http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/672
kenneth minogue - the liberal mind
whole book online
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Minogue
>Minogue wrote academic essays and books on a great range of problems in political theory. His 1963 book The Liberal Mind, about the perversion of the liberal label by radical leftists became popular internationally. Minogue argued that genuine liberalism rests on the tradition of thinkers like Adam Smith, Benjamin Constant, Adam Ferguson, Alexis de Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill et al., who built the foundation for a conservative perspective. Minogue defended civility, decency, and moderation against globalists and leftists, and advocated an honest and transparent public sphere where individuals can freely pursue their own ideas of happiness.
excerpt:
>The psychological mark of ideological entrapment is the feeling of despair which accompanies the prospect of defeat in argument. Ideologies seek to avoid such painful experiences by framing their key utterances in a vague or tautological form, in order to make these propositions impregnable. The intellectual mark of ideology is the presence of dogma, beliefs which have been dug deep into the ground and surrounded by semantic barbed wire. In addition, ideologies incorporate some kind of general instructions about behavior—ideals or value-judgments, as they would commonly be called.
>In this sense, liberalism is clearly an ideology, and one whose examination might be expected to be particularly useful. For at the present time most of us are, in some degree or other, liberal. It is only the very cynical, the unassailably religious, or the consistently nostalgic who have remained unaffected. Many liberal opinions therefore seem so obvious as to be unquestionable: liberalism invites argument and appears, with some justice, to be more open to reason than other ideologies. Nevertheless, its ideological roots are buried very deep, in an understanding of the world of whose bias we are hardly aware. Our concern, then, is to investigate liberalism as an ideology. It is neither to praise nor bury it, but to consider what might be called its intellectual and emotional dynamics.
