Helena Rosenblatt

They called it that, new liberalism in England, where a group of people started to say, no, we need to learn from the Germans and we need some government intervention to help the workers, to spread the wealth, and that the government has an important role to play in the economy in a just and liberal polity.

So they learned their lessons the hard way that way.

Yeah, that's right.

In England, eventually the new liberals kind of went out and they dropped the new and they just called liberals.

Right.

And that's what happens in America.

They don't call themselves new liberals.

They start calling themselves first progressives and then liberals.

Wilson, actually, there's a moment you can see where he's saying calling himself a progressive and then he switches to liberalist.

Quite interesting.

In France, they never make that move.

So liberalism, without any descriptive term before, it means the laissez-faire liberalism, small government liberalism.

And today, in most of the world, that's what liberalism means, right?

It's sort of right of center liberalism.

Free markets, small government, whereas in America, colloquially, it tends to mean big government.

Nobody says they're for big government, but more interventionism, more of a redistributive state, bigger role for the state.

You, of course, have to talk about John Rawls, and he comes very late in this.

So I think more than thinkers, I mean, there's John Dewey.

It was very important, particularly in his liberal education.

There are people like I mentioned, I wouldn't call them great innovative thinkers.