"The twin pillars of the nation created by America's Founders were strict limits on the power of central government and strict protections of individual rights. Now, at the close of the twentieth century, that state is gone - and Charles Murray wants to bring it back. In What It Means to Be a Libertarian, he offers a radical blueprint for overhauling our dysfunctional government and replacing it with a system that fosters human happiness because it safeguards human freedom." "In this very personal book, Charles Murray paints a vivid portrait of life in a genuinely free society. He explains why limited government would lead to greater individual fulfillment, more vital communities, and a richer culture. He shows why such a society would have stronger families, fewer poor people, and would care for the less fortunate far better than does the society we have now."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
This comprehensive study offers a balanced assessment of libertarian accounts of free will. Bringing to bear recent work on action, causation, and causal explanation, Clarke defends a type of event-causal view from popular objections concerning rationality and diminished control. He subtlyexplores the extent to which event-causal accounts can secure the things for the sake of which we value free will, judging their success here to be limited. Clarke then sets out a highly original agent-causal account, one that integrates agent causation and nondeterministic event causation. Hedefends this view from a number of objections but argues that we should find the substance causation required by any agent-causal account to be impossible. Clarke concludes that if a broad thesis of incompatibilism is correct--one on which both free will and moral responsibility are incompatiblewith determinism--then no libertarian account is entirely adequate.
Liberty and Power takes readers through a documentary tour of the timeless and fundamental social conflict between individuals seeking liberty from external control and those seeking power over others. With medieval law codes, Early Modern corporate charters, narrative accounts from pirates, filibusters, and revolutionaries, and cultural products like popular literature and paintings, this volume introduces the classical liberal theory of history. To liberal thinkers--great and humble alike--the social use of force necessarily divides the population into warring factions and produces disruptive change. History, then, is a train of errors in need of moral and intellectual correction.