The Book That Changed How I Think About Liberalism
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What does the current political landscape reveal about liberalism?
If you find yourself bewildered by this moment where there's so much reason for despair and so much reason to hope all at the same time, let me say I hear you. I'm Ezra Klein from New York Times Opinion, host of The Ezra Klein Show. And for me, the best way to beat back that bewildered feeling is to talk it out with the people who have ideas and frameworks for making sense of it. There is going to be plenty to talk about. You can find The Ezra Klein Show wherever you get your podcasts.
So we live in this moment when illiberalism is winning, when illiberalism is in power. I don't think anybody really argues that. What has surprised me about it is how weak liberalism has felt in response. I'm a liberal. I'm like a professional liberal, one involved in liberal politics. And I don't think at this moment I could tell you what liberalism's vision is, who its leaders are. In some way, I feel liberalism never really recovered from the Obama era, when it had this grand victory in electing America's first Black president, when it had this thoughtful, deliberate, and frankly, quite popular liberal leader, and then it ended in Donald Trump. And not only Donald Trump once, Donald Trump twice.
But here's the thing, Donald Trump is not working out. He is not making people want more of what he is. But if he's going to be beaten, if illiberal political forces are going to turn back, I think you're going to need a liberalism that is aspirational again. A liberalism that has moral imagination, again. A liberalism that stands for more than not this. And so I've been on this sort of esoteric personal quest, reading all these books in the liberal canon, reading all these histories of liberalism, trying to think through, like, what in this very, very long tradition... is valuable for us right now. And one of the books I came across in the search is called The Lost History of Liberalism. It's by the historian Helena Rosenblatt.
And one of the arguments it makes is that before we ever had this word liberalism, in fact, for thousands of years before the word, there was this tradition of being a liberal. And behind that tradition, there was this virtue called liberality. And people thought this virtue was really, really important. As Rosenblatt writes, for almost 2,000 years it meant demonstrating the virtues of a citizen, showing devotion to the common good, and respecting the importance of mutual connectedness. Liberality was talked about everywhere. You can read about it in Cicero, in John Locke, in the letters of George Washington. And yet, we never talk about it today. Liberalism as a political philosophy and movement, it completely elbowed out.
Liberality is a virtue. As an ethic, a citizen aspires to meet. I want to be clear, I don't think a rediscovery of liberality is a complete answer to what ails liberalism, but I do think it's one piece of the puzzle. I found it exciting. I think it's one place to begin an inquiry you're going to hear a lot more of on this show over the next year. Helena Rosenblatt is a professor at the CUNY Graduate Center. She's the author of Liberal Values, Benjamin Constant, and the Politics of Religion, as well as the aforementioned The Lost History of Liberalism, which I highly recommend. As always, my email is reclineshow at nytimes.com.
Helena Rosenblatt, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much for having me.
So to the extent people think about liberalism today, which is, let's be real, a niche hobby, I think they define it as a philosophy of individual rights, of individual expression. You write in your book that the word liberalism did not even exist until the early 19th century. And for hundreds of years prior to its birth, being liberal meant something very different. What did it mean?
That's right. Being liberal really was not just about believing in a certain or working towards a certain political design. It wasn't just about a constitutional form. It wasn't just about individual rights. It was actually more about moral development and about a certain character development that they felt was so very important and that a good constitution should promote.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What does the current political landscape reveal about liberalism?
0:00–5:20
2
How did the history of liberalism shape its modern identity?
5:20–10:19
3
What virtues were central to early liberal thought?
10:19–15:09
4
How did the concept of liberality evolve over time?
15:09–19:09
5
What role did moral imagination play in historical liberalism?
19:09–23:34
6
How did liberalism respond to crises throughout history?
23:34–29:08
7
What tensions exist between liberalism and power dynamics?
29:08–32:52
8
How can the principles of liberalism inspire future generations?
32:52–1:06:18