The Struggle for Liberty gives us vintage Ralph Raico in his roles of lecturer and professor. In these lectures he weaves together the daily life of the past, competing intellectual traditions, the history of the modern state, and the international background to create a broad and compelling narrative. He pulls no intellectual punches. But in these erudite talks, he presents to students a complex story in such a way that his mastery of learned disputes from a hundred, or from five hundred, years ago reaches us as living, breathing history.
From the Preface by T. Hunt Tooley
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Ralph Raico (1936–2016) was professor emeritus in European history at Buffalo State College and a senior fellow of the Mises Institute. He was a specialist on the history of liberty, the liberal tradition in Europe, and the relationship between war and the rise of the state. He is the author of The Place of Religion in the Liberal Philosophy of Constant, Tocqueville, and Lord Acton.
A bibliography of Ralph Raico’s work, compiled by Tyler Kubik, is found here.
“He loved liberty as other men love power,” was the judgment passed on Benjamin Constant by a contemporary. His lifelong concern, both as a writer and politician, was the growth of human freedom.
One of the most pernicious legacies of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao is that any political leader responsible for less than, say, three or four million deaths is let off the hook. This hardly seems right, and it was not always so.
The old Dutch republic was a case of commerce producing tolerance, producing harmony, producing a willingness to interact for the mutual benefit.
