John Courtney Murray, S.J.

John Courtney Murray entered the Society of Jesus in 1920. He was ordained a priest in 1933 and received his doctorate in theology from the Gregorian University in Rome in 1937. Afterwards, he assumed the Jesuit theologate at Woodstock, Maryland, where he was a professor of theology until his death. Additionally, Murray edited the magazine America and the journal Theological Studies.

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Friedrich August von Hayek

Friedrich August von Hayek was known all over the world. From the publication of his The Road to Serfdom in 1944, his name was a reference for passé thinking in the new world of Keynesian economics.

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Jacques Maritain

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Isaac Thomas Hecker

Friend and colleague of Lord Acton and Cardinal John Henry Newman, and founder of the Missionary Society of St. Paul (Paulist Fathers), Isaac Hecker is chiefly known for his efforts to reconcile Roman Catholicism with American liberal democracy.

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Frank S. Meyer

With this simple statement from his 1962 book, In Defense of Freedom: A Conservative Credo, Frank S. Meyer defined the goal of postwar conservatism: to create a society in which men are free to pursue virtue but not enforce virtue at the point of a gun.

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Orestes Brownson

Orestes Brownson (1803-76) is not, at first sight, a philosopher of liberty but, rather, one who is concerned with ordered liberty itself ordained towards a higher good. He was, to put it paradoxically, more attentive to the many ways in which freedom goes wrong than in the ways in which it goes right.

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Lord Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton

John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton—First Baron Acton of Aldenham—was born in Naples, Italy on January 10, 1834. His father, Sir Richard Acton, was descended from an established English line, and his mother, Countess Marie Louise de Dalberg, came from a Rhenish family which was considered to be second in status only to the imperial family of Germany.

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Sir Henry Vane

Born into the English landed gentry, Sir Henry Vane early rejected the advantages of his class, becoming a Protestant Dissenter. This set him against the government of Charles I and Archbishop Laud and their desire for an absolutist state coupled with a government-sanctioned church based on the European model.

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Isaac Backus

Isaac Backus was one of the leading orators of the “pulpit of the American Revolution.” Often ranked with Roger Williams, John Leland, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, Isaac Backus is one of the “preeminent figures in the establishing of freedom of conscience in America.” His commitment to liberty and freedom of conscience is best artic

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Charles le Comte de Montalembert

Born in London in 1810 to am émigré French nobleman serving in the British Army, Charles Forbes René, comte de Montalembert was raised largely by his English grandfather, James Forbes. Although a devout Protestant, Forbes encouraged Charles in the Catholic faith of his father.

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Richard Whately

Richard Whately was born the youngest of nine children in London, England, to the Reverend and Mrs. Joseph Whately on February 1, 1787. As a child he spent most of his days in his grandfather's garden, daydreaming and studying insects. At the age of nine, his parents sent him to a private school outside Bristol.

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Fisher Ames

Fisher Ames, of Dedham in Massachusetts, was one of the most eloquent Federalists at the time of America's birth. An ardent opponent of Jeffersonian democracy, Ames feared the worst for the new nation, predicting spiritual decay and social anarchy.

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