Ezra Klein

And behind that tradition, there was this virtue called liberality.

And people thought this virtue was really, really important.

As Rosenblatt writes, for almost 2,000 years it meant demonstrating the virtues of a citizen, showing devotion to the common good, and respecting the importance of mutual connectedness.

Liberality was talked about everywhere.

You can read about it in Cicero, in John Locke, in the letters of George Washington.

And yet, we never talk about it today.

Liberalism as a political philosophy and movement, it completely elbowed out.

Liberality is a virtue.

As an ethic, a citizen aspires to meet.

I want to be clear, I don't think a rediscovery of liberality is a complete answer to what ails liberalism, but I do think it's one piece of the puzzle.

I found it exciting.

I think it's one place to begin an inquiry you're going to hear a lot more of on this show over the next year.

Helena Rosenblatt is a professor at the CUNY Graduate Center.

She's the author of Liberal Values, Benjamin Constant, and the Politics of Religion, as well as the aforementioned The Lost History of Liberalism, which I highly recommend.

As always, my email is reclineshow at nytimes.com.

Helena Rosenblatt, welcome to the show.

So to the extent people think about liberalism today, which is, let's be real, a niche hobby, I think they define it as a philosophy of individual rights, of individual expression.

You write in your book that the word liberalism did not even exist until the early 19th century.

And for hundreds of years prior to its birth, being liberal meant something very different.

What did it mean?