If there is one student attitude that most all faculty bemoan, it is instrumentalism. This is the view that you go to college to get a degree to get a job to make money to be happy. Similarly, you take this course to meet this requirement, and you do coursework and read the material to pass the course to graduate to get the degree. Everything is a means to an end. Nothing is an end in itself. There is no higher purpose.

When we tell students to study for the exam or, more to the point, to study so that they can do well on the exam, we powerfully reinforce that way of thinking. While faculty consistently complain about instrumentalism, our behavior and the entire system encourages and facilitates it.

Studies by international organisations show that the total abolition of U.S. subsidies would increase the world cotton price by 14 percent. According to the charity Oxfam, this would translate into additional revenue that could feed one million more children per year, or pay the school fees of two million children in West Africa.

Without being by any means a libertarian, I do think that people of a left-wing orientation sometimes give short shrift to the non-pecuniary aspects of economic freedom. Whether or not you buy that barber licensing rules are a big deal economically, the specter of the government throwing a person in jail for participating in an exchange of haircuts for money between consenting adults should bother liberally inclined people for basically the same reasons that all random state interference in the conduct of private life is bothersome.

We consent to a lot of things that might be considered unjust, and not all transactions are purely voluntary. But he’s right that such situations should give liberals pause, and cause to ask how economic liberty might be part of an essential interest.

Prison as a deterrent does not work. If it did, America would be the safest country on earth.

Other nations routinely trade in their constitutions wholesale, replacing them on average every 19 years. By odd coincidence, Thomas Jefferson, in a 1789 letter to James Madison, once said that every constitution “naturally expires at the end of 19 years” because “the earth belongs always to the living generation.”

Larmore’s range is evident at every turn in the book, as this partial list of the philosophers he discusses will attest: Anscombe, Augustine, Bergson, Berlin, Bourdieu, Brandom, Davidson, de Biran, Dennett, Descartes, Elster, Engel, Fichte, Foucault, Frankfurt, Gauchet, Girard, Habermas, Heidegger, Horwich, Hume, Kleist, La Bruyere, Locke, MacIntyre, Marion, McDowell, Montaigne, Moran, Nabert, Nagel, Petit, Plato, Putnam, Rawls, Raz, Rorty, Rousseau, Ryle, Scanlon, Schopenhauer, Sellars, Shoemaker, Tugendhat, Williams, Wittgenstein, Wright. One feels, somehow, that the future of philosophy must lie in this method that refuses to exclude any serious philosophical attempt to come to grips with its topics.

I can attest that the man’s breadth and depth are seemingly, shockingly unending.