Liberal West

When Europe's Great War engulfed the Ottoman Empire, Arab nationalists rose in revolt against the Turks. The British supported the Arabs' fight for an independent state and sent an intelligence officer, T. E. Lawrence, to join Prince Faisal, leader of the Arab army and a descendant of the Prophet. In October 1918, Faisal, Lawrence, and the Arabs victoriously entered Damascus, where they declared a constitutional government in an independent Greater Syria. At the Paris Peace Conference, Faisal won the support of President Woodrow Wilson.

In 1927, classical liberalism, based on a belief in individualism, reason, capitalism, and free trade, was dying, when one of the 20th century's greatest social thinkers wrote this combative and convincing restatement. Nowhere are the key principles of Mises' philosophy better represented than in this timeless work. Mises was a careful and logical theoretician who believed that ideas rule the world, and this especially comes to light in Liberalism.

On a cold November day in Amsterdam in 2004, the celebrated and controversial Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was shot and killed by an Islamic extremist for making a movie that "insulted the prophet Mohammed." The murder sent shock waves across Europe and around the world. Shortly thereafter, Ian Buruma returned to his native land to investigate the event and its larger meaning as part of the great dilemma of our time.

A large, widening gap has opened between Western democracies' international ambitions and their domestic political capacity to support them. On issues ranging from immigration and international trade to national security, new political parties on the left and the right are rejecting the core foreign policy principles that Western governments have championed for over half a century. In Geopolitics and Democracy, Peter Trubowitz and Brian Burgoon provide a powerful new explanation for the rise of anti-globalism in the West.

In this effortlessly erudite account, Russell Shorto traces the idiosyncratic evolution of Amsterdam, showing how such disparate elements as herring anatomy, naked Anabaptists parading through the streets, and an intimate gathering in a 16th-century wine-tasting room had a profound effect on Dutch - and world - history. Weaving in his own experiences of his adopted home, Shorto provides an ever-surprising, intellectually engaging story of Amsterdam from its golden age to the present.

Sheriff Gus knows it’s going to be a bad week when he sees Sedric Hedgecock’s breathalyzer score. With a blood alcohol level of 0.62 percent, Hedgecock should be dead. If the breathalyzer’s isn’t on the fritz, Hedgecock’s superhuman. Either way, he’s blind drunk, so off to the county jail he goes. Joining the wannabe Bacchus in Gus’s cells is Jennifer Louis Bachman, awaiting extradition to Kansas on a murder charge. The victim in question is Jennifer’s unborn child, and the murder weapon is an illegal Mexican abortion. With the governor vacillating on whether to extradite, ...

In America and in England, faltering economies at home and failed wars abroad have generated a political and intellectual hysteria. It is a derangement manifested in a number of ways: nostalgia for imperialism, xenophobic paranoia, and denunciations of an allegedly intolerant left. These symptoms can be found even among the most informed of Anglo-America.

Political liberalism in Britain: the history of the Liberal Democrats and their predecessor parties, the Liberal Party and the SDP, from the earliest days of liberal thought in the 17th century to the Liberal Democrat-Conservative coalition and the 2015 and 2017 elections.

"Liberalism: A Sample" is an essay by G. K. Chesterton which appears in Utopia of Usurers and Other Essays (1917). It concerns the astounding baseness to which journalism had sunk. Asking why party political journalism was so bad, Chesterton states that it is even worse than it intends to be. He claims that the newspapers simply cannot argue, and do not even pretend to argue. And that there’s a sort of carelessness in their degradation, so that they assume that the reader does not have a mind.