Ezra Klein

A question echoing through history right now.

I think this is also somewhat inspiring or provocative to think of from our current vantage point, which is to say that one of the problems that

early theorists of being liberal are trying to think through is what are the habits, what is the kind of education, what is a form of personal development needed to instill the virtues that will be necessary to hold together complex societies?

What is needed to hold together a country or even a city?

It's not easy.

I actually think this helps

explain one reason liberals have always been so shocked and repulsed by Donald Trump himself, not just Trumpism or the Republican Party, but him.

which is like quite deep in the liberal theory and inheritance, I'm not even sure people totally realize that they have absorbed, is a sense that to make a country work, people have to behave in a certain way towards each other.

And the ways in which he flouts the rules of behavior, the ways in which he acts towards other people

are almost separate from anything he believes, like a profound challenge to what liberalism believes of how you make a society work.

I think in many ways he is proving that there was something important in that.

But this question of how do you instill in a society the virtues necessary to make a society work, understanding that as an actually hard problem, I think there's juice in that today.

What is liberal in the liberal arts?

Education is such an important part of this book.

Other histories of liberalism I've read actually reveal the same thing, that when you go back into the liberal tradition, the purpose of education is hotly debated and held at the center of the project.

Today, you don't have that discourse in the same way.

We talk about whether or not education is working, not so much what it is for.

It's almost taken as evident that the purpose of education is to prepare you to get a job.

And that was not the purpose of the liberal arts.

And do you think that's because citizenship is broadly shared now and so it isn't seen as a thing that people have to work to achieve?