This is an academic history of liberalism, in the form of what it calls a “conceptual history” – that is, it explores what its proponents (and to a certain extent opponents) have said over the years about the positions, ideas, and politics associated with “liberal” and its cognates. This is presented with some political history …
I’ve been reading a scholarly history of liberalism. It isn’t directly about this, but as it reminds me of things that I already knew in broad strokes and fills in some details, it is making me think morbid thoughts about the relative historical novelty and consequent fragility of the institutions that, at least in 21st …