On Liberty and Its Enemies: Essays of Kenneth Minogue

by Timothy Fuller (Editor)

Overview

This collection of twenty of Kenneth Minogue's essays, written over a period of more than fifty years, celebrates the advent of modern liberty. They describe the conditions under which liberty and individuality can flourish and the threats to liberty's flourishing in our time. Minogue offers a powerful critique of political correctness, of ideological flights from reality, and of the deformities of study in the modern university.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781594039133
Publisher:	Encounter Books
Publication date:	04/11/2017
Series:	Encounter Classics
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.30(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Timothy Fuller is Professor of Political Science at Colorado College where he teaches political philosophy. He is a leading authority on the thought of Michael Oakeshott, and a friend and collaborator with Kenneth Minogue for nearly forty years.

Read an Excerpt

The Conditions of Freedom and the Condition of Freedom
Liberty as an idea begins in political practice, and to political practice it must be returned. If there were no danger of being dominated and subdued, then liberty would never have been worth valuing in the first place. Hence an idea of liberty, which has narrowed its focus to a point where it is purely concerned with the abstract question of removing more and more restraints from human actions, will move towards absurdity because it forgets that men live in societies in which the question of domination periodically arises. To say this is not to commit oneself to the absurd view that all life is struggle or that the striving to dominate is the central feature of human existence. The whole point of a free society is to release us from such tendencies and to allow us to associate freely as equals. But in the end, liberty is not merely a situation to be en- joyed, but a capacity to be exercised. Those who lose this capacity will soon have no freedom left to them. Perhaps the best way to sum up this argument is to say that we must not put all our evaluative eggs in one basket. There may come a point with liberty—as there certainly has come a point with democracy—at which it is really better to abandon the grandiose and to explore what we value in less pretentious terms. This is what Hobbes did, and he remains our best guide to the project. So far as self-realization is concerned, his argument that we may discover a summum malum in human affairs, but not a summum bonum, remains the most economical way of invalidating the errors in the positive conception of liberty. Hobbes grasped one of the important points in the positive conception of liberty by saying that laws are like hedges which help us on our way. This is why the laws we have adapted to are usually less onerous (because our imaginations have adapted to them) than new laws, or the laws of other communities. Hobbes dealt with liberty in the context of his whole civil philosophy. There is no other way of dealing with it adequately.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Kenneth Minogue (1930-2013) Timothy Fuller vii

Essays Kenneth Minogue

"A. Fable of Time and Class." Spring 1961 1

"How to Make Trends and Influence People." Summer 1961 10

"The Modern Liberal's Casebook." Summer 1962 20

"Can One Teach 'Political Literacy'?" June 1979 35

"Choice, Consciousness and Ideological Language." 1982 49

"The Roots of Modern Dogmatism." June 1983 71

"The Conditions of Freedom and the Condition of Freedom." 1984 99

"The Goddess that Failed." November 1991 127

"Can Scholarship Survive the Scholars?" Fall 1991 135

"Totalitarianism: Have We Seen the Last of It?" Fall 1999 150

"Some Doubts About Democracy: How the Modern State Is Evolving." 2002 166

"Two Concepts of the Moral Life." September 2005 186

"Seduction & Politics." November 2006 200

"Conservatism Sc the Morality of Impulse." January 2008 214

"Marriage in Our Time." June 2009 223

"Morals & the Servile Mind." June 2010 237

"The Irresponsibility of Rights." November 2010 248

"The Intellectual Left's Treason of the Heart." September 2011 259

"Individualism and Its Contemporary Fate." Fall 2012 270

"The Self-Interested Society." September 2013 289

Acknowledgments 305

Bibliography 306

Index 321

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Timothy Fuller has put together a marvelous collection of essays by the 20th-century’s last great defender of liberty. One cannot but admire and learn from the courage, insight, and cultivated mind of Ken Minogue.”
-Nicholas Capaldi, Loyola University New Orleans

“Ken Minogue never saw liberty as a statue, as an idol to be worshipped, but as a way of life—‘not merely a situation to be enjoyed, but a capacity to be exercised.’ Minogue also knew better than any of his contemporaries that the worst traitors to the cause of liberty often go by the name of liberals. This indispensable collection of Minogue’s essays has been carefully chosen, edited and introduced by Timothy Fuller, whose understanding of the man and his thought is unsurpassed.”
—Daniel Johnson, founding editor of Standpoint

“Kenneth Minogue inhabited his own Palace of Wisdom, and these essays amount to a guided tour for the public of the humanity, learning and wit that he put into it.”
-David Pryce-Jones
“Spanning more than 50 years, these essays give a synoptic view of an important conservative thinker who is at once clear-headed, erudite, skeptical, polemical, witty, and never dull.”
-Paul Franco, Bowdoin College

“Every single essay in this book should be read and inwardly digested by people who care about liberty. Minogue was a consummate writer—a man who possessed literary style as well as the moral courage to pour cold water on all the half-baked ideologies of his (and our) age. His insights into marriage and morals, the university, conservatism, social justice and individualism offer a bracing corrective to the ‘politically correct’ world in which so many of us now live.”
-Elizabeth Corey, Baylor University