The Ezra Klein Show - The Book That Changed How I Think About Liberalism

Episode Date: May 5, 2026

In the U.S., illiberalism is in power. I don’t think anybody really argues against that. But I’ve been surprised by how weak liberalism has felt in response. Donald Trump isn’t a popular president; he isn’t making people want more of what he is. But if the forces of illiberalism are really going to be turned back in this country, I think more people need to be excited and inspired by liberalism itself. We need a liberalism that stands for more than “not Trump.” So I’ve been on my own esoteric journey, reading a lot of books on the history of liberalism, trying to understand what excited and inspired people in the past, and how liberals overcame crises like the one we’re in. And reading one of those books, “The Lost History of Liberalism” by Helena Rosenblatt, it felt like an epiphany — that this was a piece of the puzzle. So I wanted to have Rosenblatt on the show to talk about it. Rosenblatt is a professor of history, political science and French at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and in this conversation, she walks me through the history of liberalism that she uncovered, and the values that once lived at its heart. Mentioned: Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville Liberalism by Edmund Fawcett Book Recommendations: Liberalism against Itself by Samuel Moyn Liberalism as a Way of Life by Alexandre Lefebvre Thinking With Machines by Vasant Dhar Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [e-mail]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair and Julie Beer. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Johnny Simon. Our recording engineer is Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Lauren Reddy. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Transcript editing by Filipa Pajevic and Marlaine Glicksman. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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 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 recognizes. covered 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, by the story in 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 and 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, Ezraclined Show at NYU Times.com. Helena Rosenblatt, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. So to the extent people think about liberalism today, which is, let's be real a niche hobby,

I think they define it as a philosophy of individual rights of individual expression. You write in your book that the word liberalism did not even exist until the early 19th, century, and for hundreds of years prior to its birth, being liberal meant something very different. What did it mean? That's right. Being liberal, really, was not just about believing in a certain or working towards a certain political design. It wasn't just about a constitutional form.

It wasn't just about individual rights. It was actually more about moral development and about a certain character development that they felt was so very important and that a good constitution should prove. promote. And many of them thought that, yes, rights are important, but they're important because they allow us to accomplish our obligations to, 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 liberal in ancient Rome. The root of the word is liber, right? And the word labor, 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, Liberalis 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 a 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, 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 Dunn, 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 has 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. That evolved over time. So in the medieval period, it became Christianized, and it's behaving freely the way God wants you to behave in a generous, charitable way. When you talk about this conception of freedom, this conception of what it means to be liberal, who are some of the people you quote and what are their arguments? Oh, well, as you can imagine, since, you know, it's not a super long book. So I kind of move rather quickly, and I have to make some strategic choices. But as you mentioned, there's Cicero and Seneca in these are well-known names that have had tremendous influence.

What do they say? What is their vision of liberality? So that liberality is about reciprocity exchange, gift-giving and reciprocity is fundamental. You need to be good to one another very much about what they would call, you know, citizenly or I call citizenly virtues, things that make a commonwealth work. and adhere. That is not to, I don't try to idealize, you know, these thinkers either, because, you know, you had slavery in Rome, which is, so they're talking about a small group, an elite. I think this is quite important, and it's something threaded through your book. You write at some point that this idea of being a liberal, which comes away before

liberalism is a political philosophy, is designed by and for the free, wealthy, and well-connected men who are in a position to give and receive benefits in ancient Rome. And some other things it that emerge as a book goes on, one thing it makes clear is that if today your problem with liberalism and liberals is you find them to be a bunch of smug condescending elites, that problem goes way back. That's always been braided into the issue here. And that there was, like, it was a set of virtues that was associated with, like, the noble born and set them apart in a way that would make them the ideal citizens. And that feels to me actually like a profound tension at the heart of the project.

Yeah, absolutely. 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 Staal, a great early liberal and a woman, a powerhouse, such a fascinating woman right at the, some say that it was in her salon, in her drawing room, that liberalism was invented. Her name appears as a very important sort of power broker or an intellectual in early 19th century and then gets dropped out. She's 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 a 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 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 about 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 there, 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. There was no real example of it lasting. You know, would the American example, this exceptional example, actually work? And Lincoln showed that it could, and he did it in this beautiful way that kind of made people optimistic about liberal democracy. He was not a demagogue. He did not talk

down to people. He raised them up. He engaged in moral uplift. And they recognized that. And it showed that a liberal democracy could survive if it had a leader like this. They also recognized that it was those kinds of leaders are very hard to find. What is liberal in the liberal arts? Oh, the purpose of the liberal arts education is really to form leaders. to form freedom-loving and moral leaders and giving them the tools, rhetoric and history and some science for sure. But it's supposed to train citizens, really. Through engagement with the classics,

in the early times there was a lot of emphasis on being able to speak in public, to speak in a convincing way in public. And this is all really to convince people to become citizens and to do the right thing. It sounds terribly idealistic, don't always want to, again, idealize them or say these people were perfect in every way, far from it. But the ideas were pretty beautiful, and I think we could learn something from them.

Education is such an important part of this book. Other histories of liberalism I've read actually reveal the same thing, that when you go back into the liberal tradition, the purpose of education is hotly debated and held at the center of the project. Today you don't have that discourse in the same way. 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 time. 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.

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, 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 bad. 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. 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 that is that critics of liberals am 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 of 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 foreigners. 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, which 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, 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. So, and I think actually,

you know, interestingly enough, today's criticisms, for example, by posting. liberals and so on. Which are many of them, men are the Catholic, are actually reviving some of that language and using very old arguments. I've sat here with Patrick Deneen. I mean, not literally in this room,

but on this podcast. And, you know, I was like, where is this coming from with you? And he's like one of these post-liberal close to J.D. Vance. And he's like, well, you know, the left wants to destroy the family. Yeah.

I don't think we do. But that is his view of it. Yeah. How much is the tension between the Catholic Church and liberals or liberalism, how much is it around what I think of is, like, liberalism's first significant political idea, because so far we've been tracking this almost virtue that is a way for the powerful to think of themselves is developing in a way that is prosocial, if I were to be,

I think, straightforward about it. It's not a way to reorder society. But this idea of generosity towards your fellow citizen begins to flower into an idea of toleration when that is more radical. and toleration is a way of reordering society. So can you tell a bit of that story, how we get from, you know, liberality to actual arguments for toleration, and then how that begins to put, you know, liberals in tension with religious authorities?

Absolutely. Many key liberals are actually Protestant. This founding group that I talk about in France, Madame de Stal and Benjamin Constant, were actually Protestant. and Protestants who are way overrepresented in terms of numbers in liberal movements throughout the French history. The reason here is, you know, Protestants in France wanted to be tolerated, to be actually recognized as citizens, which they weren't. 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, and you can, can understand them, the church, a 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, you know, 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 tolerations' sake, because they are very hostile to or disdainful towards 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 religions. 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 a 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. I want to look more closely at something you said early in that answer, which is that tolerance, tolerance, toleration in this framing is not just a nice, civically virtuous thing. It's not about being polite. That there is a theory here about the marketplace of ideas. One of the other books on liberalism I've quite liked is Edmund Fawcett's liberalism, The Life, I think is a subtitle.

And he makes more than you do of the idea that central to liberalism is the idea that in a conflict-ridden, disputatious society, that you can turn difference into something constructive through argumentation, through the exchange of ideas, that tolerance and other things that are built on it, freedom of speech, etc., that it's not about being nice. It is about this belief, which sometimes proves out and sometimes does not go as well as people hope, that you can make disagreement not into something that tears societies apart, but into something that refines them and makes them better and helps people find truth and progress and a way forward. How do you think about that? Yeah, absolutely. I'm so glad you brought that up because it's a really important central aspect of liberalism. It's this kind of optimism, if you accept this toleration, progress will be the result. People will improve. Society will improve. We need this sort of battle of ideas to refine ourselves and our way of thinking and there'll be a better outcome in the future. Yes. So

marketplaces of ideas without state interference, without church interference, allow these ideas to compete with each other, including religious ideas. And this will be kind of a purification process. And yeah, they were very optimistic about the future. And, yeah, they were very optimistic about the future. Today, that seems so naive, this belief, you know, in the arc of history, the march of history they talked about the whole time. I mean, they weren't naive and they weren't silly. I know one of the guys who's one of a hero in my book is Benjamin Constant, and he said, we need pleasing illusions. We need pleasing illusions to make us better. Also, to maybe cut into some of that pessimism, this is hard to do well. Liberalism is hard to do well. Liberalism is hard to do well.

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. Yes. But I want to get it something that exists in there as a shadow side. 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 others, that they try to use a state to change their behavior. You can't even refuse to bake a cake for a couple that is getting married of the same sex.

And so there is this critique of liberalism that you see throughout the ages, which is that liberalism, are tolerant of everything but what they consider to be the intolerant. And 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. And 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 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 was really serious stuff to think of the Catholic Church coming back into power, the counter-revolutionaries, 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. You know, famously in 1830, there is a revolution that brings what's considered a liberal government into power, and it unfortunately fails in the 1848 revolution. In France, 1830. What happens in the French Revolution? It's the rise of the bourgeoisie. It's the fact that the nobles, the privileges of the nobility are overturned,

and you have rule of law civic equality. Marx talks about this. Communists talk about this as being the... a bourgeois kind of revolution and how terrible it is because it became very quickly considered a selfish regime, a money-driven machine. Let's stand Marx for a minute. What is his critique of liberalism? Liberalism is really the rule of the bourgeoisie. It's middle class. It's money. If you look at France, he also was really much looking at France, right? Everybody's looking

at France. What's going on with the success of revolutions? It's like a laboratory of political ideas, right? So this is a bourgeois revolution to them, and it's liberals who carry these ideas forward. But what happens in Marx's thought is, of course, once they take over power, they're going to exploit the workers and just make more and more money and exploit the workers until they will rise up and you'll have the communist revolution and the takeover. But the thing is that there's no way around it. 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. He's just 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? And, you know, when you talk about FDR and that later liberalism, right, and a lot happens between, you know, what we've been discussing and there, at some point, this moves away from just being a set of approaches to a marketplace of ideas or, you know, individual virtue. and it becomes connected to a view that power needs to be redistributed and money and security need be distributed. 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 popperism, 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

home lovingness, obviously, these people are not free. They're not able to morally refine themselves or to contribute to society 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. And something you see in a lot of the early arguments about it is you see less of

the argument, at least in my mind. reading, the society is unfair. That's more sort of how I would, you know, argue for a lot of these policies today and more of the argument that this needs to be done because it is the only way to have a citizenry capable of participating in liberal democracy, you know, able to fight in your wars, right? Like, it's a question of building the capacity of the citizenry. It's very, very concerned with like the uplift of the individual. Absolutely. And it strikes me also that factory legislation at first, for example, again in France, was, you know, when it came to women, you know, shortened the workday, make it a little less harsh for them. Why? Because they'll have

better breast milk. They'll be healthier and they'll produce healthier soldiers, basically, boys who will fight in wars. But I want to say there, Germany suddenly starts to play a big role. Their thinkers, they had thinkers who said that this whole idea of free markets and laissez-faire were great theoretically, but weren't working in practice right now. And what you need is to actually study the workers and demographic patterns and prices and salaries and so on and come and see what's actually going on and then devise policies accordingly. And these ideas were spread and were written about their ideas were translated and talked about in England and France. It's also there at the power of Prussia, right? So Napoleon III thought he could have a little war with Prussia, make him give him some glory and some popularity. And lo and behold, the exact opposite happened.

The Prussians won very quickly. And it was a shock. It was a shock to everybody that France meant to be the most powerful country in Europe. could be defeated like this, and they start to ask why. And they start thinking, well, guess what? German soldiers are vaccinated. They're much healthier. Their railroads work. Germany is very early to have a state-run health care program. Exactly. And this catches on. Again, it's because of, you know, war. But it doesn't come from the liberals initially. I mean, Bismarck is a key mover here. Exactly, and that's an interesting twist that sometimes the influences on liberalism are not necessarily from within.

The first Napoleon is what made people like Benjamin Macron's on the early liberals say, like, we need something so that this never happens again. We need constitutions that stop somebody like Napoleon, a demagogue, a dictator from coming to power. And then now it's Bismarck, but look at his policies. Look what he's doing to the population. They're healthier. They're stronger. They're more patriotic. This is really when there was what came to be called a new liberalism.

They called it that new liberalism in England where a group of people started to say, no, we need to learn from the Germans and we need some government intervention to help the workers, to spread the wealth, and that the government has an important role to play in the economy, in a just and liberal polity. So they learn their lessons the hard way that way. So how then do you have this weird split? it that makes so much of the conversation about liberalism confusing today, where you have a liberalism in much of Europe that means laissez-faire, that means that you are in many cases opposed to the

law for state, and you have a liberalism very much associated with America, maybe coming from Germany, that it's the exact opposite, right? You have this debate between the classical liberals, like Hayek, and then FDR is, you know, the central, like arguably most important American liberal, And they stand in many ways for, I don't want to say entirely opposite things. They agree on things like free speech and some other dimensions around rights. But you do have liberalism split into two streams, one of which is profoundly skeptical of the government and sees the government as the source of much tyranny. And the other which sees a government and a more generous government as the guarantor of a kind of freedom. Yeah, that's right.

In England, eventually the new world. liberals kind of win out and they drop the new and they just called liberals, right? And that's what happens in America. They don't call themselves new liberals. They start calling themselves first progressives and then liberals. Wilson, actually, there's a moment you can see where he's saying, calling himself a progressive and then he switches to liberal. It's quite interesting. In France, they never make that move. So liberalism without any descriptive term before, it means the laissez-faire liberalism, small government liberalism. And today in most of the world, that's what liberalism mean, right? It's sort of right of center, free markets, small government, whereas in America, colloquially it tends to

mean big government. Nobody says there for big government, but more interventionism, more of a redistributive state, bigger role for the state. Who in your view are the most important American liberal thinkers? If you're thinking of a canon of American liberalism, who belongs in it? You, of course, have to talk about John Rawls, and he comes very late in the, so I think more than thinkers. I mean, there's John Dewey, who's very important, particularly in his liberal education. There are people like I mentioned, I wouldn't call them great innovative thinkers. I mean, John Rawls, obviously great philosopher of the 20th century, but on his caliber or on the caliber of John Locke or John Stuart Mill, I don't see any. I hope not, you know, American intellectual.

is Dorans aren't going to like email me like crazy saying that I'm being unfair. But I don't think America was notable for its liberal theorists until quite late in the game. We do have great liberal leaders. I mentioned Lincoln. I mentioned FDR. It's underplayed in our own tradition. Yeah. And I'd like to you say more on this because I actually think great liberal practitioners in some ways to me are more interesting than great liberal theorists. I find it to be a problem with American liberalism that it is so obsessed with John Rawls. People think that is because I don't like John Rawls. And that's not quite it. I just think that in terms of something that is hopefully a popular and public philosophy, somebody whose central work is fundamentally unreadable by the public, does not really make sense as a foundation.

for that, and he's not the foundation for that, right? Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr., John Dewey, I do think is actually quite important here, but FDR, you have really remarkable liberal leaders in this country. Many of them, I mean, having written remarkable things about how to think about liberalism, many of them coming from outside the halls of power. I think liberalism is often most interesting when it is in a tense relationship with power. But I'm curious how you see that. that tradition and how it altered what American liberalism became and is. Yeah. Yeah, totally. I think that's wonderful. But if you look at the people I look at at the very beginning, you know, there wasn't this great divide between, you know, the great thinkers and the great political leaders. I mean, somebody like, they're very pragmatic earlier. Yeah, sister, it was a political figure. He's a political figure. Benjamin Constan becomes a deputy in the chamber of deputies. John Stuart Mill runs for office. And, you know, if you read the speeches, if you read some of the speeches, the wonderful speeches people were making in those days, you know, drawing on Montesquieu and Locke and they're, you know, they're reading the stuff as well. So there wasn't maybe this great divide between intellectuals and practitioners. What does that tell you in America? What was different about it here?

And maybe it's worth starting actually with the founders. I think there's a lot of interesting argumentation over how much to think of the American founders as inside the American liberal tradition, as in tension with what later becomes a liberal tradition, right? They're obviously claimed by all sides here. How do you think about the founding

and with its profound internal contradictions around freedom and human bondage? I've become more and more interested in American political thought and institutions and history, unfortunately because of the way disciplines and concentrations work, I'm more of an expert on European history. But what I've read about the founding and about the founding fathers and what was going on there, it just fills me with enormous respect and gratitude. And I think for the wonderful work that they did, being both thinkers and actors. And Franklin, Jefferson,

came to Paris and were very much interested also in French matters and vice versa. The American Constitution influenced early liberals because they thought it was an amazing document. And maybe that's the thing that's so wonderful is to see exactly those things coming together, the ideas and the practices coming together in the founding fathers to produce this amazing document. That's a very glittering answer, but I think a critic of liberalism would say that what good is your liberalism if it can include slavery in its founding constitution or in more of the European case, what good is your liberalism if it is so interwoven with colonialism? And I mean, there were many, you know, people who certainly believed in many liberal ideas we're talking about

here who made space for both of those practices within their liberalism. Right. Well, I don't mean to, again, idealize these out of proportion, these people, these are early liberals and liberals have never been perfect. They often suffer from the same prejudices. The prejudices of their time, there are exclusions. But how did they grapple with this? I mean, we've talked a lot about freedom here. How did they grapple with this? How did they grapple with this? I think there are, I mean, other people can speak more intelligently about the U.S. Constitution and the position, the slavery within the document and say that this is really a question also of compromise. It's a horrible thing to imagine. But I think there was debates going on.

there and politics going on that are unseemly today. And you have John Stuart Mill seeing absolutely atrocious things about how despotism is okay when you're dealing with barbarians or something, talking about British imperialism in India. You have Tokvil, who was okay, apparently, with burning silos in Algeria. That's awful stuff. But at the same time, these people were then from within, this was not a liberal position, I would say. This is, as many people were saying, you are betraying your own principles. And conservatives were also for, perhaps even more so, for colonialism, imperialism. It's horrible to say, but racism was rampant. Sexism was rampant. If anyone was against it, if we can, we don't, you know, they were liberal, basically.

Well, this is the other side of it, where there's a lot of liberal abolitionism. there obviously is like the long effort among liberals to expand the franchise, you know, to women and then to, you know, people of other races and, you know, a lot of fights over immigration. You have this interesting moment in the book we say maybe the first use of using liberals as a noun, somebody signs of an anti-slavery pamphlet, a liberal. Right. It is a tension. Yeah, for sure. So the thing to remember is that, for example, when it comes to women, you know, liberals did not really lobby for women's. suffrage until very, very, very, very late. They were not at all for giving women the vote

until it was almost forced upon them. But on the other hand, the women, when they did fight for admission into political rights, they used the terms of liberalism. They went to the guys and they said, hey, you know, you're not living up to your own principles. You're like an aristocracy, an aristocracy of sex. You're acting like despots. We want to participate. We want to also be citizens. We can have the virtues of citizens. So they use that same language to say, we have shared responsibilities, and we bring something to the table, something liberal. So they use the language.

And I think that's also true with Friedrich Douglas and other groups that have been prejudiced against and even subordinated and oppressed, that they can use the language of liberalism, use the lofty notions. and the ideals, to argue for their own rights and their own capacities. What is it in liberalism? What ideals in your view, what thoughts or principles or shared values, create this kind of time bomb aspect of it? Which you see go off repeatedly in history, where, you know, you go back in liberalism and the terms of liberalism get argued to blow up the constraints of the last liberalism. But as we said at the beginning of this conversation,

this begins as a quite aristocratic ideal, eventually becomes, in many cases, a philosophical weapon to expand the terms of inclusion and freedom. What is it that does that, in your view? Well, you know, ideas don't travel in a vacuum. So I would always say that the facts on the ground change socioeconomic pressures, changes in the economy, wars, all of this creates. conditions, creates conflicts, creates crises that liberals then have to confront and deal with. And that goes to, you know, everybody's talking about the crisis of liberal democracy today and the crisis of liberalism. Well, there's been a succession of crises. Liberalism was born in crisis, the crisis of the French Revolution. And so when these moments happen, when there is extreme tension, when there is new problems, It can throw liberalism sort of off its kilter for a while.

All sorts of debates occur, become more heated, confused even. There have been moments in liberalism's history where they literally start and I have lists of articles. What is liberalism? What do we stand for? What is true liberalism? No, that's false liberalism. And they have these debates. And as I said before, that can weaken the movement, but it can also bring strength to it, allow it to evolve this conflict, a battle of ideas.

brings out something new that really responds to the crisis that's on the ground. Are there specific moments in Liberals' mishistory that this moment reminds you of? Yeah. I've even started to think about the original crisis, you know, the crisis of Napoleon's despotism. Liberals had had such high hopes for establishing a liberal regime based on constitutional rule and representative government with these rights protecting the individual. And then the revolution derailed into this horrible period of the terror. And eventually they thought that Napoleon would come and save the revolution. So there was a lot of hope that this charismatic figure who claimed to want to save the revolution was making all the right noises.

He was going to bring peace to France. He was going to bring back order. He was going to protect all these things liberals had fought for so hard. And then instead he became this despot. and a demagogue. And he used wars, you know, to divert attention to what he was doing at home. He gave gifts to people. He lined the pockets of his friends. He flattered people, gave them power that, but at the same time that he amassed power in his own hands. This was profoundly demoralizing to the early liberals that I'm talking about

who had this lofty notion of what a free or better, more moral, more humane world would look like and look what it derailed into. So what did they learn from that? They learned that you needed certain safeguards in place. This is really when you get like liberalism as a constitutional way of thinking

and balance of power, separations of powers, individual rights, how important freedom of freedom of, presses, how important freedom of religion is, Napoleon used religion, you know, to buttress's power. So all of these constitutional ideas really came together then. And they, you know, it happened again and again over the course of the 19th century that you have these very clever charismatic figures who could speak directly to the people. I understand you. I represent you. We don't need these representative institutions. We don't, because I speak directly.

to you. I am you, sort of. I mean, that's what a demagogue does, and that's what populism is, right? Is that you don't need the intermediaries. And they were very worried about this. And the system they came up with, constitutional liberalisms, was meant to make it impossible, but that also made them really think more than ever that we needed an educated citizenry. Intellectuals needed to step up. Newspapers needed to step up and educate the public as to to what it means to be a citizen of a liberal regime, of a liberal form of government. They wrote articles, Madame de Staal, wrote novels in which she was, you could see her trying to foster the right kind of moral inclinations. By that, I mean compassion, generosity,

sociability, understanding, understanding of shared responsibilities that you needed to educate people to this, because without it, without an educated critically minded, alert, citizenry. The people will fall prey to unscrupulous actors, demagogues. This was on their minds the whole time because they saw how vulnerable those liberal constitutions could be. They really depended on a morally educated, civic-minded, and educated and alert citizenship. I take the current crisis of liberalism to be not any one crisis. But a couple of things, and this is a non-exhaustive list, one is it liberalism in its modern American form became associated with power and with the status quo and with reigning institutions

as opposed to being seen as a challenge to them. So the more fed up people got, the less liberalism looked like an answer because it was increasingly people who seemed sort of comfortable with how society was working? I think another crisis is that individualism has gone very, very, very far. And I think the Internet and social media and algorithmic media and the fracturing of what we know and our bonds from each other and the weakening of civic institutions and religions and labor unions and all of these things that Bob Putnam and others have documented, I think that there is a crisis of individualism that has become a personal. a crisis of meaning, but I also just think requires different ways of thinking about freedom.

And I think liberalism in its modern form is very, very skeptical of individual responsibility and communal obligations because it has seen those used for oppressive reasons or used to sort of push people out to the margins of society or to blame them for things that have been done to them. But it also has left it with very little language in which to talk about something that's not just individualism. Maybe on the question of individualism, something you described in the book is that at other times, liberals actually were quite averse to that word, and they preferred individuality or one I like more personhood. I'm curious why they preferred those words and also what you see in that that might be relevant today. So yes, they shied away from that word. Individualism

really had a meant, it was kind of a synonym for them to selfishness. And Tokville, you'll see, uses it that way, I think, in democracy in America. It's just, again, it's an isom. Isms are very often in a pejoratives. And individuality is more about, you know, becoming the best person you can be, developing yourself, your capacities of flourishing, individual flourishing. Individualism today, we've become very much a narcissistic society, unfortunately, I think, the more choices. We have, that's better. It's a very much. I don't want to go on about sounding horrible about us today, but I do feel that we're become very inward-looking and narcissistic.

And what parts of the sort of liberal past do you think could be helpful in renovating an answer to that? I really think that people are searching for meaning. You mentioned that. And I think that in order to go forward, we can draw on this history that we have, and kind of recover this moral language of character, of shared responsibilities, of moral improvement, looking at all these things that we have now that our people before us for centuries didn't have

and think of them as ways, see if we can improve ourselves, develop our capacities, and do good for everyone. You know, it's funny when I talk this way, I'm constantly aware that I must be sounding silly somehow. And it's a reflection of the cynicism that's in the culture, right? Why is it somewhat embarrassing to speak about making or improving ourselves and doing good for society, keeping the common good in mind? There's something funny there, and I think that's a shame. Well, also isn't there, though, a question of, well, who gets to decide what the common good is and what happens when we disagree?

That's exactly right. That's exactly right. That's the danger. But that's why we have to come together, at least and discuss it and come to some kind of, I think, people, come together, they kind of can agree on things that are good for everyone. And then I think there's this question which has been threaded a little bit through our conversation of liberalism's relationship to power. And sometimes it is the ideas of people out of power. Sometimes it's people in power. But I think particularly as liberalism in America

has become, you know, the movement of people who are college educated and people benefited more from how the institutions work, it's ended up very connected to power. And you see that a lot in the sort of rhetoric of people challenging it now and the sort of counter-revolutionary ideas that the people on the new right have. But I'm curious how you would describe like liberalism's view of power and what you see in like the various liberalisms that you've tracked that they might be useful at a time when people feel like very, and I think quite understandably skeptical of institutions and frustrated with the feeling that society is taking a direction that they don't have much influence over.

Yeah, absolutely. Liberalism is best when it criticizes power. That's how it was, limits authority and allows human flourishing for sure. And now there is at least this sense. And I think it's probably true that liberals largely have, I don't know if they control media and universities, but have a huge influence in power. and that is somehow self-perpetuating, which translates into political power as well.

I think the worst part of that is a kind of condescension or kind of disconnect between these liberal elites that we recognize are there, but they're disconnect between the common man, sort of regular people. And I think that is a betrayal of liberal principles, really, because this is not, we talked in the beginning about elites and leaders. And this is not what liberal elites are supposed to be doing. So I think that, and I'm an educator, I suppose part of this liberal elite. I was going to say, we're all, you know.

Yeah. So, mea culpe. I mean, I think we can do a better job here and returning to these principles. One thing that I think is useful here, and it's not a full answer, but it's one reason I found some inspiration in your book, is that I do think some of the very early I ideas that get talked about around liberality and an ethic of generosity towards your fellow citizen. Yes, they were initially framed as, you know, things the aristocracy should practice. But like a lot of things in liberalism, we've tried to expand that. And, you know, we now believe in liberal democracy, not liberal aristocracy. And I think that having a, I think it's going to be very, very hard in this period to have a relationship of generosity in a very divided country,

that politics is very hard to practice well right now. And the liberals who've done it really well, right, you think about, say, you know, Barack Obama in 2008, you know, are really able to, on the one hand, hold a vision of moral progress, which can be a divisive vision, and also hold a vision of an ethic of generosity and decency. towards, you know, both the people we agree with and the people we don't agree with. And I think when, you know, the liberal elites, as you describe them and not wrong way, but I think in general, one place that elites of, you know, all parties and persuasions tend to go very wrong is in losing that sense that they are part of a citizenry and instead seeing themselves as

leaders who know what is best for everybody else. And balancing those commitments inside of liberalism, the commitment to moral progress, to expanding freedom, to giving people a better life, and the commitment to the kinds of virtues needed to make a complex society thrive without people feeling oppressed or condescended to or pushed out by you.

I think that balance, there's not one policy that does it, it's a very, very difficult balance, but I think the great liberals forget how to do that well. I mean, you talked about Lincoln earlier, and I mean, he, to think about somebody holding together opposites, right?

Yeah. Leading a civil war, bloodiest war ever on American soil. And also doing so within an ethic of constantly trying to reach out and see that there is some solidarity on the other side of this.

There's some way to rediscover bonds of commonality. I mean, it's why speeches are read today, not because they're bloodthirsty, but because amidst all that blood, they're not. That's absolutely true. It is very difficult, and we're living in a very difficult moment, a true crisis, and we're so polarized. But I think giving up on liberals, I know that's

not what you're saying, but those post-liberals that we mentioned a while back ago, I mean, I think it's dangerous to start talking about moving beyond liberalism or giving up on liberalism. Liberalism has gone through these crises before, and I think it can survive and come out of this even stronger and better if we renew some of these ideas. But as you in particular have said, You know, we have some, liberals have to deliver, you know, with the affordability crisis that you've written about with health care, with the environmental degradation, with concrete problems that liberals aren't solving. So I think we have to find ways to do that. But to inspire people is important, too. I think there's a yearning.

Young people, we live in a very materialistic culture. There's so much emphasis on, you know, what you can buy and how you should. look and how you should dress, I think people are looking for also some moral uplift. I think it's a good place to end. Always our final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience? Okay. I'm always influenced by, in such a good way, the work of Sam Moyne. I don't know if you know his work. I think he's coming out with a new book that I'm looking forward to, but I would like to recommend liberalism against itself, which really picks up on some of the themes also for my last chapter, and it's about Cold War liberalism and sort of why

we went wrong in the Cold War, why liberals went wrong. Very interesting. The second one is a fun read, which is Alex Lefebvre's liberalism as a way of life. And it's just delightful, basically telling us that we're all liberals, whether we know it or not. He draws on comedy shows and TV series and sort of just a lovely uplifting book. And then last but certainly not least, is thinking with machines. We haven't had a chance to talk about AI, but everybody's talking about it now. And there's so many books out,

but if you want to read one book, I think that's the one. It's A Santar. It's a story of his life with AI. He was one of the first to teach it and to bring it to Wall Street. And so he talks about its evolution over time and the good and the bad,

the risks and the benefits. And full disclosure, he's my husband. I hope I was allowed to do that. Liberals, Always scratching each other's back. Helena Rosenblatt. Thank you very much. Thank you.

This episode of The Zoclian shows produced by Jack McCordick. Our recording engineer is Amin Sahota. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair. Our senior audio engineer is Jeff Gelb, with additional mixing by Johnny Simon. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Annie Galvin, Roland Hu, Marie Cassione, Marina King, Kristen Lynn, Emma Kelbeck. and Jan Kobel.

Original music by Amun Sahota and Pat McCusker. Audience Tragey by Shannon Busta. The director of opinion shows is Annie Rose Strasser.