NDPR Sarah Conly The Limits of Liberty

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Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2026.05.2 View this Review Online View Other NDPR Reviews

Sarah Conly, The Limits of Liberty, Oxford University Press, 2025, 224pp., $29.95 (hbk) ISBN 9780197812372.

Reviewed by R.S. Leiby, Elon University

Sarah Conly’s third monograph makes a provocative contribution to the scholarly conversation surrounding liberty. The book takes as its starting point the intuition that we are teetering on the verge of—or perhaps even already entrenched in—a global state of emergency. This state is generated by a variety of factors (e.g., advancing anthropogenic climate change, the inevitability of further global pandemics like COVID-19, epistemic pollution through campaigns of disinformation, etc.), conceptually united by the fact that the emergencies of the moment have the potential to be species-ending. Addressing them, therefore, cannot be a project of idle curiosity or even supererogatory enthusiasm....