Chapter 1: 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.
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Chapter 2: How did the history of liberalism shape its modern identity?
They're very much concerned with establishing a good, morally good regime. It's amazing how many of the early liberals were actually moralists at heart.
So talk me through the early word here. It's not even liberal, it's liberalitas, or where does this start for you?
Liberalism as a word was coined around 1811, 1812, and it was first theorized as a concept. People start talking about what is liberalism? Well, liberalism is this, that, not the other thing in the early 19th century in the wake of the French Revolution. It doesn't become this Anglo-American tradition until very late in the game. I say middle of the 20th century.
Does it become an Anglo-American tradition? This was something very exciting that I found in my research. So I decided to trace the word and the meaning of the word all the way back to ancient Rome, which is ancient. Liberal in ancient Rome, the root of the word is liber, right? And the word liber, yes, it means free, but it also means generous, which I thought was so very, very interesting.
So if liberal were really the qualities of freedom, lovingness, and generosity expected of a citizen... And liberalitas was the noun that went with it. So this was an attitude that was expected of citizens in Rome when you are devoted to the commonwealth, to the common good.
One thing that was a bit of an epiphany reading your book for me, I think a lot of things are missing in modern liberalism. My interest in doing this episode and more that I think are going to come is trying to figure out why liberalism feels so exhausted at a moment that it is so needed, and why so many of the books I read about it, some of the defenses I read of it, are so arid.
They have no blood in them. But one thing that was interesting here was this idea that liberalism is built on a virtue, not a political philosophy, right? Liberality. And as you just mentioned, that the old definitions of it, and you have Cicero and John Locke and John Donne, and they have some kind of intersection between generosity and freedom, but not freedom like we think of it now.
So what did freedom mean in this context?
It's really about having the freedom to voluntarily become the person that you should be. And this is dropped out of our conversation. We think of liberalism so much, as you said, being about individual rights and maximizing our choices. But it was to them also about making good choices. And a good system of government would help you, give you the capacity to make those good choices.
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Chapter 3: What virtues were central to early liberal thought?
You know, they don't even always live up to the ideal. Sure don't. But they had that ideal and they talked about it. And they designed an educational system, a liberal arts education that was supposed to cultivate these virtues, this liberality in elite boys. But there was a lot expected of the elite as well. So I don't think it was just mere hypocrisy.
I'm writing a book right now about Madame de Stael, a great early liberal and a woman, a powerhouse, such a fascinating woman. Some say that it was in her salon, in her drawing room, that liberalism was ignited. Our name appears as a very important sort of power broker and intellectual in the early 19th century and then gets dropped out. She is endlessly frustrated by where are the good men?
We need some good men, not only to pursue the policies that we need, but to serve as examples.
A question echoing through history right now. I think this is also somewhat inspiring or provocative to think of from our current vantage point, which is to say that one of the problems that
early theorists of being liberal are trying to think through is what are the habits, what is the kind of education, what is a form of personal development needed to instill the virtues that will be necessary to hold together complex societies? What is needed to hold together a country or even a city? It's not easy. I actually think this helps
explain one reason liberals have always been so shocked and repulsed by Donald Trump himself, not just Trumpism or the Republican Party, but him. which is like quite deep in the liberal theory and inheritance, I'm not even sure people totally realize that they have absorbed, is a sense that to make a country work, people have to behave in a certain way towards each other.
And the ways in which he flouts the rules of behavior, the ways in which he acts towards other people are almost separate from anything he believes, like a profound challenge to what liberalism believes of how you make a society work. I think in many ways he is proving that there was something important in that.
But this question of how do you instill in a society the virtues necessary to make a society work, understanding that as an actually hard problem, I think there's juice in that today.
Yeah, no, absolutely. And the fact that they're elitists, liberals throughout their history have tended to be elitist, but they demanded a lot. There were a lot of obligations and they took that extremely seriously. There's a section in my book where I talk about Lincoln. And they thought, you know, at that point, they thought maybe a liberal democracy would fail.
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Chapter 4: How did the concept of liberality evolve over time?
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.
No, it was not. Today, it's a lot about vocational training, a lot about preparing students to get jobs. These were considered menial tasks. Liberal arts was for the leaders in the times, and the citizens were the leaders of society in Rome. In medieval period as well, it was always about something other than preparing you for a job.
Isn't it funny that today, when people try to defend the humanities, which are under siege in many universities, frankly, and they try to advocate for liberal arts education, that they say, oh, well, actually, there's proof that having a liberal arts education will get you that job.
So that whole discussion about what a citizen of a democracy means, what it means to be a citizen, what are the values, what is our common language, what does it mean to be a citizen of a democracy? All of these questions that are so important have kind of dropped out of our discussion. People are even embarrassed sometimes.
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.
That's a great question. As a historian, I always apologize for saying history is complicated. So usually there's not just one answer to that terrific question.
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?
Definitely it happened during the Cold War, let's say. It's pretty recent in the history that I describe in my book, right? But this idea of disciplining the self, we're talking about the collectivity, about your duties, about any government or state getting involved in forming citizens, a public education system that forms citizens, started to have a
scary kind of ring to it when you've seen fascism and communism. And liberals wanted to show like, oh, we're not that. We're not going in that direction. We are not about the state forming citizens. We are about individual rights, about property rights in particular. And I think that really gave probably the impetus to something that was probably happening already.
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Chapter 5: What role did moral imagination play in historical liberalism?
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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?
Right at the beginning, it's been shown that liberalism, the actual word was first a pejorative, a term of insult. It was coined, as I said, in 1811, but by the enemies of the liberals. Because of what had happened in the French Revolution, And the word liberal, when it refers to something political, is often written with an accent on the E to show its kind of foreignness.
It's something dangerous. Liberal. Yeah, liberal. It has to do with, you know, the revolution, and we don't want that. You know, all of this getting rid of noble privileges, creating what we would call civil equality. Isn't that a great thing? They would say, no, that's removing... The privileges that they had had for such a long time. So that's being selfish. That's not being magnanimous.
And so the Catholics mainly, Catholic counter-revolutionaries immediately started denouncing liberals for being selfish because they were taking away their privileges.
I mean, they had a whole slew of insulting terms that they used as synonyms for liberals, anarchists, they're against the family, they're sexually deviant, all of this because it seemed like they wanted to free up all the, in some ways rightly so, the constraints of the old regime. Throughout the 19th century, the Catholic Church was probably the most powerful enemy of liberalism.
The popes, one after the other, just spewed, you know, the most vile kind of, if I may say, rhetoric about liberals, about how very bad and sinful the world. Liberalism is sin. I mean, there were works that came out like that. And I think actually, you know, interestingly enough, today's criticisms, for example, by post-liberals and so on,
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Chapter 6: How did liberalism respond to crises throughout history?
So this is a key, one of the key sort of developments in the history of liberalism when it moves from being just what we were talking about, the virtues of a like a Roman citizen or a Christian nobleman who should give to the poor and be liberal and magnanimous. To now, you're starting to say that we have to be accepting of difference.
And you start using liberal not to just define or describe an individual who's magnanimous, but a whole society. Clubs can be liberal because they allow different types of members. Religions can be liberal when they are tolerant. And you can understand them. The Catholic Church in particular gets very worried about this when you're going to be... accepting that it's not the one religion.
But before we go into the Catholic Church's reaction, I want to spend a moment on this because from where we sit now in the United States of America, I don't think religious tolerance strikes many people as a particularly radical idea. It is taken broadly for granted.
And I'd like you to paint a little bit more of the picture of what is the context into which this argument is beginning to play out. And the relationship to religion is like a fundamental divide in societies, and the stakes are very high for people who believe. So just tell me a little bit about what is the situation into which this argument over religious toleration is entering.
Well, today we hear very much about, you know, celebrating difference and diversity is a great thing, including a religious diversity.
But what I've found, and one might find this somewhat troubling, is that these Protestants that I'm talking about, the early founders of liberalism really, did not advocate toleration for toleration's sake because they are very hostile to or disdainful towards society. what they call superstition and dogmas. So dogmas have held people back in their opinion.
The church, of course, in France, they were in charge of education. They're in charge of censorship. They basically find, and you can see this at Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, which is really funny, is they believe in a free marketplace of religion. So that if you tolerate our religions, they can then sort of fight among themselves. And this is going to lead to a purification of
And eventually people are going to become liberal Protestants like they are or Unitarians type or deists, you know, have a religion. They're not anti-religious, but the way you please God is by being good to your fellow citizen, by doing good to the community. Not necessarily praying certain times of the day or doing certain rituals or believing in certain dogmas, but being good.
So you could see also that certain, not just the Catholic Church, but certain Orthodox churches would be upset by this because literally, if this is the case, what do you need churches for? You can believe in God and be a good person without going to church.
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Chapter 7: What tensions exist between liberalism and power dynamics?
Complex society is hard to do well. Some of the collapse in confidence in that, I think, is misplaced. I don't think that what happened is all these ideals failed. I think in many cases we failed the ideals. But I want to get at something that exists in there as a shadow side.
Right.
One thing that is very present in your book is the contempt many liberals in the 1700s, the 1800s have for religion, or certainly religions that they don't belong to, right? As you say, backwards, superstitious. And this comes right up into the modern era, right? Where
there's a real feeling among the religious that liberals look down on them you know among evangelical christians and and others that they try to use a state to change their behavior you can't even refuse to bake a cake for a a couple that is getting married of the same sex and so there there is this critique of liberalism that that you see throughout the ages which is that
Liberals are tolerant of everything but what they consider to be the intolerant. If they consider you to be intolerant, backwards, bigoted, then they will bring the full force of the state, if they control it, down upon your head. It creates backlashes, but it is this very hard problem like this paradox of tolerance. How do you tolerate people who don't want to be tolerant?
How do you then not become intolerant? Can you trace a bit of that tension?
I don't know if they ever solved that problem. They were very... I don't think they have. No, I mean, one has to if you really try to understand the world from their perspective. You know, it was really hard to be a liberal most of the time. There were such formidable obstacles, such strong enemies, and such intolerance of their views. It really...
serious stuff to think of the Catholic Church coming back into power, the counterrevolutionaries, you know, what would happen to you? So do you tolerate them? Do you allow them to use the free press to attack constitutional government? At what point do you censor? We struggle with this today, and they certainly did then.
What, in your view, is the first society or state in which something that we would now recognize as liberalism takes power? When does it move from a theory outside power as a political philosophy, not as a virtue, into something that is being wielded by those with authority?
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Chapter 8: How can the principles of liberalism inspire future generations?
You need the liberals to take power. You need the bourgeoisie.
In Marx's view.
In Marx's view. So he's not anti this precisely. This is the motor of history. It's going to be superseded by the proletariat.
Where does liberalism begin to become interested in or associated with? the actual redistribution of resources in society from the rich to the poor? Where does it become connected to social welfare states? When you talk about FDR and that later liberalism, and a lot happens between what we've been discussing in there.
At some point, this moves away from just being a set of approaches to a marketplace of ideas or individual virtue, and it becomes connected to a view that power needs to be redistributed and Money and security need to be redistributed. When does that begin to happen?
Right. So the early liberals were really mostly concerned with creating a political system, getting rid of the divine right of kings and having constitutional representative government with guarantees for individual rights, freedom of speech, freedom of religion. And private property rights, rule of law, obviously very important.
But as they're also pragmatic people, and over time, with the Industrial Revolution, with urbanization, they see new problems arise, right? The idea that there is pauperism, a new word that's invented at the time. That means people are stuck. Workers are stuck in poverty. And what to do about it? Some people start saying, listen, deregulation isn't working for these people. They're stuck.
And with our core values of generosity and freedom lovingness, obviously, these people are not free. They're not able to morally refine themselves or to contribute to society anymore. in any meaningful way, morally or intellectually. So government now needs to step in first with factory legislation and such, and eventually with some sort of tax distribution and so on.
There is an interesting dimension there that I think you hear less of today, which is a connection of a social welfare state, everything from education to health care and on and on, as being not just a matter of justice, maybe not even at all a matter of justice, but instead a matter of uplift. You're trying to create the conditions for a capable, educated, productive citizenry.
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