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

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They didn’t leave for these reasons – political freedom, but economic freedom – that other pillar of liberal values. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to watch videos of political analysis and access an archive of past events and recordings. Brexit is depicted as being illiberal because the leave campaign were economical with the truth (a contention which again requires a fair amount of historical editing).

Like all adjectives, “liberal” modifies and complicates the noun it precedes; it has an effect that is sometimes constraining, sometimes enlivening, sometimes transforming.

And it was really to understand the world I was born into in the mid-1960s into - a free democratic place to parents who had come from a not so free democratic place. We don’t talk about its absence, we simply live it and when we need to we stand up and fight for it, defend it, talk about the way it is threatened. What they most want is to pass laws that ensure their victory in the next election, which may turn out to be the last meaningful election. Presumably all these people believe in the legitimate existence of other religions; “liberal” is still a pluralizing adjective. The competing visions of Keynes and Hayek were in fact both facets of liberalism: one emphasising freedom through low unemployment and the individual opportunities thereby created; and the other focusing on low inflation and freedom of choice for the individual consumer.

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 Once again, when individual rights were denied, murderous regimes, and now on a modern industrial scale, were the result. 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. Each one promoted the power of the state over the value of the individual, and in each one this simple reversal of values led to the state brutally repressing the population and killing millions of its own citizens.The world changes; new inequalities emerge in place of old ones; we never stop arguing among ourselves; socialist politics is steady work.

It shows how the movement towards fairness, equality and inclusion has progressed (with some hiccups) though the ages and across the world. It is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand what it means to be a liberal today and how to defend the values that we hold dear. If there is no compromise, no discussion about freedom, we are in a state run organisation with not ability left to negotiate our freedom. But we have seen (in the past at least) liberal Republicans who defend constitutional democracy, believe in an independent judiciary, feel comfortable in a pluralist society, and expect to rotate out of as well as into political office.

Dunt believes the current liberal crisis could and should lead to liberalism reinventing itself in ways which will guarantee the freedom of individuals in the future.

Citizenship involves a commitment that excludes all others; secondary associations are a threat to the integrity of the republic. How To Be A Liberal by Ian Dunt is available to purchase via Canbury Press with a 20% discount using the code LSEHTBAL2020. This book has an interesting premise and and strong argument, although there is nothing particularly novel in its interpretation of history and it is a bit oversimplistic in the binary definitions of "liberalism" and "nationalism" and co-opts historical figures who would not recognise themselves as liberals in the modern sense to the cause. 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. Two steps forward, one step back is much better than three steps forward over the bodies of our opponents.And we defend nations that need states against any opposing nation-states: Kurds, Palestinians, and Tibetans, for example, against Turkey, Israel, and China—but we do this without denying the national rights of Turks, Israelis, and Chinese.