ABSTRACT
Liberalism is at the heart of the project that we usually call ‘the West’. It is a ‘Grand Theory’ like practically no other, in that it expresses a ‘systematic theory of “the nature of man and society”’ (Mills 1959, 23). And yet it has been formulated by so many thinkers and policy-makers in so many ways as to defy neat categorization. Perhaps this is why so many liberals have decried the very idea of ‘Grand Theory’, a condemnation that Quentin Skinner (1985, 3-4) has noted as being a common feeling of some very prominent liberal thinkers, with Sir Lewis Namier, the great ‘Whig’ historian, and Karl Popper, that Hammer of the Left (and of all ‘utopian’ thought), as archetypal debunkers of any school of thought that aims at explaining and understanding everything. yet that is precisely what liberalism does. It is its great strength and its ultimate weakness, as open to attack as any all-encompassing theory.
