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As he guides you through the story of liberalism, and the walls it has had to demolish at every blood-stained step on its way to where we are today, you'll get the point of his urgency. The author takes you through stories of key notable figures which he believes encapsulate the evolution of liberal thought. I believe that it comes with the territory, though, of course, we all know socialists who are neither open-minded, generous, nor tolerant. So while I can't say you'll get a thorough education on liberalism, you will receive a very engaging summary on how liberal ideas evolved over time.
Throughout its history liberal governments have been marked by those they have been illiberal towards: poor people, racial and ethnic minorities, women, LQBTQ+ people. Once again, when individual rights were denied, murderous regimes, and now on a modern industrial scale, were the result. Similarly, men and women who believe that the religion or irreligion of the others consigns them to eternal subordination (or damnation) and that they, the true believers, are morally obligated to rescue them from that fate—they are illiberal, and actively so.There is another demand of liberal nationalism that is easier to make: imperial nation-states that have expanded at the expense of other nations must withdraw from those others and contract their size. He traces the ways in which he believes that liberalism has betrayed its core ideals in recent history and in doing so, gives an explanation of how authoritarians like Victor Orban in Hungary and Donald Trump in the USA, were able to take control of the political agenda so easily.
To clarify, this audiobook is by no means a comprehensive history, nor does the actual book itself contain sources apart from the author citing the experts he worked with in the Afterword. Laissez-Faire Liberalism goes the other way toward the Free-Market fundamentalism of Thatcherism and Reaganomics.Modern political polling is doing the same to us again, dividing our thinking into marginal concepts of tribal thoughts.
What is weirder is that we then embark upon 300 page march through liberalism with two empiricist philosophers, Locke and JS Mill, (who believed that knowledge could only come from sensory perception), at the for. However, instead of an explanation I found merely a description of a phenomenon that I was already familiar with: liberal failure. The British government has invented so many new and confounding state intrusions into the lives of people who are either poor or immigrants that they are running a parallel state of government control over people’s lives. Sometimes I was seriously thinking how the title relates to the content of the book and I still have no been able to figure it out as the second half of the book was a mess.It is an interesting question whether there are groups, parties, ideologies, identities that can’t be modified by the adjective “liberal. In this view, it is liberal to wrestle with the truth and try to discover it in specific problems, rather than applying universal policies and resolutions. 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. I think I might be a better person going forward for reading this - I’ll certainly be much more aware, in so many areas. Ideas are generated through social interaction; therefore, histories of ideas must begin with social movements.
As can be clearly seen form the image, the subtitle is absent from the front cover (in fact I'm not sure it was in the pages inside either). 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. There are many ways of being religious—all of them recognized, all of them protected, none of them prioritized, by the adjective “liberal. I think the author tried to make a point along the lines of, no matter how admirable the ideas of liberalism were at its origin it has opened up a pandora's box way beyond our imagination and led to the proclamation of god knows which minority having rights too and that these minorities in turn have started silencing the main line of liberal though. But what makes How to Be a Liberal truly unique is Dunt's emphasis on the importance of humor and irony in the defense of liberalism.He shows from history what happens when liberalism is rejected (Hitler, Stalin, etc) and also in present day, with identity politics and the rise of nationalism. Remember freedom is determined at one level as the absence of intrusion into our lives - as imagined by philosophers and economists such as Locke, Smith, Mill (and Harriet Taylor who Dunt acknowledges as an equal contributor to Mill’s work) and Constant, Hayek etc. 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. From that perspective is the book Liberalism : The Life Of An Idea of Edward Fawcett a much better choice. 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.
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