The Science of Liberty: Democracy, Reason, and the Laws of Nature
Timothy Ferris
Language: English
Pages: 384
ISBN: 0060781505
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
“Ferris is a master analogist who conveys his insights on the history of cosmology with a lyrical flair.” —The New York Times Book Review
In The Science of Liberty, award-winning author Timothy Ferris—called “the best popular science writer in the English language today” by the Christian Science Monitor and “the best science writer of his generation” by the Washington Post—makes a passionate case for science as the inspiration behind the rise of liberalism and democracy. In the grand tradition of such luminaries of the field as Bill Bryson, Richard Dawkins, and Oliver Sacks—as well as his own The Whole Shebang and Coming of Age in the Milky Way—Ferris has written a brilliant chronicle of how science sparked the spread of liberal democracy and transformed today’s world.
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Society but short on how, once property had been abolished and the state had withered away, that society would actually operate: Marx’s communist world was as ethereal as a Christian’s heaven. Yet this very insubstantiality appealed to middlebrow thinkers seeking personal salvation through political revolution. As Michael Polanyi observed, Marxism predicted that historic necessity would destroy an antiquated form of society and replace it by a new one, in which the existing miseries and.
Historian Samuel Huntington that also contributed the only marginally more illuminating claim, “Islam has bloody borders.” From a liberal perspective, however, it is clear that Islam has little to do with Islamism—which is better understood as just one more totalitarian political dogma. All such dogmas justify present sins as the price to be paid to attain a future perfection. For communists, the wished-for state was Rousseau’s heaven on earth, where nobody could own anything or evince anything.
Robert L. Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times, and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), 33. Nostalgia for the old order survives even today. One hears outcries against wealth as being inherently evil—it must have been accumulated at the expense of the environment, if not of the poor—and can visit a Federal Reserve vault deep beneath Wall Street where splay-fingered laborers heft bars of gold from one cage to another to reflect.
202 Bacon, Francis, 5, 45–51, 114, 172, 258 Bagehot, Walter, 168 Bahrain, 269, 276, 277 Bailly, Jean-Sylvain, 124 Balcerowicz, Leszek, 183 banking, 40 Banks, Joseph, 152 Banneker, Benjamin, 99 Barber, Bernard, 237 Barberini, Francesco, 44 Baring, Evelyn, 142–43 barometers, 54 Barrow, Isaac, 92 “barometer,” use of term, 90 Barrow, John, 144–45 Bastille, 84, 111 Battas, the, 145 Battle of Anghiari (da Vinci), 38 Bayle, Pierre, 64 Beagle,.
Tamerlanes who preceded them, regarded themselves as being in some sense liberal. To comport their liberality with the stark fact that they ruled unfree multitudes, they were obliged to imagine that by exploiting non-Europeans they were somehow exporting the very gifts—of democracy, science, and economic freedom—that their conduct defied. For a long time they could at least take comfort in feeling that all Europe was united in the colonial enterprise—that, as King Leopold put it, each power was.