The Portuguese political theorist João Espada has written a most thoughtful and instructive book on the political and intellectual resources that inform the Anglo-American tradition of liberty. His is a "continental" perspective marked by great admiration for the sobriety and liberty that animate the political practice of the English-speaking peoples. His guides are a wide-ranging group of theorists and statesmen who illuminate the "law-abiding and moral-abiding ways of life" that to date have prevented the collapse of Anglo-American liberty into full-fledged epistemological and moral relativism, the bane of continental rationalism (and irrationalism) for two centuries.

To begin with, Espada aims to unravel the "British mystery," how Lockean rationalism in Great Britain avoided giving rise to an "adversarial project" that deduced "political schemes from rival first principles" and that ceaselessly worked to upend "existing ways of life ... because they had not been designed by 'Reason.'" Espada's book is an eloquent defense of practical reason against a rationalism that paradoxically gives way to limitless relativism. He does not reject Locke's ideas about natural rights or even the resort to the first principles of liberty. But he refuses efforts to reinterpret them "as a radical project for the entire redesign of society--politically, socially, and morally." In this regard, he takes his bearing from the great Anglo-Irish statesman Edmund Burke. Burke refused to see the Glorious Revolution of 1688 as a radical innovation and interpreted it primarily as a recovery of old liberties under threat from monarchical absolutism. Modern liberty, in Burke's view, builds on moral and political traditions that antedate the Enlightenment. Burke's great insight was to see that nothing decent and humane could be built on the thin and self-destructive reed of the human will. An ethos of duty and obligation must inform even the freest way of life.

As Irving Kristol, another major influence on Espada has argued, liberty thrives only when it avoids confronting and eroding the moral capital and moral contents that predated modern liberty and from which it gradually emerged. Liberty understood as radical autonomy or pure will inevitably gives rise to tyranny or nihilism or both. One might say that the Burkean appropriation and modification of Lockean liberty allowed it to avoid the rise to extremes. Tradition and liberty reinforced each other and thus worked against the illusion that a free society could arise from a tabula rasa, from a revolutionary "year zero" that aimed to destroy the moral capital and humane inheritance of the Christian West. As the historians Elie Halévy and Gertrude Himmelfarb have both argued, England created a remarkably dynamic and innovative society while avoiding the "Revolution" that would wreak such havoc on France and much of continental Europe. Locke was imbibed on an empty stomach in continental Europe, as the philosopher Anthony Quinton has argued, while the English appropriated him soberly for their own conserving and reforming purposes. They tamed Locke and made him a servant of a broad tradition of Western liberty.