How to Be a Liberal: The Story of Freedom and the Fight for its Survival

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French pronunciation in the audio version leaves a little to be desired but overall an excellent read/listen. It would allow citizens to avoid (some) meetings for the sake of their private happiness—to watch a baseball game, go to the movies, play with the kids, work in the garden, make love, or just sit with friends and talk.

Dunt's book is a timely and important contribution to the debate about liberalism in the 21st century. The highlight for me is the section on Isiah Berlin, an extraordinary thinker who couldn’t put his thoughts on paper. The struggle has already been long, and there have been and will be compromises along the way—with opponents whose rights we have to respect.There would be only one class of equal citizens: one class, one set of interests; nothing important to argue about. The rise of liberal governance in Europe coincided with the expansion of the transatlantic slave trade, the newly independent United States disenfranchised and legally dehumanised Black people and continued to transport them across the Atlantic in great numbers for generations and then discriminated against them for generations more. I doubt that there is such a thing as “liberal imperialism,” but if there were, it would be an imperialism genuinely committed to its future contraction—making room for the subject nations. For centuries liberalism was a white man’s politics, which is addressed well as is the sexism and racism of the time in previous centuries.

That liberal institutions and people do illiberal things is not necessarily a criticism of liberalism. The one weakness I found was his analysis of 'Identity Politics', which he clearly regards as a significant threat to liberalism. But we have seen (in the past at least) liberal Republicans who defend constitutional democracy, believe in an independent judiciary, feel comfortable in a pluralist society, and expect to rotate out of as well as into political office. Indeed, the adjective “liberal” guarantees that everyone is in fact brought in—as they mostly haven’t been in the history of actually existing democracies from Athens to the United States. In this way, I felt like he conceded too much to the illiberal side of progressive thought on these issues.I am dubious about the possibility of a liberal oligarchy, but a liberal aristocracy (along Jeffersonian lines) is conceivable, so long as membership is not hereditary. Courts defending civil liberty would certainly be repressed—or the judges replaced by vanguard loyalists who do as they are told. While we take responsible measures to ensure that accurate information is given here this event is ultimately the responsibility of the organisation presenting the event. Dunt gives an excellent account of the global financial crisis of 2008 (incidentally laying a decent amount of the blame on the often-neglected conflicts of interest inherent in the business model of the ratings agencies), and describes how the resulting austerity fuelled the rise of populism, and ideological conflicts between people subscribing to different tribal identities, all over the world. Far more dangerous, however, are the zealots who aim to “force the end” and establish the messianic kingdom—or the Islamic Caliphate or Jesus Christ’s Holy Commonwealth or any other religious version of the end of secular history.