It’s a depressing account of just how successful the right in Europe and the States has been, all too familiar to anyone who has been following current affairs over the last few years, and how it has forced back liberal ideals around freedom and compassion. Liberals instead should be out, proud and optimistic in their capacity to help shape the future for the better.

For example, liberals stayed quiet on the immigration issue, leaving intl lawyers isolated in fighting for immigrants rights.Populist victories are disasters for everyone on the losing side, perhaps especially for liberal journalists, the everyday voice of opposition, who are often falsely charged with corruption or sedition and locked up.

They attack the courts and the press; they erode constitutional guarantees; they seize control of the media; they reshape the electorate, excluding minority groups; they harass or actively repress the leaders of the opposition—all in the name of majority rule. Which at the end of the day is what this book is for; to be read by people who already agree with Dunt and smugly think themselves to be enlightened liberals. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. And then we must accommodate the activities, and sometimes the refusals to act, that those beliefs produce. Liberal nationalists are people who do that and who, at the same time, recognize the right of other people to do that.Dunt does not take an idealistic stance, but rather honestly examines liberalism's failings as well as its successes. This book charts the rise of the various ideas and ideological components that eventually came together to form what we know as Liberalism. To clarify, this book is by no means a comprehensive history, nor does the book contain sources apart from the author citing the experts he worked with in the Afterword. The rise of liberal governance in Europe coincided with the expansion of the transatlantic slave trade, the newly independent United States disenfranchised and legally dehumanised Black people and continued to transport them across the Atlantic in great numbers for generations and then discriminated against them for generations more. Do the damaging excesses of laissez faire liberalism such as austerity still count as representations of liberalism, when the direct and deliberate harm they inflict is so intrinsic ?

His realisation that you cannot truly trust sensory perception is not only the basis of the doubt which still bares his name, but of idealist philosophy. Many of the people discarded by this form of liberalism then abandoned liberalism in turn - not just laissez-faire, but as a whole. He is also not afraid to tackle difficult topics, such as the challenges of multiculturalism and the rise of identity politics. It may have served his readers better if he had spent less time on the harrowing treatment of individuals at the hands of nationalist regimes and instead included some facts about nationalism in China, India and Brazil.Compared to Fawcett’s “liberalism”, it is less academic but Dunt still delves into topics of history, philosophy, politics economics and sociology and neatly intertwines them. Both ideologies reject core Liberal values; the freedom of the individual, rationality, moderation, etc. Modern political polling is doing the same to us again, dividing our thinking into marginal concepts of tribal thoughts. The later chapters tackle the present day dilemmas facing liberal thought including Relativism, Identity Politics and the Disinformation / Anti-truth propaganda swirling round the web. The one thing which surprised me is that the first swear word didn’t appear until around the 70% mark.

Every religion that subordinates women—which means pretty much every religion in its orthodox or fundamentalist versions—is obviously illiberal.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. 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. The Marshall Plan was an attempt by America to build strong liberal democracies in Europe, which contrasts with the vicious reparations demanded by the victorious powers after WWI. Similarly, men and women who believe that the religion or irreligion of the others consigns them to eternal subordination (or damnation) and that they, the true believers, are morally obligated to rescue them from that fate—they are illiberal, and actively so. So while I can't say you'll get a thorough education on liberalism, you will learn a very engaging summary on how liberal ideas evolved over time.