We have standard labels for the liberal political and economic systems—democracy and capitalism. Oddly, however, we have no name for the liberal intellectual system, whose activities range from physics to history to journalism. So in this book I use the term “liberal science,” for reasons to be explained later. The very need to invent a label for our public idea-sorting system speaks volumes about the system’s success. Establishing the principles on which liberal science is based required a social revolution; yet so effective have those principles been, and so beneficent, that most of us take
...more
