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

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In a soaring narrative that stretches from the battlefields of the English Civil War to the 2008 financial crash and beyond, he'll explain the political ideas which underpin the modern world. The development of Liberalism was a messy and frustrating journey for these thinkers, who also, by the way, lived messy and frustrating lives. Can you be, for example, a liberal ultra-orthodox Jewish man or a liberal fundamentalist Christian man? I used to teach Rousseau’s politics, and I always felt that his republic was an overheated community.

Superb narrative sweep of liberal history and its juxtaposition with the nationalist tendencies that are seeping into everyday discourse. If there is liberal argument for leaving the EU, such as an the European Commission being an executive which is not directly elected or the European Parliament being elected by an electorate which had no homogenous identity and inspires no loyalty, then you won't find it here. Liberalism in Europe today is represented by political parties like the German Free Democratic Party that are libertarian and right-wing, but also by parties like the Liberal Democrats in the UK that stand uneasily between conservatives and socialists, taking policies from each side without a strong creed of their own. For example, a recent book by Michael Sandel (2020) gives a much more insightful explanation of Western anger and our current lack of faith in political institutions.

But this audiobook argues there still is a liberalism out there, one which has been unreasonable trashed upon, one which the baby has been thrown out with the bathwater, but if we continue using it it's still the most useful tool we have so all of us can live together and not die together.

The world changes; new inequalities emerge in place of old ones; we never stop arguing among ourselves; socialist politics is steady work. I particularly enjoyed learning of how its development intersected with economic theory throughout the 20th century and into the 21st; the pull between Hayek and Keynes, the former’s recent dominance causing many of the problems we now face. There are many ways of being religious—all of them recognized, all of them protected, none of them prioritized, by the adjective “liberal. Socialists are defined, according to Rosselli, by their “active adhesion to the cause of the poor and the oppressed.Compared to Fawcett’s “liberalism”, it is less academic but Dunt still delves into topics of history, philosophy, politics economics and sociology and neatly intertwines them. Atheist Jews are not “lapsed” Jews; they are as Jewish as orthodox Jews, since all of us are members of the Jewish people. Not an awful book by any means and I learned quite a lot in the first half, but not as good as I'd hoped. For the most part it is good fun and informative in a sort of GCSE way but such a lung bursting thrash through modern history does means some things are left out and other bits somewhat unclear. The idea that freedom is always negotiated, seeking compromise is actually a central pillar, because if you are in a conversation, you are guided by the value-system, so it’s always at the forefront of debate.