Liberalism

“They are ordained of God because they arrange the ordination”: Hobhouse’s account of political power begins with a ruler’s neatest trick.

In this early-20th-century study, L. T. Hobhouse traces the long passage from kinship-bound communities and military rule to the civic state. He sets ancient city-states beside empires and feudal hierarchies, asking how people might live together without being ruled from above. The city’s promise of self-government is stirring—but its freedoms belonged only to citizens, while faction and the problem of joining separate states threatened its survival. Liberalism, Hobhouse suggests, must reckon with both the old power of authority and the limits of earlier experiments in liberty. Can a society preserve order without making obedience its first principle?

With centuries of literature, it's inevitable that some will fall through the cracks. We hunt down public domain works and restore them so they're not lost to the world.

Who are we? We're Cairn Press. Our background is in design, publishing, typography, and technology. These skills fuel our mission to create the highest quality Public Domain eBooks available online, at an affordable price. We give them the treatment they deserve; our proprietary process restores books for a better overall user experience in design, readability, and e-reader compatibility.