Up Toward Liberalism

An earnest but ignorant undergraduate once wandered into a used book sale. Having some interest in political theory, he picked up a copy of Harold Laski’s The Rise of Liberalism: The Philosophy of a Business Civilization (1936). He didn’t know that Laski was a maverick Marxist; in fact he didn’t know enough to realize that the subtitle was a giveaway. The book cost a quarter. The undergraduate decided to skip that day’s chocolate bar, plunked down his money, hiked over to the gorge, and started reading.

A new economic order, he learned, arose at the end of the Middle Ages, in the fifteenth century, and thrust the middle class into prominence. This class needed some new ideas to justify its rise, to a...