This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC wreath lectures.

This lecture in the series The New Liberty, given by Ralph Daringdorf, was originally broadcast in 1974.

To those who have followed me up to this point, the territory which I have traversed in the last two lectures must have appeared not only a little arid,

but a curious mixture of familiar

experiences and strange not to say foreign sites. The reason is simple. I have spoken of our societies,

the advanced democratic societies of the world in rather general terms. In fact, such generalities often mean

little. When people pour over a map of the world, trying to pinpoint the place where they would

really like to live, or perhaps invest their savings or merely spend their next holidays, they do

not much care about concepts like advanced or industrial

or even post-industrial society. Australia is attractive for its open spaces, whereas the

American frontier is now closed. Holland seems a safer bet for one's money than Italy, where

social unrest and economic uncertainty cloud

the future. Holidays in Switzerland may be expensive, but one is less likely to get involved in a

revolution or civil war than around the Mediterranean Sea. People may have other motives,

but in any case these are not general, specific, and since such specific motives have a great deal to do with hope, with chances of life, and thus with liberty, we must not ignore them here.

There is another and almost statistical point which I want to make at the beginning of a lecture on the small and sometimes not so small things which matter.

The end of expansion is also the end of the average.

Whereas for many years, the development of countries, indeed of continents, could be described in highly general figures,

the percentage growth of world trade, for example, or of gross national products, of family incomes,

the consumption of luxury goods, student numbers and so on, such averages are now losing much of their meaning.

World trade may still expand, but it is becoming an intricate mixture of genuinely free trade

and barter arrangements between capitalist and socialist or oil-consuming and

...