Equality of Permission : The Politics of Feasible Liberalism - Deirdre Nansen McCloskey

From a revered public intellectual, an essential argument for the political preconditions of a liberal society.�Liberalism has always suffered from messaging challenges. It simultaneously implies a pursuit of individual liberty and social equality, two projects often regarded as at odds. Or: Liberal means the opposite of conservative. Except when it doesn't. The list goes on.�Liberal bard Deirdre Nansen McCloskey understands these rhetorical troubles. Equality of Permission is her stirring and career-defining intervention on this essentially contested yet critical topic-a forceful case for liberalism as our best hope, and an essential vision of the political conditions necessary for its survival. McCloskey prescribes a liberalism built around liberty from the bottom up: "equality before the law and equality of political and economic permissions," lightly administered. The state, McCloskey argues, is increasingly the source of our discontents-an illiberal institution, hindered by a quixotic fixation on pursuing equality of wealth or opportunity. Equality of Permission evangelizes for a better, and earlier, version of liberalism-that of John Locke, Adam Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Henry David Thoreau-as against a top-down quest for an unattainable utopia. McCloskey shows that statism in pursuit of a chimerical general will, even when well-intentioned, leads to tyranny. Brimming with energy and erudition, drawing on wisdoms from Alexis de Tocqueville to Mae West, Equality of Permission is McCloskey at the peak of her powers-brilliant, lacerating, garrulous, funny, worldly, and warm. Amid intense debate over the use and abuse of government institutions, McCloskey shares her singular vision for a true democracy, one grounded in respect and conducive to universal human flourishing.