The Triumph of Liberty: A 2000 Year History Told Through the Lives of Freedom's Greatest Champions

Through 65 pithy, vivid biographical profiles, Powell traces the struggle for freedom from oppression, equality before the law, peace, social justice, toleration of thought, speech and individuality. Along with familiar figures such as Erasmus, Jefferson, Franklin, Locke, Tocqueville, Thoreau and Mencken, he presents liberty-lovers who deserve to be better known, including John Lilburne, an English pamphleteer who attacked taxes, censorship and the notorious Star Chamber; Hugo Grotius, a Dutch antiwar philosopher and father of international law; and Lysander Spooner, a maverick 19th-century American libertarian opponent of military conscription and intrusive big government. Powell, senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute and editor of Laissez-Faire Books, includes inspirational profiles of Raoul Wallenberg, Martin Luther King Jr., Frederick Douglass, Mary Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. Among his eclectic, sometimes debatable choices for this motley portrait gallery are psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, opponent of involuntary commitment of mental patients, and anticollectivist novelist Ayn Rand. Equally unpredictable is the roster of creative artists whose works reputedly spread ideals of liberty: Robert Heinlein, western novelist Louis L'Amour, comic-opera whiz William S. Gilbert, Goya, Rabelais, Victor Hugo, Beethoven, Schiller. On balance, though, this stimulating sourcebook is a rousing testament to the belief that one person can make a difference; hopefully, it will inspire readers to go back to the original writings of these trailblazers. (July)