One common understanding of the Second World War is that it was a contest between liberty and tyranny. The refusal of alleged pacifists to participate in the often lawless violence of the Second World War posed fundamental practical and normative challenges for all combatants, but especially for those who understood themselves to be fighting for individual liberty. By studying the development of the law of conscientious objection from the First World War through the Second World War, one can track both the growing separation between liberal and totalitarian governance and the internal crisis that wracked liberalism in these years. This chapter describes the American, British and Commonwealth approaches to conscientious objection during the Second World War and contrasts them with how other belligerents treated those who refused to fight. The interwar debate over administrative governance had been structured by an overly-simplistic contrast between classical liberal and totalitarian approaches to the rule of law.

Ethical arguments for creating choice environments that lead people to make better choices revolve around two claims: it makes people better off, and it does so in a way that is entirely compatible with individual liberty. This chapter examines these two claims. The first half of the chapter turns to the conceptual and normative concerns with the claim that choice architecture makes people better off. The second half of the chapter turns to the soundness of the claim that choice architecture is compatible with liberty. Decision-making or advising others often generates a critical attitude that is not always engendered when we decide for ourselves. One way to combat choice architecture hindering the exercise of autonomy is to make it transparent to those who encounter it. In order to fully preserve liberty choice architecture must not block off or significantly burden other choices.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Discourse on Political Economy has been largely neglected, and the little attention it has received has been widely disparate. This chapter argues that the primary and unifying aim of the third Discourse is to define the best form of government for safeguarding individual or negative liberty. It also argues that the thread that connects the seemingly disparate elements of the text is a commitment to defining the institutions and policies that might best guarantee the preservation of property rights with a minimum degree of government infringement. Most crucially, even in defending the individual right to property possession, Rousseau is consistently critical of the pursuit of property, and especially the pursuit of superfluities or luxuries. He insists throughout the third Discourse that the primary task of popular and legitimate government is to make virtue reign.