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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 February 2009
The current conception of liberty is both negative and individualistic. It rests upon obsolete assumptions. Philosophers may be conscious of the defects of such assumptions, but even that is doubtful; and clearly the average journalist or politician is by no means aware of them, for the advocates of “ liberty,” in the old sense, have a very weak case, and its opponents attack it on the wrong grounds. The controversy in the lecture-room is not important. The quarrels of commentators are trivial. But there is a mortal conflict between the advocates and opponents of liberty in the sphere of government, industrial organization, and education. In the policies of those who have social power the conflicting conceptions of liberty are operative; and the battle is still uncertain, because it is normally fought upon the basis of unexamined assumptions.
page 189 note 1 It should be noted that an assumption, and not a premise in an argument, is in question. The conscious premises of the economist may be correct, and yet the whole of his argument may be futile in reference to real life because of the unnoticed assumptions upon which the argument rests or within which alone it moves.