The Liberty Paradox

A thorough meditation on the complexities of negotiating our desires with those of other people.

Kinley makes a powerful case for restoring the contingent and reciprocal notion of liberty to its rightful place in democracy, as opposed to the absolutist concept of freedom that is currently in vogue. This wide-ranging discussion of the contemporary and historical balances that must be struck between individual and community rights is an excellent introduction to a much-needed debate.

Conceptual and informative, and enjoyable and intriguing. How did we get here, a place of a facile functioning of freedom, with people in democracies everywhere proclaiming their freedom over other citizens with whom they share a country? This book is prescient and observant.

Kinley has rediscovered liberty, which provides the essential nexus between freedom and responsibility. This book was desperately needed three years ago, but it is not too late. Everyone interested in how we go forward from here will find in it the balances essential to good decision making.

David Kinley has produced a superb and subtle interrogation of the tensions and paradoxes of individual agency in complex ecologies of agency exercised by individual bodies and bodies corporate.