Publisher's Synopsis
It is one thing to assert that ordered liberty is indispensible to the preservation of open markets and democratic political orders; it is another to explain what ordered liberty is and how it emerges and endures. If an explanation of any phenomenon should be on the level of the best science of the day, then a study of ordered liberty should ask some hard questions. How do advances in the neurosciences alter how we understand and talk about liberty? How do we break our dependence on the residual language of faculty psychology, e.g. talk of free will, volition, reason or rational intellect? For that matter, how do we break free of the metaphors of an eighteenth-century mechanistic worldview, e.g. talk of determinisms and of mechanisms in the brain? This book answers these basic questions and in the process constructs a normative notion of liberty.
