This substack was always going to be a stop-go adventure. Wishful thinking regarding time constraints can clear a few hurdles, but as a mom with small children who, by their nature, require much love and attention, free time is not on my side. I regret neither the claims on my time nor the aspiration to engage with reality, but I do apologize to any readers for the lack of crisp clarity in my thinking. As I say many times a day between cycles of tears and euphorias: for better or worse, that’s how the cookie crumbles.
I've been thinking about this post from time to time, one more minor thought occurred to me: it seems very reasonable to describe the two false liberalisms as 'left' (liberation towards evil) and 'right' (rule by the strongest). I would like to think that the true liberalism is the centrist one.
Thanks for writing this; I enjoyed reading it. However, I would disagree that what you call the third manifestation of liberalism, that which has been stripped of the two parodies, is liberalism at all. What you are pointing to, rather, is the liberality that historically preceded liberalism, which extended from Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, through Classical Rome, into the Catholic Middle Ages. Liberalism was invented in the 17th century by Hobbes and Locke by turning the older liberality of Christendom, for which the liberation of the soul was the goal, into a secular politically transformative ideology. As many scholars have pointed out, much of what liberalism's partisans claim as having resulted from liberalism's breaks from older forms of politics — e.g. free speech, tolerance for diversity, balance between rulers and the ruled — can be found within the pre-Modern world from which it broke.
I've been thinking about this post from time to time, one more minor thought occurred to me: it seems very reasonable to describe the two false liberalisms as 'left' (liberation towards evil) and 'right' (rule by the strongest). I would like to think that the true liberalism is the centrist one.
Thanks for writing this; I enjoyed reading it. However, I would disagree that what you call the third manifestation of liberalism, that which has been stripped of the two parodies, is liberalism at all. What you are pointing to, rather, is the liberality that historically preceded liberalism, which extended from Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, through Classical Rome, into the Catholic Middle Ages. Liberalism was invented in the 17th century by Hobbes and Locke by turning the older liberality of Christendom, for which the liberation of the soul was the goal, into a secular politically transformative ideology. As many scholars have pointed out, much of what liberalism's partisans claim as having resulted from liberalism's breaks from older forms of politics — e.g. free speech, tolerance for diversity, balance between rulers and the ruled — can be found within the pre-Modern world from which it broke.