The Book That Changed How I Think About Liberalism

Produced by Jack McCordick

The Book That Changed How I Think About Liberalism

This is an edited transcript of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts.

We live in this moment when illiberalism is winning, when illiberalism is in power. I don’t think anybody really argues against that. But what has surprised me is how weak liberalism has felt in response.

I’m a professional liberal — one involved in liberal politics — and even I don’t think I could tell you what liberalism’s vision is, or who its leaders are, at this moment.

In some way, 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.

Then it ended in Donald Trump’s being elected — not once but twice. But here’s the thing: Donald Trump is not working out. He is not making people want more of what he is.

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.”

So I’ve been on a somewhat esoteric personal quest to read books in the liberal canon, as well as histories of liberalism, to try to think through what exactly in this long tradition is valuable for us right now.

One of the books I came across in this search is “The Lost History of Liberalism” by the historian Helena Rosenblatt. One of the arguments she makes is that for thousands of years before we had the word “liberalism,” there was the tradition of being a liberal. Behind that tradition there was the virtue called liberality, and people thought this virtue was really important.

As Rosenblatt writes, for almost 2,000 years, liberality 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 completely elbowed out liberality as a virtue, as an ethic that citizens aspire 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 that I found exciting. And I think it’s one place to begin an inquiry that you’re going to hear a lot more about on the show this year.

Helena Rosenblatt is a professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She’s the author of “Liberal Values: Benjamin Constant and the Politics of Religion,” as well as the aforementioned “The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century,” which I highly recommend.

Ezra Klein: Helena Rosenblatt, welcome to the show.

Helena Rosenblatt: Thank you so much for having me.

To the extent that 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 and 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 before its birth, being liberal meant something very different.

That’s right. Being liberal was not just about believing in, or working toward, 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 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 morally good regime. It’s amazing how many of the early liberals were actually moralists at heart.

Talk me through the early word. It’s not even “liberal,” it’s “liberalitas.” Where does this start for you?

“Liberalism” as a word was coined around 1811 or 1812, and it was first theorized as a concept.

People started asking: What is liberalism? — 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 it became 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. “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 interesting.

So if “liberal” were really the qualities of freedom, lovingness and generosity expected of a citizen, “liberalitas” was the noun that embodied it.

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 for me, reading your book, is that a lot of things are missing in modern liberalism.

My interest in doing this episode — and more, 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 was this idea that liberalism — liberality — is built on a virtue, not a political philosophy.

And, as you just mentioned, the old definitions of it — and you have Cicero and John Locke and John Donne — but they have some kind of intersection between generosity and freedom. But not freedom as 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 as 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 give you the capacity to make those good choices.

That evolved over time. So in the medieval period, it became Christianized, and it’s about 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?

As you can imagine, since it’s not a superlong book, I move rather quickly and have to make some strategic choices. But as you mentioned, there are Cicero and Seneca. These are well-known names that have had tremendous influence.

What do they say? What is their vision of liberality?

That liberality is about reciprocity, exchange. Gift giving and reciprocity are fundamental. You need to be good to one another. Very much about what they would call, or I call, citizenly virtues — things that make a commonwealth work and adhere. That is not to try to idealize these thinkers, either, because you had slavery in Rome. 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.”

Another thing the book makes clear is that if today your problem with liberalism and liberals is that you find them to be a bunch of smug, condescending elites, that problem goes way back. [Laughs.]

That has always been braided into the issue here. And there was a set of virtues that was associated with the noble born, that set them apart in a way that would make them the ideal citizens. That feels, to me, actually like a quite profound tension at the heart of the project.

Yes, absolutely. They don’t even always live up to the ideal.

Sure don’t. [Laughs.]

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 hypocrisy. They were an elite, and they had obligations.

I’m writing a book right now about Mme. de Staël, a great early liberal and a woman — a powerhouse. Such a fascinating woman. Some say that it was in her salon, in her drawing room, that liberalism was invented.

Her name appears as a very important power broker, an intellectual, in the early 19th century, and then gets dropped. She’s endlessly frustrated by where all the good men are.

We need some good men. Not only to pursue the policies that we need, but to serve as examples.

I think this is also somewhat inspiring or provocative to think about, from our current vantage point. 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. It’s quite deep in the liberal theory — an inheritance I’m not even sure people totally realize that they have absorbed — this sense that to make a country work, people have to behave in a certain way toward each other.

The ways in which Trump flouts the rules of behavior, the ways in which he acts toward other people, are almost separate from anything he believes — a profound challenge to what liberalism believes 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 you instill in society the virtues necessary to make a society work — understanding that as actually a hard problem — I think there’s juice in that today.

Absolutely. And the fact that they’re elitists. Liberals, throughout their 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 Abraham Lincoln and how much he was admired by liberals who were very worried about the problem of elites perhaps not being able to show people how to behave and to be the kind of leaders that a liberal society needs. At that point they thought maybe liberal democracy would fail. There was no real example of its lasting. So would the American example, this exceptional example, actually work?

Lincoln showed that it could. He did it in this beautiful way that 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 those kinds of leaders are very hard to find.

What is “liberal” in the liberal arts?

The purpose of the liberal arts education is really to form freedom-loving and moral leaders — to give them the tools, the 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 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, and I don’t always want to, again, idealize them or say that 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 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 — and less so 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 at the time, and the citizens were the leaders of society in Rome. In the 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 a liberal arts education, they say: Oh, well, actually, there’s proof that having a liberal arts education will get you that job. [Laughs.]

So it’s that whole discussion about what a citizen of a democracy means. 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 those politics don’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 that 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. [Laughs.]

Or maybe another way........

© The New York Times