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

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Liberal” also means that there will be room for socialists to disagree among themselves about the strategy and tactics of the struggle and its short- and long-term goals.

The fact that Dunt barely mentions the humanism of the Renaissance or the anti-authoritarianism of the Christian Reformation just goes to show that his history of liberal thought stands on shaky grounds. I have already raised doubts about a liberal communist; the Stalinist version of communism certainly can’t abide the adjective, though I am sure that there are liberal communists—in the nineteenth century certainly, and perhaps today—who believe in a plurality of communes of different sorts.But it wouldn’t turn that religion into a school catechism—any more than liberal socialists in power would turn socialist ideology into a school catechism (as illiberal socialists did in the Soviet Union). This theme, that of individual rights versus the general ‘will of the people’, underpins much of the book. The adjective “liberal” accommodates the interests of existing and aspiring nations; it also recognizes the rights of minorities within the states that nations create. Liberal nations are not created and defined by “blood and soil” or by divine appointment or by a history that starts at the beginning of time and is never interrupted.

Non-liberals argue that traditional Liberalism is the centre ground of political thinking, it is anodyne and it’s time has passed. The revived democratic socialism in the United States today seems irrepressibly polyphonic, though some of the voices are devoid of skepticism—a little too eager to deny the political correctness of all the others. The EU grew from a determination to link the economies of the warring nations so tightly that war between them would become impossible. In the final few chapters, he talks about all of the ugly issues of the present day (identity politics, including nationalism; the assault on truth facilitated by new technologies; the West's failed response to the migrant crisis) and the general, continuing feeling of discontent in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. I imagine sitting in a pub with a beer and having a good old fashioned political argument with Ian Dunt.

And then we must accommodate the activities, and sometimes the refusals to act, that those beliefs produce. 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.