Conville & Walsh
literary agency
What Price Liberty?
How Freedom Was Won and is Being Lost
- Author: Ben Wilson
- Category: Non-fiction Current Affairs / Politics
- Publisher: Faber (UK) / Basic Books (US)
- Pub date: 4 June 2009
- Length: 480 pages
About What Price Liberty?
This stirring - if troubling - history of freedom’s fall is worth its weight in gold
- Niall Ferguson, FINANCIAL TIMES
Wilson is a young Cambridge historian whose intellectual powers and breadth of scholarship seem remarkable in a man of barely 30
- Max Hastings, SUNDAY TIMES
What Price Liberty? is an erudite, eminently readable account of British liberties from Stuart monarchy to multiculturalism, written in the conviction that as a society we have ‘lost the means to talk about liberty’ and urgently need to rediscover it
- Terry Eagleton, LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS
WHAT PRICE LIBERTY? is a history of the progress and development of the idea of liberty in the US and the UK from the 17th century to the present day. Throughout the narrative Ben Wilson calls on a number of writers and thinkers – from the great philosophers of classical civilisation to contemporary historians, politicians and social commentators – in order to re-evaluate historical events and their impact on the lives of ordinary people. However, given Wilson’s innate sense of connectivity with the radical point of view, he wants to stir up some trouble too.
If we are all agreed that issues of liberty are set to become of crucial importance in the 21st century, if they haven’t already done so, we are also aware that the concept itself has fallen into dangerous political and journalistic cliché – an abstract idea which is bandied about far too often without real thought. In WHAT PRICE LIBERTY? Wilson’s aim is not only to offer us a fast-paced, engrossing narrative history of an idea, but he also invites us to define and clarify our conflicting and often rather conventional notions of liberty and to suggest new ways of thinking about the political challenges to both our liberty and liberties that face us in this new millennium.
About the Author
Ben Wilson was born in 1980 and educated at Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he graduated with a first class degree and an MPhil in history. He is the author of three books and was named in 2005 as one of Waterstone’s 25 Authors of the Future. He has consulted on scripts for various TV history progammes, and has himself appeared on TV and on national radio in the UK, Ireland and the USA. He has given lectures at Tate Britain, Cambridge and Zagreb and at book festivals in the UK including the Edinburgh Festival. He has written for the Spectator, Literary Review, Independent on Sunday, Scotsman, Men’s Health, Guardian Online and GQ.