Francis Lieber: Nineteenth-Century Liberal

Freidel, Frank. Francis Lieber: Nineteenth-Century Liberal. Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, [1947]. xiii, 445 pp. Reprinted 2003 by The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd. ISBN 1-58477-350-2. Cloth. $95. * Francis Lieber [1798-1872] was a prominent political philosopher and political scientist who helped lay the foundation for the study of political science in the United States. Renowned for his theory of civil liberty which combined an appreciation for the English concept of decentralized political institutions that protected the rights of the individual with the German idea of an overall national purpose, he bridged the intellectual gap between Europe and America. A Prussian scholar and political activist who was imprisoned twice in Germany for his liberalism, in 1827 he was one of the first university-trained scholars to emigrate to the United States. A scholar of wide interests beyond law and politics, he developed an encyclopedia that was the foundation of the Encyclopedia Britannica. He became professor of history and political economy at South Carolina College, and was later appointed to the same chair at Columbia College. In 1865 he moved to Columbia Law School, where he was renowned for his contributions. Dictionary of American Biography VI: 236-237. "There have been earlier studies of the career of Francis Lieber, but this book will rank as the definitive biography. The author has not only exhausted the archival material and the voluminous correspondence between this extraordinary German emigre scholar and the hundreds of men whom he knew during his sojourn in America from 1827 to 1872, but he used them to produce a very readable account of Lieber's career and political and social philosophy." Carl Wittke, Indiana Law Review 34:732-734 cited in Marke, A Catalogue of the Law Collection at New York University (1953) 1105.Frank Freidel is the author of 'Francis Lieber: Nineteenth-Century Liberal', published 2003 under ISBN 9781584773504 and ISBN 1584773502.