The Structure of Freedom [antikvár]

It is gratifying to learn that this book is still in demand, and I accept with pleasure the opportunity to write a brief preface to the new printing. A new edition it is not; only a few printing errors that went undetected in the second printing have been corrected. In the 1965 Preface I recorded a number of relevant respects in which my views had changed in the years following the initial publication of this book in 1958. "Six years older and conceivably six years wiser," I wrote, "I will try to replace somé defective parts in the structure of an argument on liberty which on the whole I still consider valid and useful." After another five years it is a bit unsettling to discover that the 1965 Preface continues to express my present views. At least largely and in substance it does, although I would have changed a few words here and there (for example, I üke the word "liberal" less now and prefer, especially when applied to my own stance, words like "humanist" and "radical"). No substantive gains in wisdom in five years ? I still like to distinguish "politics" proper from "pseudopolitics"; I still believe in the crucial importance of new research and theory-building regarding humán nature and needs, as an integrál part of political inquiry; and, with this proviso, I still consider myself a behavioralist (that is alsó true, I believe, of a large proportion of the generation that has brought about, in Dávid Easton's not quite appropriate phrase, "the post-behavioral revolution"; see his "The New Revolution in Political Science," American Political Science Review, LXIII [1969], 1051-61). I still believe in the vitai importance of bridging the gulf that existed between mainly normative political inquiry, too often scholastic or entirely speculative in approach, and mainly empirical inquiry, only fact-oriented and mainly sociological in approach. But the field has been moving, so much so that by comparison I may seem to have been standing still. The gulf that existed is gone in somé areas, and is nowhere as wide and intimidating as it used to be. Political theory is in the ascendancy, and Leo Strauss and those he has influenced are no longer the most influential or even the most visible political philosophers. Indeed, the very terms "normative theory" and "empirical theory" have become a bit disreputable, as indicating a division of labor that makes no sense. Put in Harold D. Lasswell's terms, the separation of "political theory" from "political philosophy" has few spirited defenders today, even though it con-