The Science of Liberty: Democracy, Reason, and the Laws of Nature

Timothy Ferris discusses the relationship between science and liberal government, arguing that the fortunes of science and liberty rise and fall together.

Brink Lindsey

Brink Lindsey is vice president and director of the Open Society Project at the Niskanen Center. He is the author of several books, including Human Capitalism: How Economic Growth Has Made Us Smarter—and More Unequal and The Age Of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America’s Politics and Culture.

Jason Kuznicki

Jason Kuznicki was a senior fellow and the editor of Cato Books and of Cato Unbound, the Cato Institute’s online journal of debate. His first book, Technology and the End of Authority: What Is Government For? (Palgrave, 2017) surveys western political theory from a libertarian perspective. Kuznicki was an assistant editor of the Encyclopedia of Libertarianism. He also contributed a chapter to libertarianism.org’s Visions of Liberty. He earned a PhD in history from Johns Hopkins University in 2005, where his work was offered both a Fulbright Fellowship and a Chateaubriand Prize.

Jonathan Rauch

Jonathan Rauch is a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution, a senior writer for National Journal, and a contributing editor at The Atlantic.

Timothy Ferris

Featuring the author, Timothy Ferris, with comments by Jason Kuznicki, Research Fellow, Cato Institute; and Jonathan Rauch, Contributing editor, The Atlantic Monthly, and visiting scholar, The Brookings Institution. Moderated by Brink Lindsey, Vice President for Research, Cato Institute. Award-​winning author Timothy Ferris discusses the relationship between science and liberal government, arguing that the fortunes of science and liberty rise and fall together. The scientific revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries were, he argues, a powerful inspiration for the concurrent revolutions in government; together, they produced what we know as the modern world. It was no accident that many of the American revolutionaries were also successful scientists, and it is no accident that today’s liberal societies produce vastly more scientific research than their dictatorial counterparts. In a book that spans centuries of world history, Ferris observes how scientific reasoning depends on open inquiry, free dissent, and the freedom to innovate. Liberal government, he says, enshrines these very virtues as well.