Ezra Klein

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?

Or do you think that's because that politics doesn't work?

People don't like it.

People don't want to be told what they have to do to be a citizen anymore.

Just give me the one that best serves my current purposes.

Or maybe another way to ask it is, at what point in your view did the strand of liberal thinking that was about the cultivation and disciplining of the self drop out?

The critiques you hear today of liberalism go back quite a long way.

You have this part of the book where you're describing fights in England in the 1830s.

And the conservatives, what they say about the liberals, even then, is that critics of liberalism accused it of meaning the exact opposite of liberality.

They accuse liberals of being selfish, egoistic, only interested in the gratification of their individual desires.

So, you know, you're describing this tradition that is focused on, you know, personal cultivation and the liberal arts.

So at what point is this critique that, no, you just want to be able to follow your own desires wherever they go and not have anybody tell you not to?

When does that enter into the fray?

I've sat here with Patrick Deneen.

I mean, not literally in this room, but on this podcast.

And, you know, I was like, where is this coming from with you?

And he's like one of these post-liberal close to J.D.