 There are a lot of grandiose philosophies of history out there. I don't subscribe to them. Most of them see that history is a linear emotion that goes from here to there, that everything is unfolding. This is where history needs us to be, and everything is moving toward it. In fact, if you look at it from a libertarian perspective, it doesn't work that way. Sometimes there's retrograde motion where liberty retreats. It's not always an upward motion of liberty. The reason is people have to understand freedom and be willing to fight for it. So let's look at just a couple of examples. We can think about the retreat of classical liberalism in the late 19th century intellectually, and it's replaced by socialism, by nationalism, by protectionism, mercantilism, racism, and other anti-libertarian ideologies. Discommodated in World War I, the rise of totalitarianism, and in the United States, the growth of Jim Crow laws, for example, the notion that the state was going to keep certain people out of the economy, make some of you go to the back of the bus, deny them their equal rights. That was clearly a retrograde motion for the whole society, most especially, of course, for African-Americans, at whom it was explicitly aimed. We can also think about the growth of these terrible totalitarian states in Europe and in Eurasia as well. The state unleashed, if you will, absolute power with no restraints at all, based on an ideology that put the state, the collective at the top, and made the individual of no value whatsoever. So that when the Communists or the Nazis or the fascists wiped out and exterminated millions of people and their eyes, nothing was lost. What really mattered was the nation, the party, or the state. Those were real, and the concrete flesh and blood human being didn't really exist, so they could be wiped out and nothing was lost. That was truly an ideology of power, and from a libertarian perspective, an ideology of evil. The ideas of liberty did not completely die out, however. They were pushed back, but in some little corners of the world, there were flickering flames of liberty that persisted. People such as Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, both from Austria, the American writers, Roosevelt or Lane, and Isabel Patterson and the Russian Emma Gray, who learned so much from them, Ein Rand. In the early 1940s, they began to write, to write about freedom. Roosevelt or Lane wrote a wonderful book, The Discovery of Freedom. F. A. Hayek wrote his very influential work, The Road to Serfdom. Ein Rand wrote The Fountainhead, Isabel Patterson's book, The God of the Machine, and there comes about a great intellectual flourishing again of the ideas of liberty, and this has real consequences for institutions. People began to understand protectionism, socialism, nationalism, don't work. What we need is a return, and what we saw was a return to principles of freedom of trade, of constitutionally limited government, of democratic liberalism, individual liberty within the context of a constitutionally limited government. So history isn't always a forward progression towards some end that's inevitable, that's unfolding, that we have to reach. Quite the contrary. There are a lot of accidents, there's a lot of randomness in history, but also acts of courage and decency. The people who stop terrible things from happening by saying, not here, not in my lifetime, not where I live. Those are the occasions when we are likely to see liberty flourish, when people are willing to stand up for their rights.