Ian Dunt

How To Be A Liberal

The Story of Liberalism and the Fight for its Life

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

'A tour de force.' - THE SECRET BARRISTER 'Clear-eyed and hard-headed. His defence of liberalism is political writing at its most urgent and engaging.' - NICK COHEN, OBSERVER COLUMNIST 'Dunt's gift for making complicated issues comprehensible is second to none. Courageous.' - JAMES O'BRIEN, LBC Nationalism has marched across the world. Wherever it goes, it seeks to destroy the liberal values that underpin Western civilisation. In this epic new book, political journalist Ian Dunt tells the forgotten story of the advance of liberalism and the events which led to its current retreat. His sweeping narrative takes in the Levellers, the American and French Revolutions, John Stuart Mill, the great economic clashes between John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich Hayek, and the works of George Orwell. He then traces how the financial crash, identity politics and post-truth have wreaked havoc on liberal values in some of the world's biggest countries. Weaving together history, philosophy and polemic, How To Be A Liberal stretches from the dawn of the age of science to the latest developments in politics and everyday life. This wide-ranging and powerful account will answer all the questions you have about what's happening to our society and how we create a better world.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Canbury Press
• Seitenzahl: 498
• Erscheinungstermin: 17. September 2020
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 240mm x 161mm x 31mm
• Gewicht: 792g
• ISBN-13: 9781912454419
• ISBN-10: 1912454416
• Artikelnr.: 58665911

Autorenporträt

Ian Dunt is a columnist with the I newspaper and presents the Origin Story and Oh God, What Now? podcasts. His first book, Brexit: What the Hell Happens Now? (Canbury, 2017) on Britain's departure from the European Union was a bestseller. In How Westminster Works (And Why It Doesn't) he looked at the political system in the UK.In How To Be A Liberal (Canbury, 2020) he tells the story of our personal freedom. Drawing on history, politics and economics, he argues for a radical, egalitarian liberalism that nurtures both individuals and all of us.

Inhaltsangabe

TODAY. Reveals the six lies behind the rise of nationalism in the
Republican Party in the USA, the Conservative Party in Great Britain, the
Bharatiya Janata Party in India, Likud in Israel, the Alliance for Brazil
in Brazil, PDP–Laban in the Philippines, Fidesz in Hungary and the Lega in
Italy
1. BIRTH. The origin of independent thought in the mind of philosopher René
Descartes, who realised Cogito, ergo sum: 'I think therefore I am'.
Mentions Meditations on First Philosophy and Discourse on the Method, and
Nicolaus Copernicus' On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres.
2. AWAKENING. In the English Civil War period, radicals started to outline
three political thoughts that challenged the established order. They were
freedom of religious conscience, the notion of the individual, and the
notion of doubt. These three ideas would become central to liberalism
3. THE THREE REVOLUTIONS. Liberalism was moulded in the furnace of three
revolutions in the 18th century: The Glorious Revolution in England, the
American Revolution and the French Revolution
THE GLORIOUS REVOLUTION
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
4. CONSTANT. The womanising dissolute 18th Century Swiss philosopher
Benjamin Constant established the political rights of the individual and
warned of the tyranny of an over-mighty government in Napoleonic France
5. HARRIET AND JOHN. Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill had a deep love
affair and laid the groundwork for the development of modern liberalism,
including championing a minority cause in 19th Century Victorian England:
the right of women to vote. They wrote The Enfranchisement of Women and On
Liberty
6. DEATH. The Dreyfuss Affair in France, the extermination of peasants in
Ukraine's Holodomor, and the genocide against Jews in Nazi Germany showed
what happened when nationalism when tyrants could channel the 'will of the
people' over the rights of the individual protected by liberalism
7. NEW WORLD ORDER. After the catastrophe of the Second World War, liberal
democracies in the West built a new post-war, rights-based liberal world
order designed to guarantee peace and individual rights. Economically John
Maynard Keynes triumphed over Friedrich Hayek
8. BELONGING. One flaw in liberalism was the lack of recognition of the
identity felt by individuals, whether nationality or religion. The English
writer George Orwell and philosopher Isaiah Berlin averred the importance
of this sense of belonging in their writings and ultimately in liberalism
9. CRASH. The post-war liberal world order crashed with oil crisis
stagflation in the 1970s when Hayek's small state philosophy took root in
US governments, leading to bank deregulation on Wall Street (and likewise
in the UK under Margaret Thatcher) - leading eventually to 2008 global
financial crash
10. IDENTITY WAR. Liberalism had largely been devised by white men, and
women and ethnic groups carved out a separate identity that put the group
ahead of the individual. 'This was no longer the politics of how to change
the world. It was the politics of who you were.'
11. ANTI-TRUTH. Just as liberalism faced multiple threats from the
resurgence of nationalism, the rise of identity politics and the financial
crash, people’s ability to use reason diminished with the rise of social
media. Now everyone was the arbiter of their own truth. Facts became
opinions.
12. THE NEW NATIONALISM. 1. Hungary, where Victor Urban used fear of
foreigners to dismantle the free media and democratic institutions of
Hungary. 2. The rise of Donald Trump who degraded the idea of independent
facts. 3 Brexit Britain where nationalist propaganda trumped a nation's
interests
13. THE OTHER. How nationalists in Italy, Britain, the US and elsewhere
have seized on a supposed threat to their countries from other people to
whip up dissent and to crack down on immigration and the rights of
individuals, harming democracy and liberal values
TOMORROW. The big problem with liberalism has been complacency that it
would eventually triumph around the world. The answer is for liberals to
fight for their democratic values. Joe Biden's election as US President
offers hope for a kinder, better future
SORRY & THANK YOU. Acknowledgements and apologies. Mentions Ronald Dworkin,
TH Green, François Guizot, Leonard Hobhouse, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Immanuel
Kant, Robert Nozick, Martha Nussbaum, Karl Popper, John Rawls, Friedrich
Schiller and Alexis de Tocqueville.
FURTHER READING. An extensive list of books that hold the keys to
liberalism, including Liberalism: The Life of an Idea by Edmund Fawcett and
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Also recommended is Toby Buckle’s
Political Philosophy podcast. 'You owe it to yourself to read On Liberty'
INDEX. The As start: Act of Union, Acxiom, Adam, adaptive preference,
advertising, African Americans, aggregate demand, agitators, Agreement of
the People, Akhmatova, Aktion T-4 programme, algorithms, alternative
facts...

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CONTENTS

Today

1. Birth

2. Awakening

3. The Three Revolutions

4. Constant

5. Harriet and John

6. Death

7. New World Order

8. Belonging

9. Crash

10. Identity War

11. Anti-Truth

12. The New Nationalism

13. The Other

Tomorrow

Sorry & Thank You

Further Reading

Index

Rezensionen

'A tour de force; a mighty trumpet blast for the forces of liberalism and enlightenment in the face of a global tide of ignorance and populism.'

- THE SECRET BARRISTER

Dunt, editor of the website politics.co.uk, counterposes liberalism and nationalism, the latter of which, he writes, is based on a sixfold lie. Among its elements are the thought that we can have only one identity at a time, which makes us "part of the mass: an undifferentiated component of the whole," and the contention that any difference from that mass is bad. We see the sixth component, "there is no such thing as truth," enacted with every Trump tweet. As Orwell knew, when politicians can get away with lies, lie they will; if the concepts of truth and falsehood disappear, then they will do as they please. Having established this sixfold premise, Dunt examines the evolution of the idea of liberalism, at least some of which he traces back to Descartes and his obsession with the "gap between dream and reality, the thin line between being awake and…the crazed world of dreaming"—i.e., the foundational stuff of truth and lies. While Descartes is seldom pressed into political work, Dunt makes a good case for doing so. Other figures in the battle against authoritarianism include some of the usual suspects, such as John Locke and John Stuart Mill—who was careful to give credit to his partner, Harriet Taylor, a woman who even so "was erased" from the historical record. The paucity of intellectualism on the far right, an ideology "pumped into the heart and pursued with the fist," is as evident now as it was a century ago. In a book that makes a good companion to Adam Gopnik's A Thousand Small Sanities, Dunt takes down a few politically correct absurdities, but most of his fire is aimed squarely at Trump, Theresa May, Marine Le Pen, and other enemies of freedom. When in the course of human events it falls on us to resist, this makes a welcome guidebook.