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

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I probably learnt more relevant history than I did the entire history curriculum at school (in the UK). Grief will result,” Rosselli says, “from trying to fetter a movement with a development spanning centuries, a movement irrepressibly polyphonic, to a given philosophical creed. Win or lose, I am pretty sure Ian is not the sort of person who would demand I apologise for my privilege and have me ‘cancelled’.

Liberal socialists don’t necessarily deny that the final overthrow of capitalism might require measures of that sort.

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.

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 appears liberalism was splintered in more recent decades and fear of being labelled woke has prevented some to think along the lines of their values rather than against the grain of the many (or at least the loudest on social media). He does a nice job of engaging with Hayek and showing him as a contemporary and intellectual partner of Keynes, and rightly spends time critiquing Hayek.We are so far away from the most elegant of liberal ideas devised by Mill and Taylor in On Liberty – the harm principle. Dunt balances a detailed mastery of complex issues with a compelling and highly readable style that keeps you turning the pages. He will rightly critique colonial Britain and also the US, but he won't ask "what contemporary governments were less barbaric". Presumably all these people believe in the legitimate existence of other religions; “liberal” is still a pluralizing adjective.

For him, as for the democrats he follows, the adjective “liberal” is not only a constraining but also a pluralizing force: it guarantees the existence of “various parties” (which means more than one) and sustains for each the possibility of success. Some liberals, Dunt informs us, may say it isn't as they are merely choosing to practice their religion and therefore choosing not to drive a motorcycle, whilst others will claim that failure to exempt them would amount to an imposition on their right to freely express their faith. I thought it was a great shame that it was only the last quarter of this book that seemed to address directly Liberalism’s relevance today.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. Many of the people discarded by this form of liberalism then abandoned liberalism in turn - not just laissez-faire, but as a whole. Dunt thankfully examines, however, the way liberal ideas like the US bills of rights were designed with one eye on freedom and the other on preserving illiberal privileges like slavery, male enfranchisement and property rights.

There were many light-bulb moments for me in that there were things in this book I was already aware of but didn't know how they connected, or what led to the A philosophy that claims to liberate the individual excluded all but white property-owning men from the political sphere, and provided the ideological justification for the financial crisis. It is education that must give souls a national formation, and direct their opinions and tastes in such a way that they will be patriots by inclination, by passion, by necessity. Losing an election leaves you still possessed of all your civil rights—including the right of opposition, which carries with it the hope of victory next time. Liberals instead should be out, proud and optimistic in their capacity to help shape the future for the better.I imagine sitting in a pub with a beer and having a good old fashioned political argument with Ian Dunt.