In the Liberal Tradition: A History of Liberty
"At all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare, and its triumphs have been due to minorities...If hostile interests have wrought much injury, false ideas have wrought still more; and [true liberty's] advance is recorded in the increase of knowledge as much as in the improvement of laws."
- Lord Acton, "The History of Freedom in Antiquity"
This collection of short biographies highlights the life and thought of central characters in the history of liberty.
The rest of this page is a link list. They're very short biographies. Ah, what the heck!
THE MIDDLE AGES
Hugh of St. Victor (1096-1141)
Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274)
Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406)
St. Bernardino of Siena (1380-1444)
St. Bernardino of Siena (1380-1444)
THE RENAISSANCE
Bartholomew de Las Casas (1474-1566)
Francisco Marroquín (1499-1563)
Girolamo Zanchi (1516-1590)
Luis de Molina (1535-1600)
Francisco Suarez (1548-1617)
Johannes Althusius (1557-1638)
William Perkins (1558-1602)
Hugo Grotius (1583-1645)
John Winthrop (1588-1649)
Samuel Rutherford (1600-1661)
John Milton (1608-1674)
Sir Henry Vane (1613-1662)
John Locke (1632-1704)
Samuel von Pufendorf (1632-1694)
William Penn (1644-1718)
Joseph Addison (1672-1719)
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
Adam Smith (1723-1790)
John Witherspoon (1723-1794)
Issac Backus (1724-1806)
Samuel Cooper (1725-1783)
Anne Robert Jacques Turgot (1727-1781)
Ferdinando Galiani (1728-1787)
Edmund Burke (1729-1797)
Charles Carroll of Carrollton (1737-1832)
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
James Madison (1751-1836)
Fisher Ames (1758-1808)
Noah Webster (1758-1843)
William Wilberforce (1759-1833)
K. Wilhelm Freiherr von Humboldt (1767-1835)
Benjamin Constant (1767-1830)
Jean-Baptiste Say (1767-1832)
Lyman Beecher (1775-1863)
NINETEENTH CENTURY
Richard Whately (1787-1863)
James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851)
Antonio Rosmini-Serbati (1797-1855)
Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850)
John Henry Newman (1801-1890)
Jean-Baptiste-Henri Dominique Lacordaire (1802-1861)
Orestes Brownson (1803-1876)
Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859)
William Ewart Gladstone (1809-1898)
Charles le Comte de Montalembert (1810-1870)
John Bright (1811-1889)
Isaac Thomas Hecker (1819-1888)
Lord Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton (1834-1902)
Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920)
Booker T. Washington (1856-1915)
J. Gresham Machen (1881-1936)
Jacques Maritain (1882-1973)
J. Howard Pew (1882-1971)
TWENTIETH CENTURY
Rose Wilder Lane (1886-1968)
Emil Brunner (1889-1966)
Michael Polanyi (1891-1976)
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892-1973)
Christopher Dawson (1898-1970)
C.S. Lewis (1898-1963)
Leonard E. Read (1898-1983)
Friedrich August von Hayek (1899-1992)
Edward A. Keller, C.S.C. (1903-1989)
John Courtney Murray, S.J. (1904-1967)
Frank S. Meyer (1909-1972)
Erik Ritter von Kuehnelt-Leddihn (1909-1999)
Richard M. Weaver (1910-1963)
Carl F. H. Henry (1913-2003)
Russell Kirk (1918-1994)
I've provided the links to people that I've mentioned, or know I should have. For the rest, go there. Except for the Eighteenth Century; there are too many. I'm trying to highlight the one's that people should know by using links. The Eighteenth Century would just be a sea of blue.
I see that I reversed Emerich Edward in my comment to the previous post. I think of him as Eddie. (Ow! Ow! Ow! I'm sorry! I'm sorry!)
By the way, for anybody who's interested enough to read this far, I've fired up another blog that I plan to think of as my backroom/workshop. I'll be tinkering with ideas that need more work there, instead of doing all that right up front here as I've been doing. The goofy thing about me is that I can't write at all if I don't think anybody could possibly see it. I like a little (polite) kibbitzing. I call it Bourgeois Philistines of Minnesota. Nothing much there yet.
