence of the author's originality.

This book is good for basic information, but the best thing, or things about it are the tidbits of information that lead one to further reading. It is a great source for pointing the reader not only to great thinkers, but also to works by great thinkers worthy of further investigation.

This book provides inspirational biographies of some of the major figures that have advanced the cause of liberty. Jim Powell is a masterful storyteller. A senior fellow at the Cato Institute and the senior book reviewer at laissezfaire.org, Powell's years of research help him produce a book that respects the struggle for liberty in the context of the times. This helps to produce a wide-ranging book that transcends sectarian politics.

In this book you'll find the authors of some of the greatest books in history. This is virtually a book of books.

This book is one of those rare books that gives you a serious snapshot of history along with interesting anecdotes about the subjects -

I never realized how much each of these people did for the cause of freedom !

Recommend to all and should be assigned reading in HS and college!!

Will Durant's "The Story of Philosophy" is an eternal starter for those interested in the history of ideas. Jim Powell's work tops it. What more can be said?

Powell deserves great credit for surveying the last two millenia of Western history to find liberty's "greatest champions". I found myself at the end begging for more analytic input from the author to "put it all together". But I am grateful for his compiling this list of the good guys in the struggle to attain the freedom which we all say we want, and are too often willing to sacrifice by pieces to other ends. The book would benefit greatly from better editorial attention to correct obvious syntactical errors and repetitions. Overall, an admirable addition to the literature of classical liberalism.

With this book, Jim Powell advances the notion that modern history can best be viewed as a quest for freedom, and even the most cynical among us must agree that "wresting liberty from tyranny's iron fist" is indeed worth fighting for. In a series of short biographical vignettes, Powell looks at the lives of sixty-five historical figures that he deems heroes in this struggle, making for a fascinating and inspiring read. However, any such grouping of people is bound to spark debate, as very few of these individuals would call themselves "libertarian", nor would all libertarians be quick to claim them all as ancestors or heirs.

Historian Paul Johnson may sum up this book best with these words from its foreword: "I do not agree with all of it". That luminaries like Cicero and Thomas Paine belong in this canon is almost without question, but the case for Beethoven, Goya, and Robert Heinlein (among others) requires one to adopt the modern "big L" libertarian perspective in its entirety. I, for one, would prefer to see Margaret Thatcher's place in the book removed, and replaced by a section on Nelson Mandela; economic issues aside, surely most people would place the latter above the former as a champion of liberty and justice in our time.

Thus, the greatest weakness of this book is also its strength: it forces the reader to think, to consider what "liberty" really means. Given the state of the world today, that fact alone merits my recommendation.

In this book Jim Powell attempts to tell us the story of liberty by illuminating the lives of it's greatest champions.Mr. Powell is a great storyteller and for the most part he succeeds in his mission of telling us the story of freedom's champions from Cicero to Ronald Reagan.The book might have been better if Powell had started out by giving us a definition of liberty. In the biblical sense liberty implies the ability to be morally self-governed.This was certainly how Locke, Jefferson and Franklin among other libertarians understood the term.If the concept of self-government is understood as it relates to liberty the author would have to eliminate the chapters on H.L. Mencken,and Albert Jay Nock among others.I agree with a previous reviewer that the book's inclusion of Martin Luther King Jr. is highly questionable.Dr. King was certainly a great man who achieved great things.But He was not a libertarian, He was a socialist.But beyond these criticisms this is an excellent book.My favorite chapter is the one about William E. Gladstone. Mr. Gladstone's life was the personification of liberty.Like John Locke and Hugo Grotius Gladstone was a devout christian who practiced moral self-government in his personal life and attempted to impose that same sense of self-discipline upon government. Once again this is a great book, which ought to be required reading in all of our schools. God bless you Jim Powell.