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 over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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The Munk Debates Podcast · Be it Resolved, liberalism gets the big questions right · 4 Aug 2026 podcast

In this older telling, our philosopher said, freedom is not only the absence of external restraints, it's about freeing ourselves from selfish passions with politics and law helping guide us and helping us to fulfill our social natures and thus to become more fully human.

Liberal ideology trashed this core consensus.

Human beings, for liberalism, are little more than self-interested brutes thrown into a brutish world and naturally at war with their fellows.

We form political community because we fear each other.

So the best we can achieve is to let everyone maximize his self-interest and hope the public good emerges spontaneously out of this ceaseless clash of human atoms.

Our thinker, the one we've summoned to present these two rival views, wasn't very fond of the liberal answer.

He doubted that people motivated solely by anxiety about their physical safety and the security of their property could build humane, decent societies.

The common good, he worried, disappears in societies founded upon individual self-interestedness.

So who was he?

I won't keep you guessing any longer.

It was none other than George Will, writing four decades ago.

Today, he's frequently a proponent of liberalism in its most extreme form, US-style libertarianism.

I don't mention this to give George a hard time about his intellectual evolution.

People are allowed to change their minds.

I only turn to his earlier, wiser self because he did such a wonderful job framing our debate.

What are human beings and why do we form community?

Are we naturally social animals capable of discerning and building the common good?

Or are we self-interested brutes who form a social contract out of bare necessity to protect ourselves from our rapacious neighbors?

You're welcome to choose that first set of answers, my friends.

But before you do, keep three things in mind.

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