Ezra Klein

But it doesn't come from the liberals initially.

I mean, Bismarck is a key mover here.

So how then do you have this weird split that makes so much of the conversation about liberalism confusing today, where you have a liberalism in much of Europe that means laissez-faire, that means that you are in many cases opposed to the welfare state, and you have a liberalism very much associated with America, maybe coming from Germany.

Right.

You have this debate between the classical liberals like Hayek and then FDR is, you know, the the central, like arguably most important American liberal.

And they stand in many ways for I don't want to say entirely opposite things.

They agree on things like free speech and, you know, some other dimensions around rights.

Right.

But you do have liberalism split into two streams, one of which is profoundly skeptical of the government and sees the government as the source of much tyranny.

And the other, which sees the government and a more generous government as the guarantor of a kind of freedom.

Who, in your view, are the most important American liberal thinkers?

If you're thinking of a canon of American liberalism, who belongs in it?

I think this is underplayed in our own tradition.

And I'd like to say more on this because I actually think great liberal practitioners in some ways to me are more interesting than great liberal theorists.

I find it to be a problem with American liberalism that it is so obsessed with John Rawls.

People think that is because I don't like John Rawls.

And that's not quite it.

I just think that...

In terms of something that is hopefully a popular in public philosophy, somebody whose central work is fundamentally unreadable by the public, does not really make sense as a foundation for that.

And he's not the foundation for that, right?