Wherein lies the remedy? Anyone familiar with Hannan's pronouncements as a Conservative MEP will know that he advocates withdrawal from the EU. In this book he calls for the creation of an Anglosphere free-trade area. He also reminds us that there is nothing inevitable about centralisation, high taxation and the cradle-to-grave interventionist state. Above all, Hannan asks us to remember who we are, to recall and cherish the values and institutions that sustained Anglo-Saxon liberties.

The tale told by Hannan is therefore a very different one from that provided by Larry Siedentop. For Hannan, what we understand by liberty has its origins in the tribal councils called by the early English kings; for Siedentop it is to be found in the moral beliefs of Europe's earliest Christians. 

Towards the end of his book, Hannan announces that, if in Europe, liberty was theoretical, in the Anglosphere it was practical. Better trust, in other words, to the liberties we enjoy than to the liberties our continental neighbours profess. Siedentop draws a different conclusion. We are wrong, he suggests, to minimise the moral and intellectual distance between the ancient and modern words while maximising the distance between ourselves and the Christian Middle Ages. To do so is misunderstand how Christian beliefs provided the foundations for our conception of the moral status of the individual, and therefore to fail to see how Christianity played a pivotal role in shaping modern liberalism, with its core commitment to the equal liberty of all humans as rational agents responsible for their own actions. 

By making that mistake, Siedentop continues, we have allowed liberalism to be identified with secularism as a form of non-belief, as a doctrine without moral content, and thus by extension for it be equated with mere consumerism and materialism. In so doing, we have not only "weakened Europe's voice in the conversation of mankind" but encouraged the propagation of two "liberal heresies". 

The first is the reduction of liberalism to nothing more than an endorsement of market economics and the satisfaction of current wants and preferences. Liberalism subsists only as a crude form of utilitarianism. The second amounts to an impoverished conception of the individual. Placed in an atomised society, this individual retreats into the private world of friends and family and in a spirit of self-reliance forgets the habit of association and ignores the wider claims of citizenship and our civic life.

This takes us back to the meaning of liberty. We can possibly agree that a definition of liberty as the power to satisfy our wishes does not get us very far. In practice it has produced big government and the welfare state. But perhaps we need a more complex understanding of liberty than simply the absence of constraint by either the state or other individuals. There is more to liberty than mere civil liberty. 

And this, as Larry Siedentop knows, was something better seen by French liberals than it was by British liberals. It was writers such as Alexis de Tocqueville who saw that without the existence of a set of attitudes that fostered civic involvement and the educational benefits of political participation there was a grave risk that even our most basic liberties would be lost. It was active citizens rather than passive spectators who were best able to defend themselves against the infringement of their rights. Perhaps Daniel Hannan might care to reconsider whether we have anything to learn from our friends in Europe.