Nicholas Buccola, "One Man’s Freedom: Goldwater, King, and the Struggle Over an American Ideal" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Nov 19, 2025

Nicholas Buccola, a political theorist and professor at Claremont McKenna College, delves into the dramatic clash between Barry Goldwater and Martin Luther King Jr. over the meaning of freedom. He explores how Goldwater's radical individualism conflicted with King's vision of collective empowerment for civil rights. Buccola highlights their divergent paths, pivotal moments like the Civil Rights Act, and the lasting impacts of their beliefs on American politics. The conversation paints a vivid picture of their rivalry and its relevance to today's political landscape.

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INSIGHT

Freedom Is Felt As Well As Defined

Freedom is an emotionally felt idea as much as a rational concept and different thinkers foreground different feelings of freedom.
Buccola aims to capture both the intellectual arguments of King and Goldwater and what their visions of freedom felt like in public moments.

ANECDOTE

Parallel Political Origins In 1955

In 1955 Barry Goldwater was an emerging senator who preferred speaking about ideas to legislating and built his profile on criticizing big government.
Martin Luther King Jr. was thrust into leadership during the Montgomery bus boycott and discovered political leadership unexpectedly.

INSIGHT

Divergent Threats To Freedom

Goldwater framed threats to freedom as federal government overreach and championed negative liberty rooted in frontier individualism.
King argued states' rights failed to protect Black freedom and called for federal action to secure equal political and social rights.

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From the acclaimed author of The Fire Is upon Us, the dramatic untold story of Barry Goldwater and Martin Luther King Jr.'s decade-long clash over the meaning of freedom--and how their conflicting visions still divide American politics

In the mid-1950s, Barry Goldwater and Martin Luther King Jr. emerged as the leaders of two diametrically opposed freedom movements that changed the course of American history--and still divide American politics. King mobilized civil rights activists under the banner of "freedom now," insisting that true freedom would not be realized until all people--regardless of race--were empowered politically, economically, and socially. Goldwater rallied conservatives to the cause of "extremism in defense of liberty," advocating radical individualism. In One Man's Freedom, Nicholas Buccola tells the compelling story of Goldwater and King's dramatic decade-long debate over the meaning of an all-important American ideal.

Part dual biography, part history, One Man's Freedom: Goldwater, King, and the Struggle Over an American Ideal (Princeton UP, 2025) traces the actions and words of Goldwater and King over a crucial and eventful decade, from their dizzying rise through 1964, which ended with Goldwater's landslide defeat in the presidential election and King's Nobel Peace Prize. The book chronicles why Goldwater and King, who never met in person, came to view each other as perhaps the greatest threat to freedom in America. It explains how their ideas of freedom could be so vastly different, yet both so deeply rooted in American history and their times. And it shows how their disagreement continues to shape and explain politics today, when the bitter divisions between Republicans and Democrats often come down to the question of what kind of freedom Americans want--the one defined by Goldwater or by King?

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