Portraits of Liberty

John Cooke was the English lawyer who dared to prosecute Charles I for tyranny, treason, and bloodshed. In an age when kings claimed to rule by divine right, Cooke argued that even the monarch stood beneath the law. John Cooke, though largely forgotten by history, established one of the most dangerous ideas in political history: rulers can be judged by the people they govern. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The American Founding Fathers did not stumble into liberty by sheer instinct. To understand their world, we must immerse ourselves in their libraries filled with Roman history, biblical texts, Locke, Cato’s Letters, Montesquieu, and Plutarch. This episode explores the reading habits that shaped the American Revolution and asks what it would mean today to recover that tradition. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sociology is often treated by libertarians as a hostile discipline: collectivist, ideological, and drawn toward social control. But its origins tell a more complicated story. From Ibn Khaldun to Adam Ferguson and Herbert Spencer, this older tradition reveals a sociology of spontaneous order, civil society, and limits on political power. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

At just sixteen years old, Helmuth Hübener launched a secret anti-Nazi resistance campaign from inside Hitler’s Germany. He exposed Nazi lies by publishing underground pamphlets, knowing it could cost him his life. In this episode, Paul Meany tells the story of the youngest opponent of the Nazi regime. Hübener’s courageous actions reveal the senselessness of censorship and state propaganda, and the moral responsibility to speak the truth. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Fukuzawa Yukichi rose from a marginal samurai background in a rigid, hierarchical society to become one of the most important minds behind Japan’s transformation in the nineteenth century. Deeply influenced by his encounters with the West, he championed education, skepticism of authority, and personal independence as the foundations of a free society. Yukichi helped translate Enlightenment ideals into a distinctly Japanese context. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.