Last month (October 2025), I wrote up a series of blog posts on “the paradox of politics”: the perennial tension between law and liberty, coercion and consent, authority and autonomy. More specifically, I surveyed four of the greatest Anglo-American minds in modern political philosophy: Thomas Hobbes (see here), John Locke (here), David Hume (here and here), and James Madison (here, here, and here). Although these “Four Horsemen of Modern Political Philosophy” present competing solutions to the paradox, they agree on one thing: they define liberty as the freedom to pursue one’s private interests. But is that how we should define the concept of liberty? What other definitions are possible? Starting on Saturday (8 Nov.), I will resume my survey on the paradox of politics with another quartet of European political theorists: Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Alexis de Tocqueville. As we shall soon see, the members of this competing camp of great minds attempt to solve the law-liberty dilemma in one of two ways: either by presenting a different conception of freedom or by rejecting the idea of natural liberty altogether!