"During my first year of graduate school in 1975, Professor Harvey C. Mansfield led
a discussion section for graduate students in a survey course on the history of political
thought. There he argued that there was a “hole in the center of liberalism,” by
which he meant that a political philosophy whose central tenet was to permit people
maximum freedom to pursue self-defined ends did not contain and probably could
not contain standards to guide the best uses of that freedom."(...
