Yet European messianic secularism would prove catastrophic; history attests to a tragic lethality that was not incidental to the surrogate doctrines. Marx and Freud, for example, have entries in a compelling account of ideologues who were, as the book is titled, Architects of the Culture of Death.3 The authors demonstrate that it is precisely the messianic and totalizing nature of Marxism and of Freudian philosophy, based on their radically reductionist humanisms, that engendered “death cultures.” With his paradigm of “scientific” materialism, Freud reduced the human being to a mere biological being, devoid of any spirit or soul, and he significantly minimized the centrality of reason and judgment in the motives behind human action, thereby dismissing the ethical imperative altogether. But to eliminate the soul and the moral life is to inaugurate a culture antagonistic to life. And given his immense influence in the modern history of Western civilization, the pernicious effects of Freud’s surrogate faith had a widespread and lasting impact. As for Marx, his program combined rage against class exploitation and injustice, dialectical materialism, “rational” atheism, and a summons to violent revolution, while his salvific promise included liberation, a cure for man’s alienation, and ultimately a utopian earthly paradise of societal cooperation without the hierarchy of classes.

Skeptics of renewable energy development often point out that the wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine. True enough, but when the sun isn’t shining in one place, the wind is often blowing there, or somewhere else that’s not too far away.

These patterns open up the possibility of complementarity: using different renewable energy sources to balance each other out across time and space.

Several Scotsmen, including George Turnbull, David Hume, and Adam Ferguson, had made pregnant remarks using “liberal”—remarks that may have suggested using the adjective to describe a political attitude. But the “liberal” christening was really kicked off by William Robertson in 1769, and in 1776, Adam Smith went all-in, in The Wealth of Nations. The political meaning was, essentially, a policy posture, premised on a stable, functional system of governmental authority. The policy posture is one of leaving people be, of “allowing every man to pursue his own interest his own way,” within the bounds of commutative justice. The “liberal” christening took.

Hayek Was Right

In 1960, Hayek questioned the consensus view that “liberal” first obtained a political meaning after 1800 on the Continent, from which Britain then imported the term. Hayek suggested otherwise:

I am more inclined to believe that it derives from the use of the term by Adam Smith in such passages as W.o.N., II, 41: “the liberal system of free exportation and free importation” and p. 216: “allowing every man to pursue his own interest his own way, upon the liberal plan of equality, liberty, and justice.”

Hayek’s view had had little hope of overturning the consensus. Before the digitization of millions of texts, mounting a case for Hayek’s view would mean spending years gathering a few score quotations. Tedious quotations, cherry-picked by one of those Hayek votaries with an axe to grind, from the vast uncharted forests of innumerable texts, could not get far. Such curiosa could easily be ignored and dismissed.

But, around 2012, the data came readily to hand, thanks to the Google Books Ngram Viewer.