Ira Levin's gift is no longer what it once was, to judge from his recent Son of Rosemary and his Sliver a few years back. Still, we are permanently in Levin's debt. For decades he produced some of the most exciting and intelligent page-turners in the business – A Kiss Before Dying, Rosemary's Baby, The Stepford Wives, and The Boys from Brazil. Like his Broadway hit, Death Trap, these were all turned into movies. Rosemary's Baby, brilliantly directed by Roman Polanski with a superb cast, was understandably omitted from the American Film Institute's recent list of the 100 greatest American films – otherwise, there might not have been room for Jaws or Dances with Wolves. However, the best work of Levin's creative period was never filmed at all. It is This Perfect Day.

When Bob Nozick entered grad school at Princeton from Columbia in 1959, he was, politically speaking, a run of the mill social democrat. In the same year, another New Yorker, Bruce Goldberg, entered the same Princeton program in philosophy, from the City College of New York. Bob and Bruce had much in common, except that, at that point, Goldberg was an enthusiastic, proselytizing libertarian.

I’d come to know Bruce a few years earlier, at CCNY. We became good buddies, engaging in non-stop talk about everything under sun, including politics. I was already a hardcore libertarian, under the early influence of my friends Leonard Liggio, George Reisman, and, later, Murray Rothbard. Aside from our conversations, Bruce and I, outer-borough types, strolled the great city. We even ventured into Harlem, no problem in those days. Once we went to the famous Apollo theater, the only whites in the audience even then. The main performer was Eartha Kitt, in a classic turn. There were a lot of cheap Cantonese lunches and much else, as we discovered New York as young men.

The great intellectual and political movement known as liberalism has been one of the prime shapers of the modern world. As Ludwig von Mises wrote, it "changed the face of the earth," creating for the peoples who shared in it a life of freedom and abundance unexampled in previous history. Given this, the paucity of general works on the history and philosophical bases of liberalism and the mediocrity of most of the readily accessible ones is curious indeed. (This does not hold, however, for works of more limited scope. The Decline of American Liberalism, (1955) by Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr., for example, combines fine scholarship with a seasoned understanding of the true meaning of liberalism.)

The best known book in the field is doubtless the History of European Liberalism, by Guido de Ruggiero, originally published in 1925. Still useful in some respects, it suffers from a conceptual haziness and a lack of cutting edge perhaps attributable to the neo-idealist philosophy popular in Italy at the time, of which the author was a follower. Moreover, although himself a liberal in a very broad sense, Ruggiero had little knowledge of economics or appreciation of the functioning of the free market. His vulnerability to anticapitalist arguments may be gathered, for instance, from his treatment of the Industrial Revolution in Britain. Here he repeats the common socialist interpretation of that great process as a catastrophe for the working class, in terms scarcely differing from those of Friedrich Engels.

It is the widespread view in academia that John Maynard Keynes was a model classical liberal in the tradition of Locke, Jefferson, and Tocqueville.

Like these men, it is commonly held, Keynes was a sincere, indeed, exemplary, believer in the free society. If he differed from the classical liberals in some obvious and important ways, it was simply because he tried to update the essential liberal idea to suit the economic conditions of a new age.

But if Keynes was such a model champion of the free society, how can we account for his peculiar comments, in 1933, endorsing, though with reservations, the social "experiments" that were going on at the time in Italy, Germany, and Russia? And what about his strange introduction to the 1936 German translation of the General Theory, where he writes that his approach to economic policy is much better suited to a totalitarian state such as that run by the Nazis than, for instance, to Britain?