DAVID HACKETT FISCHER

If a free society is ever destroyed in America, it will be done in the name of one particular vision of liberty and freedom.

Most Americans do not think of liberty and freedom as a set of texts, or a sequence of controversies or a system of abstractions. They understand these ideas in another way, as inherited values that they have learned early in life and deeply believe.

Many pundits today are in the habit of misquoting Santayana's epigram, Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Maybe some people have come to grief this way, but they are probably fewer than those who have fallen into the opposite error. One is apt to perish in politics from too much memory, Tocqueville wrote somewhere, with equal truth and greater insight.

Americans tended to think of war as something that had to be done from time to time, for a particular purpose or goal. They fought not for the sake of fighting but for the sake of winning.

The most important fact about American liberty is that it has never been a single idea, but a set of different and even contrary traditions in creative tension with one another. This diversity of libertarian ideas has created a culture of freedom which is more open and expansive than any unitary tradition alone could possibly be.

The only creature less fashionable in academia than the stereotypical 'dead white male,' is the dead white male on horseback.

Most Americans do not think of liberty and freedom as a set of texts, or a sequence of controversies or a system of abstractions. They understand these ideas in another way, as inherited values that they have learned early in life and deeply believe.

If a free society is ever destroyed in America, it will be done in the name of one particular vision of liberty and freedom.

Americans tended to think of war as something that had to be done from time to time, for a particular purpose or goal. They fought not for the sake of fighting but for the sake of winning.

Many pundits today are in the habit of misquoting Santayana's epigram, Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Maybe some people have come to grief this way, but they are probably fewer than those who have fallen into the opposite error. One is apt to perish in politics from too much memory, Tocqueville wrote somewhere, with equal truth and greater insight.

The only creature less fashionable in academia than the stereotypical 'dead white male,' is the dead white male on horseback.

The most important fact about American liberty is that it has never been a single idea, but a set of different and even contrary traditions in creative tension with one another. This diversity of libertarian ideas has created a culture of freedom which is more open and expansive than any unitary tradition alone could possibly be.