I am indebted above all to the many students at Palm Beach Atlantic University who participated in my courses in political philosophy over the past sixteen years. This work would not appear in its present form without the knowledge and understanding I have gained through my experience teaching undergraduates at PBA, and especially those enrolled in my Freedom and American Society and Roots of...

Freedom has traditionally been regarded as the foundational value of American political order, enshrined and celebrated in its most significant national symbols. The centrality of liberty to American identity is attested not only by the enduring appeal...

More than two millennia have passed since Confucius issued a warning of special relevance to contemporary American society: “when words lose their meaning,” he cautioned, “people lose their freedom.” A modern paraphrase of Confucius (551 B.C.–479 B.C.), Analects, tr. Arthur Waley (New...

Both freedom and law are, of course, intimately related to another concept central to Anglo-American political and legal discourse—the concept of rights. Indeed we have seen the difficulty of discussing American political values such as freedom and justice without recurrence to the idea of rights. The time-honored association of freedom and rights in the American experience even leads to...

The concept of freedom is invariably associated with the concept of government in the American mind. Such spontaneous association is eminently justified. Freedom and government are inextricably if indirectly linked in the Anglo-American tradition, a linkage forged by the correlative concept of the rule of law. The Anglo-American conceptions of freedom and the rule of law were examined in a...

The kind of political order established by the Constitution of the United States is conventionally classified as liberaldemocracy. Although the Founders themselves did not employ the term—they preferred such designations as “republic” or “representative democracy”—the modern classification has the advantage of pointedly distinguishing the two...

The freedom philosophy explored throughout this work is the traditional American response to the implicit question posed by all forms of political philosophy—what are the rules that ought to govern human relations within society? The American view, as we have seen, emphasizes the principle of individual liberty. The rules enforced by government should maximize the sphere of voluntary...

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Linda C. Raeder is professor of politics at Palm Beach Atlantic University in West Palm Beach, Florida, where she teaches modern and American political philosophy. She is the author of numerous scholarly publications exploring the nature and development of the Western liberal tradition, including a monograph on the religious thought of J. S. Mill, chapters and articles on Hayek,...