Teaching Comparative Government

So I discovered that The Economist is doing a whole series on "Liberal Thinkers." The first one, which I missed in the throes of moving, was about John Stuart Mill. In future weeks the essays will be about John Maynard Keynes, "Schumpeter, Popper, and Hayek," "Berlin, Rawls, and Norzick," and "Rousseau, Marx, and Nietzsche." Look for them. Against the tyranny of the majority Above all, though, like all liberals Mill believed in the power of individual thought. His first big work, “A System of Logic”, argues that humanity’s greatest weakness is its tendency to delude itself as to the veracity of unexamined convictions. He renounced shibboleths, orthodoxies and received wisdom: anything that stopped people thinking for themselves. He wanted them to be exposed to as wide a range of opinions as possible, and for no idea or practice to remain unchallenged. That was the path to both true happiness and progress… As Richard Reeves’s biography makes ...

In the second of a series about liberals and liberal philosophy (the first was about John Stuart Mill), the editors of The Economist offer their understanding and prospects of de Tocqueville. It's good (even with some editing) for FRQs or debates. De Tocqueville and the French exception The gloomiest of the great liberals worried that democracy might not be compatible with liberty HE IS the most unusual member of the liberal pantheon. Liberalism has usually been at its most vigorous among the Anglo-American middle classes. By contrast, Alexis de Tocqueville was a proud member of the French aristocracy… Tocqueville believed that liberal optimism needs to be served with a side-order of pessimism. Far from being automatic, progress depends on wise government and sensible policy… Alexis de Tocqueville He broadened the liberal tradition by subjecting the bland pieties of the Anglo-American middle class to a certain aristocratic disdain; and he deepened it by pointing to the growing dan...