After having touched on the question of translating Freedom and the Law as La libertà e la legge or La libertà e il diritto, the paper briefly examines the studies on Leoni and his contemporaries. The author observes that regarding some of those who were closest to Leoni and whose problems he felt akin to, that is, many of the thinkers he frequented at the Mont Pelerin Society, there is still a lack of research. The topic of the essay is, however, the actuality of Leoni’s intellectual legacy. The thesis is that the theory of power that he elaborated, and which unfortunately did not have much echo among the thinkers cited above, would have contributed to debunking an accusation that is frequently leveled at Classical Liberalism and Libertarianism of not having an adequate theory of the relationship between institutional evolutionism and power. Of limiting themselves, in other words, to thinking that liberal Constitutions would have been an adequate barrier to the expansion of government powers. The author’s conclusion is that even though Leoni was a child of his time, of his hopes and illusions, an integration of his theory of power with the ‘Austrian’ theory of exchange is still today a fruitful way to revitalize Classical Liberalism. That is, that theory of the political regime that is based on an uncompromising defense of individual freedom understood as the best tool to allow everyone, while respecting the freedom of others, to try to improve their own condition and to be able to defend themselves from those who would like to impose asymmetric exchanges.

Friedrich A. Hayek is widely regarded as one of the most influential twentieth-century theorists of classical liberalism and constitutional governance. His work emphasizes individual liberty, decentralized decision-making, and the rule of law as essential institutional conditions of a free society. Hayek argued that economic freedom is inseparable from political freedom and warned that discretionary government intervention in markets undermines constitutional limits and expands the state's coercive authority. This article examines Hayek's conception of liberty, his critique of economic interventionism, and his theory of the rule of law as articulated in The Road to Serfdom and The Constitution of Liberty. Situating Hayek's arguments within the literature of constitutional political economy, the article engages major critiques from Keynesian economics, Karl Polanyi, John Gray, James Buchanan, and Amartya Sen. It further considers contemporary governance challenges, including digital markets and regulatory discretion, through Hayek's emphasis on general rules and institutional restraint. While critics contend that Hayek's framework limits the state's capacity to address collective problems, the analysis argues that his institutional approach offers a durable standard for evaluating constitutional limits, economic coordination, and the preservation of liberty in modern democratic societies.

Aim. To reconstruct the values of classical liberalism regarding their axiological revision by the collective West. A retrospective analysis of the basic principles of European liberalism, their interpretation and verification in the socio-political thought of Russia during the period under study made it possible to determine its essential foundations and prospects for the development of Russian political science and the state. Methodology. The study uses a wide range of general scientific methods and political science approaches: dialectical, descriptive, axiological, structural and functional, analysis and synthesis. Results. It is concluded that fundamental principles of European liberalism were borrowed and axiologically assimilated by Russian liberals, considering the specifics of Russian reality. The process of interpreting and verifying the key tenets of European liberalism was made with use of new methodological approaches such as the following: the problem of free man was studying thorough a metaphysical dimension (two trends were intertwined – individual freedom and the search for the boundaries of this freedom); the antinomies of Western social theory were solved from moral and humanistic positions; the monarchy was recognized as a form of government, ensuring the unity of the people and state stability; the foundations of constitutionalism were the philosophy of law with a pronounced ideal of moral and legal reason; the philosophy of economy was formed under the influence of socio-cultural factors and expressed itself in the idea of the unity of property and the state. The historical drama of Russian liberalism consisted in its radicalization and, as a result, the rejection of the evolutionary path of Russia’s development at the beginning of the 20 th century. Research implications lie in discovering the identity of Russian liberalism and reactualizing the problematic field of political and legal thought in Russia in the late 19 th and early 20th centuries.

Abstract This paper advances three suggestions from the ‘classics’. First, freedom as autonomy is distinct from the popular idea that freedom consists of the absence of restraint. This is because autonomous action is different to acting instrumentally on desires or preferences. It is action where the person uses reason to reflect on what ends to pursue and the person thereby becomes more fully the author of their actions. Second, acting autonomously is a coherent understanding of what individual freedom entails in the sense that it yields predictions regarding individual behaviour. In particular, autonomous action is characterised by satisfying the Categorical Imperative and/or by embarking on learning-by-doing to generate knowledge. Kant is the source for the first of these arguments and Mill the second. Third, the exercise of individual freedom will always generate diverse behaviours. As a result, liberals have to be concerned with how the rules of freedom avoid diversity becoming a source of destructive conflict within society. Thus, liberalism has always been as much about how to avoid costly conflict as it has been about how to encode liberty in society’s institutions. The last two arguments point public policy towards the character of the rules that constrain and enable action. It is the procedures or means that matter (and not the ends) and they matter in more complicated ways than the idea of freedom as the absence of restraint might suggest.

The Financial Times called the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship’s 2025 conference the ‘right-wing Davos’. The Alliance involves academics from elite universities, current and former members of government from the UK, Australia, Hungary, and the USA, global media personalities, international capital investors, and CEOs of major companies. Superficially, it appears to represent a motley association of self-described Classical Liberals, evangelists of free-market capitalism, ethnonationalists, atheists and conservative theologians. We need a better understanding of what unites this power elite because through its interventions it is seeking to radically change societies. The dataset is all the publicly available keynote speeches (32) given at ARC 2025. The method is the Discourse-Historical Approach. The analysis reveals a community unified by its opposition to a common enemy that the conference claims is destroying ‘Western Civilisation’ from within. By drawing on its bespoke history and a series of discursive strategies, ARC 2025 becomes a theatre of self-affirming ideological recursion that, despite each speaker’s different origins, converges on an ideology that morally justifies its members’ investments in fossil fuels, their social status, and right to intervene in society. Consequently, ARC’s regressive neoliberalism erases the boundaries between Christian nationalism, neoliberalism, and the far-right.

The article delves into Friedrich Hayek’s theory of cultural evolution as a framework for understanding his “restatement” of liberalism. Beginning in the 1950s, Hayek increasingly embraced a naturalistic perspective, leading to a conceptualization of the market in evolutionary terms. His definition of the market sharply contrasts with the one proper to laissez-faire liberalism of the nineteenth century. Unlike classical liberalism, Hayek claims that the market is “unnatural,” as it has culturally evolved in opposition to innate human traits. The article will argue that Hayek’s concept of “evolutionary rationalism” establishes a new political rationality aimed at cultivating conditions that promote the flourishing of the market order and protect it from innate human instincts. According to this political rationality, the cultural reproduction of the market order maximizes the evolutionary “progress” of the human species and must be upheld to prevent the purported decline of modern civilization attributed to political rationalities based on “primitive” behavioral traits such as “solidarity” and the pursuit of “common goals.”

ABSTRACT How can social scientists advance discussions around public policy in a world characterized by increasing political polarization? I examine how Social Identity Theory (SIT) and its extensions, subconstituency theory, meritocracy theory, and the SMB model, motivate a scientific and practical interest in universal basic income (UBI) as a necessary policy response to the human capacity for social categorization. I offer a novel theoretical and empirical contribution by integrating SIT with public attitudes toward UBI, framing these discussions through broader economic and political ideologies. Unlike class- or race-based redistributive policies, strong UBI treats everyone equally, a novelty. To structure discussions around public policy and basic incomes, I provide scientific and ideological frameworks for interdisciplinary research on novel policies like UBI. Finally, I present data from a 2022 Congressional Election Study survey experiment to demonstrate that Americans’ policy preferences are motivated by a norm of equal treatment, consistent with classical liberalism.

The article analyses the evolution of the ideas embodied by Fritz Lang in M (1931) and later reformulated in Fury (1936), exploring their relation to populism and justice in democratic contexts in crisis. Of particular note is Gabriele Tergit's critique of M, pointing out its ambiguity regarding revenge and people's courts in a period marked by the instability of the Weimar Republic. Lang, initially influenced by this atmosphere, shows in M a discourse that lends itself to populist readings. However, his exile and his insertion in Hollywood lead him to reformulate his vision in the subsequent Fury, where he denounces lynching and advocates institutional justice. Through a comparative analysis of the two films, the article explores the shift from a morally ambiguous position to one closer to classical liberalism, and how these ideas are marked by the political and social changes between interwar Germany and American democracy in the 1930s.

Abstract Richard Rorty’s pragmatic liberalism seeks to combine individual freedom that encourages the flourishing of individualistic, Nietzschean “strong poets” with progressive, economically egalitarian social democracy. Critics, particularly on the Left, have questioned whether this combination is coherent and argue that Rorty’s robust commitment to individual autonomy undermines his political progressivism. This article suggests that these critics are correct that Rorty’s liberal theory contains a problematic tension and, further, that this tension could be ameliorated if Rorty had recognized the affinities his liberalism has with the pragmatic classical liberalism of FA Hayek.

ABSTRACTJames Buchanan advocated that societies should be based on a social contract. He rejected anarchy, seeing it as a “Hobbesian jungle” that calls for government intervention to maintain social order. He also opposed theories of spontaneous order. These views led to debates about the compatibility of Buchanan's works with classical liberalism and even with democracy. This paper contributes to this discussion by exploring the development of Buchanan's views on anarchy from a historical viewpoint. We argue that Buchanan's earlier works contain a theory of spontaneous cooperation and that Buchanan held to this theory until the 1970s. Then, the deteriorating conditions of American society convinced him that although anarchy is theoretically desirable, cooperation requires individuals to enter a social contract and delegate enforcement authority to political institutions. Overall, the paper reconciles Buchanan's practical views with his philosophical inclinations, portraying him as a practical contractarian but a philosophical anarchist.

ABSTRACT This article discusses the German Constitutional Court’s ‘intertemporal freedom’ concept, which demands present-day emissions constraints to protect future generations from future state overreach that may become necessary because of climate inaction today. Contextualising this jurisprudential innovation within the longue durée of classical liberalism’s exclusion of nature and its dependence on the Humean-Kantian fact-norm divide, I argue that the court unduly transforms projections regarding future policies into normative imperatives. Addressing Foucault’s biopolitics, Heidegger’s anti-liberal critique of Rationalist individualism, and Latour’s appropriation of Schmitt’s Nomos of the Earth, I caution against reviving ‘nature’ as a normative authority – a move historically entangled with Social Darwinism and fascist approaches such as Schmitt’s. Going beyond the Global North, I also critically discuss the alternative of Ecuador’s decolonial Pachamama approach, which ascribes legal personhood to nature. I conclude by proposing a ‘climate constitution quadrilemma’ mapping four competing paradigms – classical liberalism, ecological authoritarianism, Pachamama, and intertemporal freedom.

In his 1978–1979 lecture series at the Collège de France, Michel Foucault presents the figure of John Maynard Keynes as a “field of adversity,” emblematic of the tensions inherent in the crisis of governmentality. The Birth of Biopolitics centers on this crisis, understood as the proliferation of governmental interventions aimed at fostering freedom, which paradoxically result in its negation. Foucault’s genealogy of the new art of government reveals the intricate relationship between liberalism, political economy, and the limitation of governmental power, ultimately leading to the assertion of the impossibility of an economic sovereign. A closer examination of Keynes’s writings—particularly those from the mid-1920s—allows for the reconstruction of an alternative governmental rationality. This perspective articulates a distinctive relation among the critique of classical economics, liberalism, and sovereignty, seeking to address the endogenous dimension of crisis within capitalism.

This study embarks on a critical examination of classical liberalism's profound impact on Europe's sociopolitical landscape in the 21st century. By delving into the historical roots and fundamental principles of liberalism, this research assesses the extent to which classical liberal ideals shape contemporary European societies. Our analysis reveals that classical liberalism's emphasis on individual freedom, limited government, and economic liberties continues to influence European politics, economies, and social policies. We explore the multifaceted impact of classical liberal principles on specific policy developments, socioeconomic structures, cultural shifts, and governance frameworks within different European countries. Furthermore, this study investigates the reception and adaptation of classical liberal ideas in the face of modern challenges, such as globalization, technological advancements, and shifts in societal values. Our findings underscore the enduring relevance of classical liberalism in understanding Europe's sociopolitical evolution and informing policy debates. This research contributes to a nuanced understanding of the complex interplay between classical liberal ideals and contemporary European societies, shedding light on the ongoing struggle between individual liberty and state intervention.

In this paper I deal with Bernard Mandeville's views on political economy, in order to reconstruct his overall perspectives on individual moral psychology and on the topic of luxury. First, I discuss Mandeville's views on labour, wages, political management and the balance of trade against the background of contemporary paradigms of 'mercantilism' and 'free trade'. I argue that he freely moved between these categories, and I also contend that they can not be taken as a rigid orthodoxy, which would prevent a real historical recovery of their meaning. Then I turn to his discussion of luxury. I maintain that this aspect of Mandeville's thought can not be reduced to a paradoxical provocation (however brilliant), but must be reconstructed along a three-dimensional framework, because Mandeville elaborated the relative difference between needs and desires in three contexts. This framework was not explicitly stated by Mandeville, but can be recosntructed through a close reading of his writings: first, an international context, in which certain countries specialised in exporting, whereas others in consuming, luxury goods; secondly, a social context, in which the differentiation between luxuries and wants mirrors a social hierarchy; and finally an evolutionary dimension, in which the consumption of luxury goods helps spread benefits to all social ranks in the next generations. In a final section I reconsider the classic question of Mandeville's role in the growth of political economy and his alledged theory of 'possessive individualism' coupled with classical liberalism. I disagree with those reconstructions that take for granted the attendant rise of free trade, individualism and liberalism. Mandeville is a crucial case in point for showing how economic arguments were still strictly interwoven with insights in moral psychology, party politics and social criticism.

Abstract The present article reconstructs an often-neglected international political theory: libertarianism. In what follows, libertarianism is presented as a distinct branch of liberal theory, differing from both classical liberalism and, in particular, modern-day IR liberalism. To this end, the pillars of the libertarian outlook on international relations are reviewed: the sharp distinction between the incentive structures shaping the behavior of state and private actors in anarchy, a critique of public goods theory, the notions of decentralization and secession, and libertarian ethics of war. This reconstruction is followed by a juxtaposition of libertarianism with the major IR paradigms, especially liberalism. The article ends with several suggestions for future libertarian research.

Sociology and classical liberalism in dialogue: Freedom is something we do together. Edited by FabioRojas and CharlottaStern. Lexington Books. 2024. pp. 236. £85.00 (hbk). ISBN: 978‐1666961331. £35.00 (ebk). ISBN: 978‐1666961348

According to classical liberalism, markets are instruments for the mutually advantageous voluntary exchange of goods and services among individuals who have conflicting interests. Some critics have used a virtue ethics understanding of behavior in markets to call for moral limits to markets because this classical view does not respect the internal value of human practices and the intrinsic motivations of individuals. In response, Luigino Bruni and Robert Sugden have offered a virtue ethics defense of markets, thereby “reclaiming virtue ethics for economics.” We argue that their account needs further elaboration and clarification before it is possible to assess the soundness of their virtue-theoretic understanding of markets.

The purpose of this paper is to conduct a historical and exegetical analysis of two sets of ideologies that influence the current political climate of the world: modern and postmodern. The paper argues that the ideational substance of both groups of ideologies is frequently conflated in the political discourse of not only Russia, but also numerous other nations. The discussion argues that liberalism as the predominant and fundamental ideology of modernity can be divided into two distinct categories – modern and postmodern – both of which exhibit significant differences and, in many ways, oppose each other. In addition, the paper reinforces the point that classical liberalism of modernity serves as the ideological basis of the entire modern era. Fascism, on the other hand, is often considered an ideology of modernity, while this article argues that it serves as the fundamental basis of postmodernity and the watershed ideology between the two eras. Finally, the paper observes that Russia, as well as many countries of the global South, are gravitating towards modern ideological constructions, and that an important way forward would be to reinvent and reintroduce the paradigm of modernity in the contemporary postmodern world. In Russia, some academic debates on this issue are underway

Jules Ferry is a principle French politician of the last third of the XIX century, who can rightfully be considered one of the "founding fathers" of the Third Republic in France. His early views were quite contradictory: he called himself a liberal and a republican, but his political opponents sometimes defined him even as a socialist. He played an important role as a journalist and pamphleteer in the liberalization of the authoritarian Second Empire in France in the 60s of the XIX century. However, despite the importance of his political heritage, expressed in the establishment of republican values and institutions in the 80s of the XIX century, the formation of his socio-political views was not examined properly in historiography. There is still no special research on this topic in Russian Federation. The sources for writing this article were his numerous speeches, pamphlets, letters, newspaper articles written by him, as well as the memoirs of his contemporaries. The important issue explored in this article is the correlation of liberal and republican ideas in his system of views in the 60s of the XIX century, that is, until the moment when he began political activity, becoming a member of parliament in 1869. The article draws an important conclusion that in the 1860s Ferry was much closer to the classical liberals than to the "red" Republicans. It is concluded that there was a lot of classical liberal ideas in J. Ferry's views: he was a supporter of "necessary freedoms" (the expression of A. Thiers), he supported the idea of decentralizing France and condemned attempts to rehabilitate the Terror of the French Revolution at the end of the XVIII century. At the same time, like all other liberals, he defended the gains and values of the Revolution.

There have always been different approaches to the concept of the state in political science and political philosophy. Political ideologies, which interpret political and social problems in contrasting ways, offer differing perspectives on the state, particularly the modern state. In this context, it is common to find analyses of the state shaped by ideological perspectives. This study examines and discusses in detail the libertarian approach to the state, using the work of Robert Nozick as a case study. To begin with, the view of the state within the context of classical liberalism is analysed both historically and theoretically. The study then evaluates libertarianism’s view of the state based on modern assumptions. As seen in Nozick’s example, the attempt to construct a model of the state in line with an ideological doctrine—rather than an independent philosophy of the state—often gives rise to contradictions. Accordingly, Nozick’s conception of the state is subjected to a detailed analysis. The study explores whether Nozick’s notion of the state aligns with central themes in modern political thought and provides a critical evaluation of his theory of the state.