Dunt laments that identity has often been an oversight of past liberals; overlooking oppressed minorities and too unwilling to acknowledge the need for human group bonding.

The author makes clear that some of the many challenges to it’s existence Liberalism faces is due to the complacency of Liberals before and now. From that perspective is the book Liberalism : The Life Of An Idea of Edward Fawcett a much better choice. The newcomers weren’t loved, some were loathed, but accepted as the national view was that they represented the safe future – a numbers game of population increase. A philosophy that claims to liberate the individual excluded all but white property-owning men from the political sphere, and provided the ideological justification for the financial crisis.There is another demand of liberal nationalism that is easier to make: imperial nation-states that have expanded at the expense of other nations must withdraw from those others and contract their size.

It appears liberalism was splintered in more recent decades and fear of being labelled woke has prevented some to think along the lines of their values rather than against the grain of the many (or at least the loudest on social media). Rousseau describes the ideal citizen—a man (women were not yet included) who rushes off to one meeting after another and who derives a greater proportion of his happiness from his political life than from his private life. In this groundbreaking new book, Ian Dunt tells the story of liberalism, from its birth in the fight against absolute monarchy to the modern-day resistance against the new populism. It was wonderful and refreshing to read about people from marginalised communities and understand how they shaped liberalism too.But we defend minorities against majority tyranny and ordinary activists against vanguard arrogance. The development of Liberalism was a messy and frustrating journey for these thinkers, who also, by the way, lived messy and frustrating lives. But much of this is avoidable by a simple principle:
“The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.

This book, by placing the development of liberalism in its historical context, and re-stating its key tenets in one place, is a valuable contribution to the fight. If by this 'other form' he is referring to an organisation of politics which includes democratic institutions and promotes policies that are inclusive, conscientiously egalitarian, and socially considerate, then he is essentially arguing for social democracy. These others,” liberals might say, “believe what they believe in the same way that we believe what we believe—and so we can acknowledge the value of their beliefs to them (because we know the value of our beliefs to us).It isn’t expressed in a single correct ideological position that an elite of knowers, a political vanguard, can impose on the rest of us. 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. He does a nice job of engaging with Hayek and showing him as a contemporary and intellectual partner of Keynes, and rightly spends time critiquing Hayek.

Political journalist Ian Dunt has wrriten an urgent book for our times that is a must-read for everyone seeking to understand how western politics got to where it is today. Neither of these men ever lost any sleep over the thought that they might still be asleep or in the Matrix or that the World was anything other than as it presented itself to be. Laissez-Faire Liberalism goes the other way toward the Free-Market fundamentalism of Thatcherism and Reaganomics.Dunt gives an excellent account of the global financial crisis of 2008 (incidentally laying a decent amount of the blame on the often-neglected conflicts of interest inherent in the business model of the ratings agencies), and describes how the resulting austerity fuelled the rise of populism, and ideological conflicts between people subscribing to different tribal identities, all over the world. Trump’s America invented the newest dastardliest intrusion of the state into people’s lives when they invoked child minor separations from immigrant parents and locked up children in welfare shelters where they cried and cried until even the republican mafia could no longer stand the polling results. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to watch videos of political analysis and access an archive of past events and recordings.