This book was in essence the brainchild of Chanaka Amaratunga, leader of the Liberal Party of Sri Lanka until his tragic death in a car accident in August 1996. He had founded the party ten years previously, at a time when the word liberalism seemed to many in Sri Lanka an anachronism. It is a tribute to the intensity of his vision, and the single mindedness with which he articulated it, that by the time of his death almost all major politicians in the country claimed to be upholders of liberal democracy, thus acknowledging the claims of a doctrine none of them had taken seriously a decade previously.

Of course the increasing popularity of the views Dr Amaratunga articulated owes something also to the times in which he lived. He was born in 1958, ten years after Sri Lankan independence, in a period in which the subcontinent was dominated by statism. In Sri Lanka it was of the socialist variety that had been propounded by Laski at the London School of Economics, a philosophy that also held most Indian political theorists of the time in its thrall; while even under ostensibly right wing military regimes in Pakistan, the necessity of centralised control was never challenged.

It cannot be denied that these dispensations enjoyed some successes. Sri Lanka developed an enviable score on the quality of life index; while India, a regular victim of famines in the colonial period, advanced towards agricultural self-sufficiency, laid the basis for future industrialisation, and also managed despite various fissiparous tendencies to maintain both unity and democracy.