Queen Liberty

Queen Liberty traces the history of an idea that lay at the foundation of political thought in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and at the same time a certain political myth that formed a core element of Polish noble culture. Anna Grześkowiak-Krwawicz seeks to trace the evolution of the ideal of “golden liberty” from the state’s creation in the sixteenth century through to the distinctive degeneration of the idea and attempts at resuscitating it in the eighteenth century. She highlights what was different or even odd about the Polish concepts, as well as how they dovetailed into the broader European tradition stretching back to antiquity. This book broadens the European perspective of scholarship on the Republican tradition and presents the fascinating political thought of the ‘Republic of the Two Nations’.

This book traces the history of an idea of freedom in political thought in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth from its emergence following the Union of Lublin in 1569 to its collapse in 1795.

The cornerstone of Clark's argument is the 1763 Royal Proclamation which forbade non-natives under British authority to molest or disturb any tribe or tribal territory in British North America. Clark contends that this proclamation had legislative force and that, since imperial law on this matter has never been repealed, the right to self-government continues to exist for Canadian natives.

She danced upon rays of Sunshine and drank the wine of time. Naught in the world could touch her, high in her lofty place among princes of the stars and potentates of the mountains. Starlit flowers wove her blankets and wholesome creatures befriended her; she rested her head upon daisies in the evening and clothed herself in grasses of the morning. She was the Wild Miss. She was Liberty. Far from the verdant lands of Liberty's freedom, across sundry wonders of her sweet time, an evil ancient as the days grew in the darkest corner of Whenua. Kino It was called, and It hibernated within the blackened depths of Mont Ata. With the greatest power of the deities in Its emblematic hands, this Kino abided below until that idyllic time when the stolen treasure would rise to its utmost potency. When that time arrived, naught in the world could have stayed Kino's curséd hand. Nevertheless, Liberty had to try.

"Why is it so difficult to develop and sustain liberal democracy? The best recent work on this subject comes from a remarkable pair of scholars, Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson. In their latest book, The Narrow Corridor, they have answered this question with great insight." -Fareed Zakaria, The Washington Post From the authors of the international bestseller Why Nations Fail, a crucial new big-picture framework that answers the question of how liberty flourishes in some states but falls to authoritarianism or anarchy in others--and explains how it can continue to thrive despite new threats. In Why Nations Fail, Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson argued that countries rise and fall based not on culture, geography, or chance, but on the power of their institutions. In their new book, they build a new theory about liberty and how to achieve it, drawing a wealth of evidence from both current affairs and disparate threads of world history. Liberty is hardly the "natural" order of things. In most places and at most times, the strong have dominated the weak and human freedom has been quashed by force or by customs and norms. Either states have been too weak to protect individuals from these threats, or states have been too strong for people to protect themselves from despotism. Liberty emerges only when a delicate and precarious balance is struck between state and society. There is a Western myth that political liberty is a durable construct, arrived at by a process of "enlightenment." This static view is a fantasy, the authors argue. In reality, the corridor to liberty is narrow and stays open only via a fundamental and incessant struggle between state and society: The authors look to the American Civil Rights Movement, Europe’s early and recent history, the Zapotec civilization circa 500 BCE, and Lagos’s efforts to uproot corruption and institute government accountability to illustrate what it takes to get and stay in the corridor. But they also examine Chinese imperial history, colonialism in the Pacific, India’s caste system, Saudi Arabia’s suffocating cage of norms, and the “Paper Leviathan” of many Latin American and African nations to show how countries can drift away from it, and explain the feedback loops that make liberty harder to achieve. Today we are in the midst of a time of wrenching destabilization. We need liberty more than ever, and yet the corridor to liberty is becoming narrower and more treacherous. The danger on the horizon is not "just" the loss of our political freedom, however grim that is in itself; it is also the disintegration of the prosperity and safety that critically depend on liberty. The opposite of the corridor of liberty is the road to ruin.