Leave me alone

Terry Eagleton

  • What Price Liberty? How Freedom Was Won and Is Being Lost by Ben Wilson
    Faber, 480 pp, £14.99, June 2009, ISBN 978 0 571 23594 0

David Hume once remarked that the English had the least national character of any people in the universe. Perhaps this was a cunning Scottish put-down, since character is just what the English pride themselves on. They may not bestride the world in intellect, cuisine or emotional intimacy, but these fancy pursuits can be left to foreigners, and don’t count for much compared to their own moral robustness. At the core of this moral character lies the spirit of liberty: liberty not as the lawlessness of the anarchic French or the self-realising Geist of the high-minded Germans, but liberty as the right to be cussedly, bloody-mindedly oneself. ‘John is John,’ as Tony Blair wryly murmured of John Prescott when he punched a demonstrator, suggests something of this tautological quality.

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[*] Towards the Light: The Story of the Struggle for Liberty and Rights that Made the Modern West (Bloomsbury, 352 pp., £8.99, September 2008, 978 0 7475 9299 0).

Vol. 31 No. 8 · 30 April 2009 » Terry Eagleton » Leave me alone (print version)
Pages 19-21 | 2915 words