August 27, 2008 — A Timely Message About Freedom

Toward the Light of Liberty:

The Struggles for Freedom and Rights that Made the Modern Western World

By A. C. Grayling

Walker & Company, 336 pages, $26.95

Reviewed by Charles R. Baron

Most people in America get up in the morning and take for granted a whole series of rights they’ll be free to enjoy throughout the day: to think and say whatever they please, satisfy their curiosities however they choose, perform whatever religious observances the day demands, and feel secure in their persons, privacies and possessions.

So deeply ingrained are these rights, they’re not given a second thought. And with good reason: the systems of laws and institutions Western democracies have developed over the past five centuries guarantee them, even if imperfectly.

But trends afoot today are eroding our rights. Some individuals, because of their ethnicity perhaps, now have good reason to feel insecure and to doubt whether equality before the law and due process of law will actually be available to them, should push come to shove. In Toward the Light of Liberty, Anthony Grayling cites the Patriot Act in the United States and the Identity Cards Act in Britain as but two instances where a frenetic grasping for security is trumping civil liberties.

Toward the Light of Liberty is an engaging sweep through the last 500 years of Western history. Grayling begins with the terror-laden 16th century, when few had any freedom or rights at all, and ends with the 21st, when terror stalks us once again.

Grayling limits the focus to the central figures, key events, and milestones that marked the hard-won progress. We are thus afforded a narrow yet embracive view from the perspective of liberty, freedom and rights.

Featured are such champions as John Locke, Montesquieu, John Stuart Mill, and others who contributed to the articulation of liberty’s rationale.

Featured as well are the landmark writings: the Bill of Rights (England 1689, United States 1791); the Declaration of the Rights of Man (France 1789); and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (United Nations 1948). Grayling has thoughtfully included the text of these documents as appendices to the book.

Toward the Light of Liberty is therefore somewhat of a cautionary tale. But it is more: it is an in-your-face reminder of just how bitter was the struggle and how relentless were the forces of tyranny arrayed against liberty’s proponents. Grayling notes we are today on the “verge of betrayal” of the millions who fought and died in the 500-year struggle.

Grayling, however, is not one to stand idly by. He is one of a rare breed of academic who chooses to venture forth from his ivory tower as professor of philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London, and engage the world in meaningful dialogue. In the 1990s, for example, he was for several years a member of a human rights group working with the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.

Throughout, Grayling gives articulate voice to arguments both for and against liberty. Thomas Hobbes’ argument in support of autocracy, for example, is dispatched neatly but fairly. To modern-day autocrats, Grayling has this to say:

“Sceptical questions about the universal applicability of the idea of human rights are asked by people for whom it is proving inconvenient…. Sceptical questions about the utility of the idea in the absence of means to enforce it are asked by those impatient of mere talk, of hot air and well-meaning declamations that cut no ice, who instead think that infantrymen’s boots on the ground are the only real solutions for real problems. Sceptical questions about the basis or justification of the idea of rights itself are asked by philosophers in safe, comfortable armchairs who have not been arbitrarily arrested and then subjected to electric cattle prods and imprisonment without trial.”

This is frank stuff and Grayling delivers such pulse-quickening prose throughout the book.

If fault can be found with it, it may be in a far too sweeping indictment of religion per se and in a far too romantic notion of science (a more sober characterization of scientific attitudes can be found in Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions). But these are minor flaws in an otherwise gem of a book.

This is a book with a message: chip away at one right and the whole edifice of liberty, painfully built at such great expense, reverberates in alarm. The message should give us pause as we get out of bed and greet a new morning.

Charles R. Baron is a writer servicing the aerospace industry. He lives in Los Angeles.