The Education of Liberty

Is general history (formerly called speculative philosophy of history) a legitimate field of inquiry today? Talk of historical progress is suspect, and the academic climate of opinion is unfavorable to normative judgments distinguishing between any sense and nonsense in our story. However, successive cultural integrations occur in accord with probability because their antecedent conditions are mutable; hence, we should not expect today's climate of opinion to be permanent or somehow superior. These basic insights prepare for the "fantasies" occurring in the concluding chapters. They are thought experiments in imagining how the education of liberty might go forward in coming centuries and slowly alter common understanding and practice in economics, politics and culture.