Colin Bird mounts a powerful and original challenge to the traditional view that the ideas associated with the liberal political tradition--the meaning of political freedom, the notion of inviolable human rights, the idea of privacy--cohere around an "individualist" conception of the relation among individuals, society and the state. He argues that by taking this conception for granted, theorists have exaggerated the unity and integrity of liberal political ideals, and limited our perception of the issues they raise.