Thus goes the opening of John Gray's introduction to the volume of essays on Conceptions of Liberty in Political Philosophy.

Few would give such a sentence a second glance. Such generalisations are a commonplace, not only of scholarship, but of the modern Western tradition that cherishes a concept of culture-bound values which places what seem the more appealing of those values squarely within the West. And such attitudes are almost subconscious – there is little doubt that a statement such as the above is, not to any great extent, concerned with asserting or establishing a dichotomy between Western and Eastern (or, to use the term such commentators would prefer, non-Western) traditions. Such a dichotomy would be taken for granted, not worth a further glance. Instead what would be argued for (as is indeed the case with Gray), so as to make the statement necessarily true, indeed tautologically so, is that particular conceptions of liberty or the weight attached to them vary. Gray in fact deals also with Western thinkers ‘who have sought to devalue freedom as a political ideal’ and a later essay in the book is concerned with ‘The Marxian Conception of Freedom’, characterised as central to Marxist philosophy, though of course, with a somewhat different meaning attached to freedom from that commonly associated with it.