“Speaking truth to power” is not easy when you support that power. Perhaps this is the reason why so few Western historians are willing to tell the whole truth about state crimes during this century.Last fall the Moscow News reported the discovery by two archaeologist-historians of mass graves at Kuropaty, near Minsk, in the Soviet republic of Byelorussia.  The scholars at first estimated that the victims numbered around 102,000, a figure that was later revised to 250–300,000.  Interviews with older inhabitants of the village revealed that, from 1937 until June 1941, when the Germans invaded, the killings never stopped. “For five years, we couldn’t sleep at night because of all the shooting,” one witness said.Then in March, a Soviet commission finally conceded

Part 1: Early YearsAs we approach the end of the 20th century, the figure of Franklin Roosevelt looms ever more imposing in the minds of Americans. In the two centuries or so of our history, it has happened that a few of our leaders—a very few—became symbols of some powerful idea, one that left a permanent imprint on the life of our country. Thomas Jefferson is one such symbol. With Jefferson, it is the idea of a free, self-governing people, dedicated to the enjoyment of their God-given natural rights, in their work, their communities, and the bosom of their families. Abraham Lincoln symbolizes a rather different idea—of America as a great centralized nation-state, supposedly dedicated to individual freedom, but founded on the unquestioned authority and power of

Recorded at the 2003 Supporters Summit: Prosperty, War, and Depression. Ralph Raico discusses how from Jefferson to Madison, and on to Bastiat, Molinari, and Spencer, the "classical" liberals routinely denounced war as the enemy of freedom, prudence, and natural rights. Instead, militarism and imperialism have long been the domain of the enemies of private property and other apologists for the state.

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It is not disputed that the popular meaning of liberal has changed drastically over time. It is a well-known story how, around 1900, in English-speaking countries and elsewhere, the term was captured by writers who were essentially social democrats. Joseph Schumpeter (1954: p. 394) ironically observed that the enemies of the system of free enterprise paid it an unintended compliment when they applied the name liberal to their own creed, historically the opposite of what liberalism stood for from the start.
For a century now, controversy has raged over the true meaning of liberalism (Meadowcroft 1996b: p. 2). Stephen Holmes (1988: p. 101) scoffs at the dispute as involving nothing more than “bragging rights.” That does not stop him, though, from joining others of

Understandably enough, the current disfavor into which socialism has fallen has spurred what Raimondo Cubeddu (1997: 138) refers to as “the frenzy to proclaim oneself a liberal.” Many writers today have recourse to the stratagem of “inventing for oneself a ‘liberalism’ according to one’s own tastes” and passing it off as an “evolution” from past ideas. “The superabundance of liberalisms,” Cubeddu warns, “like that of money, ends up by debasing everything and emptying everything of meaning.”1
In truth, a survey of the literature on liberalism reveals a condition of conceptual mayhem. One root cause of this is the frequent attempt to accommodate all important political groupings that have called themselves “liberal.” This is an approach favored by some British