And so the young man passes out of his original nature, which was trained in the school of necessity, into the freedom and libertinism of useless and unnecessary pleasures.

I wasted my energies in numberless frivolous pursuits, and in the short-lived love intrigues that are the disgrace of salons in Paris, where every one seeks for love, grows blase in the pursuit, falls into the libertinism sanctioned by polite society, and ends by feeling as much astonished at real passion as the world is over a heroic action.

Chesterton predicted in 1926 that the "next great heresy is going to be simply an attack on morality; and especially on sexual morality." The degradation is today all around us, and abortion advocacy is largely driven by a desire to avoid the consequences of sexual libertinism. As for the attack upon morality itself, consider that MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry, Ph.D., actually said of prenatal infanticide on a 2013 edition of her erstwhile weekend show, "When does life begin?

And the one person who really saw it coming was Aldous Huxley in Brave New World, the essential dystopia for our times, which captured the most important feature of late-modern social life--the way that libertinism, once a radically disruptive force, could be tamed, domesticated and used to stabilize society through the mediation of technology and drugs.

They are an unlikely pair: Prager with his middlebrow bookishness and Carolla, a former co-host of Comedy Central's The Man Show, with his cocky libertinism, but they've bonded over their distaste for political correctness.

But there is a whale of a difference between liberty and libertinism. Liberty is resonant only if there are clear limits to freedom.

And, in case the number of lives broken by our sexual libertinism is not sufficiently compelling evidence, then perhaps their maldistribution might suffice.

But nothing about political libertarianism implies libertinism. In fact, libertine libertarianism is generally incoherent.

Istanbul speaks of mystery, Rio de Janeiro of zestful libertinism and Shanghai of rapid reinvention.

The Luxembourg's exhibition charted a "progress of love" from the middle to the end of the eighteenth century, demonstrating how Fragonard's pictures dovetailed with different phases of Enlightenment eroticism: the tender sociability of galanterie typified in the new pictorial genre of the fete galante; the diffusion, by mid-century (through illustrated novels, principally), of libertinism as a philosophically oriented practice of voluptuousness and sexual freedom; and the ascendance in the last decades of a new ideal of romantic, conjugal love.