The Book That Changed How I Think About Liberalism

If you find yourself bewildered by this moment, where there's so much reason for despair and so much reason to hope all at the same time, let me say, I hear you. I'm Ezra Klein from New York Times Opinion, host of The Ezra Klein Show. And for me, the best way to beat back that bewildered feeling is to talk it out with the people who have ideas and frameworks for making sense of it. There is going to be plenty to talk about. You can find The Ezra Klein Show wherever you get your podcasts. 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 like 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 recovered 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 this search is called The Lost History of Liberalism. It's by the historian 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 2000 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, in 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 as 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, EzraKleinShow@NYTimes.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 promote. And many of them thought that, yes, rights are important, but they're important because they allow us to accomplish our obligations. 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 liberals, 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 is 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 liber, 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, liberality 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 your 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 like have no blood in them. But one thing that was interesting 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 Donne, 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 is 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. And these are well-known names that have had tremendous influence. What do they say? 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 what 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 way before liberalism as 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 that emerge as the 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 a, 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 quite 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. And, 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, you know, hypocrisy. I'm writing a book right now about Madame de Stal, a great early liberal and a woman, a powerhouse, such a fascinating woman right at the, it was, 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 and intellectual in the early 19th century and then gets dropped out. She's endlessly frustrated by, where are all the good men? We need some good men, not only to pursue the policies that we need, but to serve as examples. A question 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 this 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 or talking about the collectivity, about your duties, about any government or state getting involved in forming citizens, the public education system 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 that, 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. This podcast is supported by MIDI Health. Are you in midlife feeling dismissed and unheard by the healthcare system? You're not alone. For too long, women's midlife health issues have been trivialized and ignored. It's time for a change. It's time for MIDI. MIDI is the only women's telehealth brand covered by major insurance companies, making expert care accessible and affordable. MIDI's clinicians provide one-on-one consultations where they truly listen to your unique needs, offering data-driven solutions tailored for you. At MIDI, you'll feel seen, heard, and prioritized. Visit joinmidi.com to book your insurance-covered virtual visit. That's joinmidi.com. MIDI, the care women deserve. I gave my brother a New York Times subscription. She sent me a year-long subscription so I have access to all the games. We'll do Wordle, Mini, Spelling Bee. It has given us a personal connection. We exchange articles. And so having read the same article, we can discuss it. The coverage, the options, it's not just news. Such a diversified disc. I was really excited to give him a New York Times cooking subscription so that we could share recipes. And we even just shared a recipe the other day. The New York Times contributes to our quality time together. You have all of that information at your fingertips. It enriches our relationship, broadening our horizons. It was such a cool and thoughtful gift. We're reading the same stuff, we're making the same food, we're on the same page. Connect even more with someone you care about. Learn more about giving a New York Times subscription as a gift at nytimes.com slash gift. 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 then, is that critics of liberalism accused it of meaning the exact opposite of liberality. They accused 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, 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 foreignness. It's something dangerous. It's something... Libéral. Yeah, libéral. 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 counterrevolutionaries, 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 the old regime. Throughout the 19th century, the Catholic Church was probably the most powerful enemy of liberalism. So 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. They, 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 post-liberals and so on. Which are many of them... Men are the Catholics. ...Catholic counterrevolutionaries. ...are actually reviving some of that language and using very old arguments. I have sat here with Patrick Dineen. 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. I was like, I don't think we do, but that is his view of it. How much is the tension between the Catholic Church and liberals or liberalism, how much is it around what I think of as, 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 as developing in a way that is pro-social, 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 were actually Protestant. This founding group that I talk about in France, Madame de Stael and Benjamin Constant, were actually Protestants and Protestants who were way overrepresented in terms of numbers in liberal movements throughout 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 understand them, the church, the 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 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 toleration's 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 all 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 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. 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 to be redistributed. When does that begin to happen? Right. So the early liberals were mostly concerned with creating a political system, getting rid of the divine right of kings and having constitutional representative governments 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 pauperism, 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 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 healthcare 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 that you see less of the argument, at least in my reading, that society is unfair. That's more sort of how I would 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, 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 the uplift of the individual. Yeah, 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, shorten 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 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, the power of Prussia, right? So Napoleon III thought he could have a little war with Prussia and 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 healthcare program. Exactly. And this catches on again. It's because of, you know. 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 Constant, 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. And 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 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 welfare state and you have a liberalism very much associated with America, maybe coming from Germany, that is 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, you know, 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 the government and a more generous government as the guarantor of a kind of freedom. Yeah, that's right. In England, eventually the new liberals kind of win out and they drop the new and they're 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 means, right? It's sort of right of center, free markets, small government. Whereas in America colloquially, it tends to mean big government. Nobody says they're 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 this. 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 a 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 historians 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. I think this is underplayed in our own tradition. Yeah. And I'd like you to 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 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. Yes, Cicero is a political figure. He's a political figure. Benjamin Constant 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 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 conflict, 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 started to 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 liberalism's history 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's 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 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 freer, 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 to freedom, how important freedom of press is, how important freedom of religion is. Napoleon used religion, you know, to buttress his 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'd 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 liberalism, 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 what it means to be a citizen of a liberal regime, of a liberal form of government. They wrote articles. Madame de Stahl 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, the 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, an educated and alert citizenship. I take the current crisis of liberalism to be not any one crisis, but a couple things. And this is a non-exhaustive list. One is that liberalism in its modern American form became associated with power and with the status quo and with the 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, you know, 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 partially 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 is left with very little language in which to talk about something that is not just individualism. Maybe on the question of individualism, something you describe 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 bent, was kind of a synonym for them to selfishness. And Tocqueville, you see, uses it that way, I think, in Democracy in America. It's just again, it's an ism. Isms are very often pejoratives. And individuality is more about, you know, becoming the best person you can be, developing yourself, your capacities, 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 about, you know, I don't want to go on about sounding horrible about us today, but I do feel that we 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 think 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 who've 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 counterrevolutionary 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 that 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 to 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 and power and that it's somehow self-perpetuating, which translates into political power as well. I think the worst part of that is a kind of condescension, a kind of disconnect between these liberal elites that we recognize are there, but their 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 in a good way, the work of Sam Moyn. 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 from 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 Laferber's Liberalism as a Way of Life. And it's just a 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 if there's so many books out, but if you want to read one book, I think that's the one. It's the sun dar. 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.