What Price Liberty?

[sawyl]

I read a few bleeding chunks of Ben Wilson's What Price Liberty? for my MA, but being pushed for time, I skipped some chapters. With more time available to go back and fill in the blanks, I've managed to form a more rounded impression of the book as a whole. Generally, I thought it rather good in the historical sections but less so in discussions of modern politics.

The early chapters of the book, which sketched out the history of England by following the discussions about individual liberty through the early modern age to the start of the twentieth century, were excellent. Although necessarily brief, they set the history of each period with reference to what the key political thinkers argued and did to promote the cause of liberty. In the twentieth century sections, the focus shifted away from ideas towards actions, as the power of politicians grew and justifications for policies shifted away from the ideological and towards the pragmatic.

But I feel that the book really lost focus when it moved on to the late 20th and early 21st century. Although Wilson is good at setting out some of the ideas, I didn't feel as though he was arguing so much as simply complaining — in places, it seemed like a rather more rigourous version of one of Simon Jenkins' Guardian comment pieces. But even here, there gems were still to be found. I particularly liked the bizarrely Hayeckian take on crime from the Home Office that we should, "[v]iew offenders as illicit entrepreneurs ... and price them out of the market through systematically raising the costs and risks and lowering the rewards of offending." In the discussions on multi-culturalism, I thought that some good points were made about the justifications for a pluralist society; but I thought that Sandel, in his Reith lectures, made a rather better job of showing why we need to be able to discuss moral values outside of a economic and technocratic framework.