Liberalism is a precarious achievement of enduring value.This important legacy of both European history and philoso-phy – what we sometimes like to abbreviate imprecisely asthe Enlightenment – is not simply of local significance to the Atlantic democracies and their close relatives such as Australia and New Zealand. It has a scope and resonancethat continues to inspire political emancipation both within Europe and far beyond. Furthermore, it is an achievementthat is not subject to the increasingly commonplace chargesof philosophical confusion, reductionist individualism, politi-cal naivete and irrelevance, or cultural imperialism, or, atleast, that is what I contend in what follows. This book offersa restatement and defence of liberalism as a theory about theproper limits to the exercise of political power and about the scope of just political action. Yet liberalism is ubiquitousin both the academy and the public realm, so much so thatit is often presented as a hegemonic ideology or intellectualorthodoxy, so why do we need another defence of liberalism?In answering this simple question we open up issues that takeus to the heart of the problem of liberalism as an ideology,political movement or approach to normative politicaltheory. The short answer to this question is that most currentbooks on the subject tend to bury liberalism rather thanpraise it (or at least defend it).
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