Liberalism is under attack. But don't despair! Ian Dunt's new book, How to Be a Liberal, will teach you how to defend the values you hold dear, even in a world that is increasingly prone to populism and hostile to liberalism. Ã
Liberalism is under attack. But don't despair! Ian Dunt's new book, How to Be a Liberal, will teach you how to defend the values you hold dear, even in a world that is increasingly prone to populism and hostile to liberalism. Ã
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...
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...
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.…mehr
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