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

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Think of it as an adjectival form: we are, or we should be, liberal democrats and liberal socialists.

What they most want is to pass laws that ensure their victory in the next election, which may turn out to be the last meaningful election. But these disputes are not settled by majority rule but only by much more complex processes that work slowly over time, making it difficult to overturn any existing set of rights and liberties. Socialists are defined, according to Rosselli, by their “active adhesion to the cause of the poor and the oppressed.Although no swears were harmed in the making of this book, this is not the contemporary political commentary for which Dunt has made his name. And then we must accommodate the activities, and sometimes the refusals to act, that those beliefs produce.

You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. In some ways they are more pervasive and insidious than nationalism and present a powerful threat to Liberal ideas.

The fact that Dunt barely mentions the humanism of the Renaissance or the anti-authoritarianism of the Christian Reformation just goes to show that his history of liberal thought stands on shaky grounds. Many of the people discarded by this form of liberalism then abandoned liberalism in turn - not just laissez-faire, but as a whole. 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. Liberal Jews who are religiously identified are no different from liberal Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, and so on. Communitarianism describes the close connection of a group of people who share a commitment to a religion, a culture, or a politics.