A Tour De Force Defense of Natural Law
Liberating Liberty: Life, Liberty, Pursuit of Happiness and the Creator of Man is a new book written by Bert Schwitters.
From the Foreword of Liberating liberty …
… The central theme of Liberating Liberty is the notion that the true Telos, the Cause and Ultimate Goal, of the united States of America was defined in the Preamble of the Declaration of Independence as the common defense of their constituents’ unalienable rights to Life, Liberty and their Pursuit of individual Happiness, to enable them to attain and “live” Happiness.
Considering the fact that the authors of the Preamble held and declared that these unalienable rights were endowed to Man by his Creator, the Creator of Man, Who is commonly understood as being the God of Genesis, the Happiness mentioned in the Declaration cannot be understood as anything other than Divine Happiness or “eudaimonia”. And because it is also written in Genesis that God created Man in His image, and that God’s Name and His Whole Beingness may be summed up in the words “I am”, the pursuit of Divine Happiness must of necessity entail Man’s pursuit of attaining “Oneness” with his Creator, with God, in the Divine state of being “I am”.
From the starting point of a short passage in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence Schwitters builds an enormous edifice in defense of Natural Law, weaving together evidence from history, philosophy, political science, theology, . . .. Perhaps most impressive are his linguistic assertions consisting of detailed dissections of words and phrases from six languages: Hebrew, Greek, Latin, French, German, and obviously English. He brings to bear a wide range of sources from Aquinas, Augustine and Plato to Mises and Rothbard to make his case, while not letting past criticism of Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche. But Liberating Liberty especially relies on the thinking of Eric Voegelin. Resources explaining Voegelin’s relationship to the Austrian School have been presented by the indispensable Charles Burris here. To my mind, Schwitters reminds me of old school and old world scholarship, exhibited, for example, by Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn.
The source of the incredible breadth of scholarship that Schwitters’ brings to his assertions is signaled on the back cover of the book which states that:
Bert Schwitters (1945) may best be qualified as a “renaissance man.” Journalist, director, author, researcher, entrepreneur, marketeer, poet, and, above all, a skilled and prolific writer. Knowledgeable and active in the fields of health & nutrition, regulatory affairs & legislation, legal affairs, business enterprise, publishing, communication and the “humanities” (science, history, culture, art, political and religious philosophy).
The evidence of the truth of this description is obvious throughout the book.
Mr; Schwitters has been a delightful interlocutor with me following my articles on LRC. He sent me a copy of Liberating Liberty directly. I did not find the book on Amazon so I suggest going to his website, Liberating Liberty, to order a very well designed and printed copy.
My succinct description of Liberating Liberty is a tour de force defense of natural law.
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