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

Nov 19, 2025

Nicholas Buccola, Dr. Jules K. Whitehill Professor of Humanism and Ethics, delves into the clash between Barry Goldwater and Martin Luther King Jr. over the meaning of freedom. He discusses how Goldwater's radical individualism contrasted with King's call for equality and civil rights. Buccola explains the implications of their views on federal power, segregation, and the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Their debate reshaped American political discourse and still resonates today, making this story of competing ideals both timely and relevant.

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INSIGHT

Freedom Is Feeling As Well As Idea

Buccola frames freedom as emotionally felt as well as intellectually argued, and he aims to capture both in the book.
He wants readers to sense what it felt like to hear Goldwater or King advance their visions of freedom.

ANECDOTE

Two Careers Begin In 1955

Goldwater rose suddenly from Arizona business into the Senate and became a national voice against big government in the 1950s.
King, 26, was thrust into leadership during the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott and found his democratic, communitarian vision there.

INSIGHT

Divergent Threats To Freedom

Goldwater emphasized negative liberty and feared federal coercion, rooted in frontier individualism.
King argued federal power must remedy state violations of freedom when states deny equal 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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