Rethinking democracy and the market from the idea of freedom

Abstract

Ezequiel Spector understands freedom as a cooperative practice through which people pursue their life plans alongside others, so that everyone depends on everyone else but on no one in particular. Thus understood, freedom in its economic dimension is based on private property and the market, and in its political dimension is related to suffrage and limited government through the separation of powers, administrative decentralization, and federalism. This text highlights the books main strengths on the normative, methodological, and evaluative levels; it analyzes the treatment of individual rights with a focus on private property and examines its proposal regarding religious instruction in schools. It concludes that the author succeeds in updating the defense of democracy and the market with an exhaustive work that renews the potential of classical liberalism for the 21st century.