ESSAY R EFLECTIONS ON ANCIENT AND MODER N FR EEDOM Alexander Rosenthal-Pubúl What is liberty without virtue and wisdom? It is the greatest of all possible evils: for it is folly, vice, and madness. -Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France W estern civilization is unique among world cultures in the special significance and value it accords to the idea of freedom.1 Already a central value in Greco-Roman and Christian thought, modern liberalism has exalted freedom as the central human and political value. The effort to secure individual liberty in the religious, political, cultural, and economic spheres lies at the heart of the whole modern project. The liberal doctrine of individual liberties with its intellectual roots in the European Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is enshrined in the founding documents of the American and French revolutions. America in particular-a nation "conceived in liberty" Alexander Rosenthal-Pubúl is an online lecturer in political thought at Johns Hopkins University's Center for Advanced Governmental Studies from his home in Spain. He is also cofounder and director of the Petrarch Institute, which is dedicated to keeping alive the classical humanist tradition. 62