British politician Daniel Hannan’s Inventing Freedom is
an ambitious account of the historical origin and spread of the principles that
have made America great and their role in creating a sphere of economic and
political liberty that is as crucial as it is imperiled.
The ideas and institutions we consider essential to
maintaining and preserving our freedoms—individual rights, private property,
the rule of law, and the institutions of representative government—are the
legacy of a very specific tradition that was born in England and was inherited by Americans, along with other former British colonies. By the tenth
century, England was a nation-state whose people were already starting to
define themselves with reference to inherited common-law rights. The story of
liberty is the story of how that model triumphed: How it was enshrined in a
series of landmark victories—the Magna Carta, the English Civil War, the
Glorious Revolution, the US Constitution—and how it came to defeat every
international rival.
Today we see those ideas abandoned and scorned in the places
where they once went unchallenged. Inventing Freedom is a chronicle of
the success of Anglosphere exceptionalism, and it is offered at a time that may
turn out to be the end of the age of political freedom.
Download and start listening now!