What Price Liberty

Individual liberty will be the defining issue of the twenty-first century, while fear of terrorism, crime and social chaos has put our ideas of liberty into retreat in recent years. It is clear that there is not just a crisis of liberty, but a crisis in the way people talk about liberty. How do we, as individuals, negotiate the maximum amount of freedom in such a complex world? How can we resist the growth of intrusive authoritarianism without exposing ourselves to crime, terrorism and other risks? Even those who instinctively support social freedoms are losing confidence when confronted with such hard truths. History provides a guide to answering these questions. We have a rich legacy to draw upon to help define our approach to current problems. Yet it is a history which we are in danger of forgetting or misreading. In What Price Liberty? Ben Wilson travels through four centuries of British, American and European history, elaborating not just how civil liberties were constructed in the past, but how they were continually re-thought -and re-fought - in response to modernity. The last chapters put into context the controversies of the last decade or so-the threat of terrorism and the rise of the database nation. If liberty is to survive now it must, like it did in the past, adapt to new circumstances. But to do this we need to agree about the value we place on liberty.

The story of a fictional West African country, Sianga. Starting in 1961, on the eve of independence, it traces the country's political development until it hosts the OAU conference in 1978. How long will ordinary Siangans such as Carl and Kwesi tolerate the deterioration of living standards?

In nineteenth-century America, the belief that blacks and whites could not live in social harmony and political equality in the same country led to a movement to relocate African Americans to Liberia, a West African colony established by the United States government and the American Colonization Society in 1822. In The Price of Liberty, Claude Clegg accounts for 2,030 North Carolina blacks who left the state and took up residence in Liberia between 1825 and 1893. By examining both the American and African sides of this experience, Clegg produces a textured account of an important chapter in the historical evolution of the Atlantic world. For almost a century, Liberian emigration connected African Americans to the broader cultures, commerce, communication networks, and epidemiological patterns of the Afro-Atlantic region. But for many individuals, dreams of a Pan-African utopia in Liberia were tempered by complicated relationships with the Africans, whom they dispossessed of land. Liberia soon became a politically unstable mix of newcomers, indigenous peoples, and "recaptured" Africans from westbound slave ships. Ultimately, Clegg argues, in the process of forging the world's second black-ruled republic, the emigrants constructed a settler society marred by many of the same exclusionary, oppressive characteristics common to modern colonial regimes.

In a bracing work of history, a leading international finance expert reveals how our national security depends on our financial security More than two centuries ago, America's first secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton, identified the Revolutionary War debt as a threat to the nation's creditworthiness and its very existence. In response, he established financial principles for securing the country—principles that endure to this day. In this provocative history, Robert D. Hormats, one of America's leading experts on international finance, shows how leaders from Madison and Lincoln to FDR and Reagan have followed Hamilton's ideals, from the greenback and a progressive income tax to the Victory Bond and Victory Garden campaigns and cost-sharing with allies. Drawing on these historical lessons, Hormats argues that the rampant borrowing to pay for the war in Iraq and the short-sighted tax cuts in the face of a long-term war on terrorism run counter to American tradition and place our country's security in peril. To meet the threats facing us, Hormats contends, we must significantly realign our economic policies—on taxes, Social Security, Medicare, and oil dependency—to safeguard our liberty and our future.

Born in the village of Llangeinor, near Bridgend in south Wales, Richard Price (1723–91) was, to his contemporaries, an apostle of liberty, an enemy to tyranny and a great benefactor of the human race. His friend Benjamin Franklin described aspects of his work as ‘the foremost production of human understanding that this century has afforded us’. A supporter of the American and French Revolutions, Price corresponded with the likes of Jefferson, Adams, Washington, Mirabeau and Condorcet. In November 1789 he publicly welcomed the start of the French Revolution and thus inspired not only Edmund Burke to write his rebuttal in Reflections on the Revolution in France, but also the Revolution Controversy, ‘the most crucial ideological debate ever carried on in English’. Price also brought to world attention the Bayes-Price Theorem on probability, which is the invisible background to so much in modern life, and wrote a fundamental text on moral philosophy. Yet, despite all this and more, he remains little-known beyond academia, a situation that this biography helps to rectify. Liberty’s Apostle tells his life story through his published works and, fully for the first time, his now published correspondence with a host of eighteenth century celebrities. The life revealed is of a truly remarkable Welshman and, as Condorcet remarked, of ‘one of the formative minds’ of the eighteenth century Enlightenment.

Kwesi, a dashing young man, comes of age as his country, Sianga, achieves independence from the British. He is certain of a bright future. As the years pass he watches his dreams crumble even as he serves the very government he blames for the deterioration. Eventually he comes face to face with a terrible decision, one that will affect the entire African continent. "Easy to read, hard to put down." Commonwealth Writers Prize winner.