Burke on Liberty and License

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Just like Thomas Paine’s political thought, Edmund Burke’s sees liberty as a core aim of a good society. But “liberty” means something very different for Burke. While Paine defines liberty as the freedom to do whatever you want so long as you are not harming another, Burke speaks of “ordered liberty.” In this clip from Tikvah’s advanced institute “Liberalism, Conservatism, and the Jews,” Yuval Levin of National Affairs and Peter Berkowitz of the Hoover Institution explain Burke’s idea of liberty and its insight into a fundamental dilemma of liberal societies: a liberal society requires a certain kind of citizen that it cannot create by itself.

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