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

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Like all adjectives, “liberal” modifies and complicates the noun it precedes; it has an effect that is sometimes constraining, sometimes enlivening, sometimes transforming. You'll read about the liberal emphasis on property rights of John Locke to the egalitarian liberalism of John Stuart Mill to the laissez-faire liberalism of Friedrich Hayek to the "liberalism" know today as identity politics. How To Be A Liberal by Ian Dunt is available to purchase via Canbury Press with a 20% discount using the code LSEHTBAL2020.

Competition in excellence and virtue and the social mobility it produces might have some of the features of rotation in office. But it wouldn’t turn that religion into a school catechism—any more than liberal socialists in power would turn socialist ideology into a school catechism (as illiberal socialists did in the Soviet Union). Hence also the multiplication of denominations and sects that inhabit the open spaces of civil society and make room for the groups that come next. Liberal believers would recognize not the equal rightness of other beliefs but the equal sincerity of the men and women who hold those beliefs.It was wonderful and refreshing to read about people from marginalised communities and understand how they shaped liberalism too. 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. While these chapters do nothing to justify the title of the book, the highly readable delineation of liberal thought culminating in the tension between Hayek and Keynes is a highly recommendable read for anyone interested in the history of ideas. That is partly right, since the adjective “liberal” is transferable, and so liberal believers are likely to be liberal democrats and (in the United States) liberal New Dealers or social democrats.

But the victory of unconstrained capitalism did not always safeguard the prosperity of individuals, and increased the fragility of the financial system. 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. I think I might be a better person going forward for reading this - I’ll certainly be much more aware, in so many areas. To clarify, this book is by no means a comprehensive history, nor does the book contain sources apart from the author citing the experts he worked with in the Afterword.

These others,” liberals might say, “believe what they believe in the same way that we believe what we believe—and so we can acknowledge the value of their beliefs to them (because we know the value of our beliefs to us). Based on a sweeping and fascinating review of the genesis of liberal thought, makes a compelling argument to reject the nationalist garbage of Trump/Johnson and just generally try to become a less comprehensively awful society. Dunt's book is a timely and important contribution to the debate about liberalism in the 21st century. 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. We are best described in moral rather than political terms: we are open-minded, generous, tolerant, able to live with ambiguity, ready for arguments that we don’t feel we have to win.