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

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Many of the people discarded by this form of liberalism then abandoned liberalism in turn - not just laissez-faire, but as a whole. Ian Dunt has multiple personas: the sweary critic of Remainiacs and Twitter, lambasting Parliamentary dunces with choice invective (“brain like a piece of crumpled paper, spluttering out little scraps of bullshit”); the polemicist of politics.

But this book argues there still is a liberalism out there, one which has been unreasonable trashed upon, one which the baby has been thrown out with the bathwater, but if we continue using it it's still the most useful tool we have so all of us can live together and not die together. They came from a place unfree in terms of rigid social and religious structures, a dictatorship, a military occupation and after civil war a virtual political monopoly. It follows from this account of liberal and illiberal religion that state power cannot be used to indoctrinate future citizens in the orthodox version of Judaism or Catholicism (or any other religion) or to persecute heretics or infidels.As we learn about each of the important concepts of liberalism, we are immersed in the historical context in which the idea took shape. 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 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. So there will be many socialisms, and we should expect to find parties, unions, and ideological groupings of different sorts competing for members and influence within a liberal-democratic framework. As Rosselli argued, the competition will be continuous because, finally, “liberal” means that “socialism is not a static and abstract ideal that can one day be completely realized.

Across the world from India to Britain to the USA, liberal values are under attack from nationalists. 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. Dunt does not take an idealistic stance, but rather honestly examines liberalism's failings as well as its successes. It's actually a hell of a lot more engaging than the (often) dry original texts from key thinkers and philosophers, and a great starting point for someone who wants to dip their toes into the political theory and evolution of Liberalism.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.

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