The Science Of Liberty by Timothy Ferris

From The Week of April 24, 2011

How did we come to be free? How did democracy come to replace authoritarianism? And how is it that most democracies do not backslide into tyranny? Mr. Ferris contends that, rather than be fuelled by the ideas that bubbled up out of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, democracy is the direct offspring of the willingness to doubt and the freedom to debate that are the keys to scientific inquiry.

The Science of Liberty charts the progress of modern science from the Renaissance onward, stopping off at various vital points to highlight its key thinkers, inventors and advocates. From important philosophers like spinoza and Descartes, to revolutionary geniuses like Galileo and Newton, Mr. Ferris describes how a growing discontent with the tyrannical rigidity of centralized authorities like the church and the monarchy gave rise to a class of individuals who were willing to question accepted truths, to subject them to the rigor of logic, and to debate their findings with likeminded individualists. Slowly, with the passage of time, communities grew up to house this scientific spirit and it was from these communities that most of the founding figures of modern democracy were birthed.

Mr. Ferris puts forward a compelling case for why liberty should thank science for its existence. Without the spirit of inquiry to cause us to question authorities in our world, we might all be content to follow in the footsteps of those who came before us, at peace in the knowledge that what we were told was truth. But with the dawning of modern science, the impenetrable barriers to freedom were systematically smashed by the sledgehammer of reason, backed by the muscle of the scientific method. Mr. Ferris' argument drags at times as he lingers overlong on some of science's leading lights, but his argument is solid and it goes a long way to explaining how, in the span of some 200 years,saturated by anti-intellectual authoritarianism, the world transformed itself from a flat plane, generated by god, to a round ball, orbiting the sun which was but one of millions of like stars in a vast universe. Illusions falling beneath minds willing to question, willing to be wrong, willing to be free... (3/5 Stars)