What area do you perceive as the "front line" in the fight for liberty right now?

Stephen Hicks, Ph.D.

January 31, 2024

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min read

Question: What area do you perceive as the "front line" in the fight for liberty right now?‍

Answer: That’s a difficult one because the fight for liberty is always a multi-front battle that each generation needs to fight, but my top candidate right now is education and the kind of massive bureaucratic and ideological failure in the past two generations with respect to formal schooling, formal education.

Any time you have a bureaucratic, monopolistic government-run system, it always end-results in disaster in combination with that. We’ve had an ideological capture by anti-liberal, anti-rational, even anti-resilience philosophies and they have done enormous damage, the generation of young people now coming out undereducated, stressed, not having the resilience psychologically to take on Liberty; that I think is a terrible consequence of education.

So, I would say, the first battle is to young people: Educate yourself and take full responsibility for getting as much skills and knowledge as you possibly can.

About the author:

Stephen Hicks, Ph.D.

Stephen R. C. Hicks is a Professor of Philosophy and a Senior Scholar for The Atlas Society.

He is author of The Art of Reasoning: Readings for Logical Analysis (W. W. Norton & Co., 1998), Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Scholargy, 2004), Nietzsche and the Nazis (Ockham’s Razor, 2010), Entrepreneurial Living (CEEF, 2016), Liberalism Pro and Con (Connor Court, 2020), Art: Modern, Postmodern, and Beyond (with Michael Newberry, 2021), Eight Philosophies of Education (2022), and Lectures on the Philosophy of Politics (Spanish translation, Publicaciones del Orden Espontáneo, 2026). He has published in Business Ethics Quarterly, Review of Metaphysics, and The Wall Street Journal. His writings have been translated into 20 languages.

He has been Visiting Professor of Business Ethics at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., Visiting Fellow at the Social Philosophy & Policy Center in Bowling Green, Ohio, Visiting Professor at the University of Kasimir the Great, Poland, Visiting Fellow at Harris Manchester College of Oxford University, England, and Visiting Professor at Jagiellonian University, Poland.

His B.A. and M.A. degrees are from the University of Guelph, Canada. His Ph.D. in Philosophy is from Indiana University, Bloomington, USA.

In 2010, he won his university’s Excellence in Teaching Award.

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