Sohrab Ahmari
speaker
219 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2026
last heard 4 Aug
Sohrab Ahmari’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The Munk Debates Podcast · Be it Resolved, liberalism gets the big questions right · 4 Aug 2026
podcast
Freedom for the many rather than just the few requires collective action and a government prepared to tame market tyrants.
This is my first time in Toronto, or as we Iranians in the diaspora call it, Tehronto.
Resolved, liberalism gets the big questions right.
Before you make up your minds, you have to untangle what the big questions are.
When you hear liberalism, you might think tolerance, due process, impartial administration, self-government.
Wait a second.
The pre-liberal ancients were aware of what a fair trial should look like.
Just look at the Bible.
Self-government is as old as Greece.
Imperial impartial administration as old as Rome and China.
I just got in my mention of the Roman Empire for the day.
So if these values weren't invented by a handful of Englishmen in the 17th and 18th centuries, then we have to ask, what made liberal ideology new?
It was the answers liberalism gave to the questions, what are human beings, and what makes them come together to form political community?
And those answers were terribly wrong.
They've yielded societies defined by eye-watering inequality, profound alienation, and the tyranny of the most selfish among us.
What are human beings?
What makes us form political communities?
Let's turn to a living philosopher, I'll tell you his name in a minute, to help us summarize the two starkly different sets of answers to these questions, the ancient answer and the relatively recent liberal one.
For a very long time, the core consensus of the Western tradition, as our thinker put it, was that human beings are naturally social.
Political community comes naturally to the human animal who yearns for the common good, which is also his or her own good as an individual who's part of the whole.
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