In his insightful and important essay "Taking Liberty" (Washington Monthly, April 2005), William Galston, one of contemporary America's leading social and political thinkers, is right to insist that liberty should be at the heart of American progressive politics. And he is right to caution against "a temptation by many, especially on the left," to redefine freedom to mean "economic fairness and social justice" with which "today's left is more comfortable. That temptation should be avoided. Because freedom has its own context and logic, we cannot make it mean whatever we like." In the American political tradition, if not in the French or Swedish, liberty is central, not equality or fraternity. Galston deserves credit for emphasizing that it is not enough for thinkers of the center-left to learn to "speak American"; they must learn to "think American" as well even if the kind of progressivism this produces does not necessarily resemble any European model. Given the disorientation of the center-left in the United States today, Galston's advice could not be wiser or more timely.

But we can accept his premise that liberty must be at the center of our understanding of the history of American reform and at the same time question the details. Many of the achievements that progressives in the United States today are trying to defend from the right or build upon can be defended by two different conceptions of liberty, which might be called individualist liberalism and republican liberalism. These map the same reality in different ways, like Euclidean geometry and Riemannian geometry.

Galston writes, "For much of the 20th century, progressives took the lead in both defining freedom and advancing its borders. Teddy Roosevelt expanded the 19th-century laissez-faire conception of freedom