What happens when liberalism stops feeling like a victory and starts feeling like an exhaustion?

Summary

New Books Network: What Happens When Liberalism Stops Feeling Like a Victory and Starts Feeling Like an Exhaustion?

Date: January 5, 2026
Host: Eli Karetney (B)
Guest: Alexandra Lefebvre (C), Professor of Politics and Philosophy, University of Sydney
Book: Liberalism as a Way of Life
Podcast Theme: Interview with Lefebvre about the crisis of liberalism, the tradition’s core values, its evolution, and how it might be revitalized as both an ethos and a way of life.

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Overview

This episode dives deep into the state of liberalism, exploring why a once-triumphant philosophy now feels depleted and embattled. Host Eli Karetney welcomes Alexandra Lefebvre to discuss his acclaimed book, Liberalism as a Way of Life, examining whether liberalism remains a worthy tradition, how it compares internationally, and how its adherents can rekindle a sense of higher purpose, even in today’s ideological and existential crisis.

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Core Themes and Discussion Points

1. What Is Liberalism? – Defining the Tradition

[03:53 – 07:31]

• Lefebvre pushes past the academic cliché of liberalism as a “coat of many colors,” instead arguing for two central, ancient ideals: freedom and generosity.
• These ideals are rooted in the Latin “liberalis,” meaning both “free” and “generous”—forming the duo of liberty and liberality.

“If I had to nominate the two kind of core principles of liberalism, it would be that: freedom and generosity... liberty and liberality.” – Lefebvre [04:56]

• While traditions and emphasis may shift (Locke, Mill, Montesquieu, Kant, Rawls, etc.), he centers Rawls’s idea of fairness as a third foundational pillar for modern liberalism.

The Modular Furniture Metaphor

• Political theorist Michael Freeden likens liberalism to a room of modular furniture—what is “centered” (freedom, fairness, etc.) determines its broader configuration, explaining its global diversity.

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2. Liberalism’s Inclusion & Exclusion of Other Values

[07:31 – 09:37]

• Some values fit poorly into the liberal framework because they rely on hierarchical or exclusionary ideals (aristocratic honor, asymmetrical loyalty, piety, self-sacrifice).
• Lefebvre notes that liberalism “levels the playing field,” making virtues like loyalty or piety “starved out,” yet upholds others, offering a “hothouse environment for certain plants, but not for others.”

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3. Rawlsian Liberalism – A Way of Life, Not Just a Framework

[09:37 – 16:15]

• John Rawls is painted as the central (even heroic) figure binding the American (freedom-heavy) and European (equality-focused) liberal traditions into the ideal of fairness via the “fair system of cooperation.”
• Lefebvre highlights two phases:
  • Early Rawls considered liberalism a robust ethical framework, with deep moral development and emotional resonance.

    “What it means to live as a liberal person: someone who is free and also generous… we strive for something beyond ourselves, something redemptive.” – Lefebvre [12:00]

  • Late Rawls retracted this, making liberalism a more “thin,” political framework to include citizens with diverse (even illiberal) moral worldviews.

Responding to Liberal Disenchantment

• Lefebvre argues early Rawls is newly relevant as Western societies become less religious but retain a “God-shaped hole” that liberalism could fill as a secular framework for meaning.

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4. International Liberalism – Geography, History, and Ideological Tensions

[19:39 – 31:00]

• The meaning and critique of “liberalism” shifts dramatically between contexts:
  • In the US, it aligns with the progressive left and is attacked as tax-and-spend “do-gooderism.”
  • In Europe or Australia, it can be centrist or even center-right, criticized as “heartless small-government individualism.”
• Lefebvre explains this as a function of history and adaptability:
  • Cold War Liberalism narrowed the tradition to defend individual liberty against the perfectionism of the Soviet project.
  • Newer histories (Rosenblatt, Moyn) show how “classical liberalism” is a retrospective fiction; the tradition re-invents itself in the face of each new crisis.

“Liberalism contains multitudes… you can find a strand… to defend your commitments.” – Lefebvre [30:35]

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5. Nationalism, Sovereignty, and Imperialism

[31:20 – 47:23]

• International tensions: Does liberalism inevitably trend toward universalism—“imperialism,” as conservative Yoram Hazony claims?
  • Hazony distinguishes between “imperial universalists” (e.g., liberals, jihadists, historic empires) and true “pluralist nationalists.”
  • Lefebvre concedes a “liberal imperialism” exists by enforcing universal human rights norms, sometimes via “soft coercion” (e.g., EU sanctions on Hungary’s natalist policies).

Key Questions Raised

• Is the nation-state the best container for liberalism, or does the logic of liberal rights and cooperation push toward supranational projects (à la Kant, Habermas, or Fukuyama)?
• What is the legitimate scope of state action for liberal states—neutrality vs. promotion of particular goods (“lightly perfectionist” vs. “hardcore” states)?

“I think liberals haven’t come up with a good answer to this yet...there's no liberal state that is not at least lightly perfectionist.” – Lefebvre [47:54]

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6. The Challenge of So-Called “Post-Liberal” Regimes

[51:09 – 58:24]

• Lefebvre outlines a global rise of regimes—India, Israel, MAGA America, Russia, Hungary, China—that explicitly use the state to shape citizens’ views of the good life, returning to an “Aristotelian” vision.
• Western liberal critics too quickly dismiss these as pure “repression,” “kleptocracy,” or “populism,” failing to appreciate that they present real, positive visions of flourishing attractive to portions of their societies.
• Liberals, by contrast, are uniquely hamstrung: “They cannot go down that path…it is core to their commitment as being liberals that they can’t push a liberal way of life…”

“Liberals think it’s almost natural …that the state should allow its individuals freedom to figure out what the good life is for them. We need an ounce of historical perspective to notice how irregular and exceptional that is.” – Lefebvre [56:57]

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7. Revitalizing Liberalism As a “Way of Life”: Pierre Hadot and Spiritual Exercises

[64:51 – 70:14]

• Enter Pierre Hadot—philosopher and classicist who reconstructed ancient philosophy as a practice of spiritual and character “exercises.”
  • Hadot’s claim: Ancient philosophy was about living wisely—practices to progress toward an ideal self.
• Translating this for liberals: Could liberalism likewise become a way of life with “spiritual exercises”?
  • Lefebvre suggests key Rawlsian ideas—Original Position, Reflective Equilibrium, Public Reason—could function as rituals or meditations for moral/character development, not just as theoretical tools.
  • He wished this part of his book were even more developed, leaving an open invitation for listeners/readers to invent more “spiritual” exercises for liberal life.

“It’s an open conspiracy...furnish some spiritual exercises for liberals to do right now.” – Lefebvre [68:14]

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8. Liberal and Non-Liberal Character Development

[70:43 – 80:44]

• Karetney opens up about his own journey—citing a “God-shaped hole” in his own liberalism, which led him from Nietzsche and Strauss to Kabbalah and spiritual practice.
• Are there higher and lower selves for liberals? Lefebvre: “Hard yes.” Every moral system poses a demanding ideal—liberals dodge generosity; Christians, love; Confucians, harmony—and thus must confront their own distinctive failings (e.g., individualism for liberals).

“Everyone basically spends most of their life trying to dodge the main moral commitment that their moral system makes on them...So what I would try...[is] the main character failing of liberalism is individualism because it’s so tempting, it’s so easy.” – Lefebvre [76:12]

• The “original position” becomes a key exercise: Asking ourselves to imagine a world not fixated on our accidental, positional identity, to transcend egoistic interests and thereby become more genuinely liberal.

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9. The Spiritual Core of Rawlsian and Liberal Exercises

[80:44 – 82:03]

• Karetney reflects that only recently, with his own spiritual practices, does he recognize the “original position” as a profound, even spiritual, exercise—no longer a “neutral, meaningless self,” but a universal vantage point, akin to philosophical or mystical transcendence.

“Now when I hear it...it sounds like a secularized expression of a deeply spiritual idea...ascending above a kind of lower self, a kind of embodied self, to an almost God’s eye perspective.” – Karetney [81:25]

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• [04:56] “If I had to nominate the two kind of core principles of liberalism, it would be that: freedom and generosity...” — Lefebvre
• [12:00] “What it means to live as a liberal person: someone who is free and also generous… something redemptive...” — Lefebvre
• [30:35] “Liberalism contains multitudes…” — Lefebvre
• [47:54] “There's no liberal state that is not at least lightly perfectionist.” — Lefebvre
• [76:12] “The main character failing of liberalism is individualism because it’s so tempting, it’s so easy.” — Lefebvre
• [81:25] “It sounds like a secularized expression of a deeply spiritual idea...to an almost God’s eye perspective.” — Karetney

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Highlighted Timestamps

• 03:53 – What makes liberalism liberal? Core principles
• 09:37 – John Rawls as liberalism’s great synthesizer; liberalism as a way of life
• 16:15 – Liberalism as a secular tradition after the decline of religious faith
• 26:24 – How “liberalism” means different things across the world
• 31:20 – Nationalism, imperialism, and the critique of global liberalism
• 47:54 – The “perfectionist” tendencies of even the most open liberal states
• 51:09 – Defining “post-liberal" or “soulcrafting" regimes; Aristotle’s influence
• 64:51 – The challenge in defending a liberal way of life without overstepping liberal commitments
• 65:16 – Introduction of Hadot and the idea of liberal spiritual exercises
• 76:12 – Liberalism’s main challenge: overcoming individualism, embracing generosity
• 80:44 – Transforming Rawls’s “original position” into a secular spiritual exercise

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Conclusion

Alexandra Lefebvre’s account suggests that liberalism, facing existential threats and growing exhaustion, needs to be rediscovered not merely as an ideology or political program but as a living tradition, rich in spiritual and ethical promise. The episode ends in a spirit of collaborative reflection, inviting liberals—and anyone else—to find new spiritual and practical resources in the tradition, and to rediscover its depths through philosophical and personal practice.

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Transcript

[A]

Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts, and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.

[B]

Not long ago, a triumphalist spirit infused Western discourse with proclamations of liberal democracies, victory in the ideological battles of the 20th century. A victory that represented the end or purpose of history itself. But something happened on the way to implementing that purpose. For we liberals have lost our vitality. No longer celebrating victory, instead we're confronting what commentators across the political spectrum see as a crisis of liberalism. Critics on the left and right have exposed the weaknesses of our ideas, our values, habits, culture. We stand naked, without purpose or meaning, believing only in our own self interest or believing nothing at all. Is this the end point of our liberalism, of modernity, of history itself? Or can liberal thinkers save us by doubling down on our own hegemonic tradition? Can philosophers remind us of what makes liberalism so deserving of our commitments? The shoehorn challenge posed by the hard left and the radical right got nothing on the liberals who boldly, bravely announce, there's more here than you realize. There's more to our own belief system than you think. There's a way of life here to embrace, not only because it offers us freedom and fairness, but because it has the resources to help us become our best possible selves. Welcome to International Horizons, a podcast of the Ralph Bunch Institute for International Studies that bring scholarly and diplomatic expertise to bear on our understanding of a wide range of international issues. My name is Eli Karetney. I teach political theory and international relations at Baruch College and have for years been the Deputy Director of the Ralph Bunche Institute at the Graduate center of the City University of New York. With our director, John Torpy on leave this year, I have the privilege of serving as the Institute's interim Director, which means I have the honor of hosting this podcast. Here with me today is Alexandra Lefebvre, professor of Politics and Philosophy at the University of Sydney. He is originally from Vancouver, Canada, and he got his PhD at Johns Hopkins University. Alex's book Liberalism as a Way of Life was named the best book of 2024 by the New Yorker, the Australian Book Review, Persuasion, and Australia's Ministry of Pop Culture. His current project, provisionally titled soulcrafters, investigates how populous and authoritarian regimes, from China and Russia to India and Maga America actively shape their citizens views of the good life. Welcome Alex. Thank you for joining us on International Horizons.

[C]

It's my pleasure. Thank you for having me.

[B]

Your book has really struck a nerve with liberals whose self confidence has waned in the face of challenges coming from all sides. Certainly with this liberal let's start at the level of principles. Let's give some content to the ideology, to the waters we all swim in. What holds together all the different liberalisms you discuss? And just to give a little bit of reference, you write about the early modern liberalisms of John Locke, John Stuart Mill, Montesquieu, Kant. You make reference to 19th century classical liberalism, Cold War liberalism, social democratic liberalism, and contemporary neoliberalism. So what are the core principles at play here and why does it represent a good way of life?

[C]

So let me not dance around the question, because the easy academic dodge is to say liberalism is a multicolored coat with all of these different colors. I want to say that there's two main ideals or both political principles, but also qualities of character, let's say at the heart of liberalism. And it goes back to the very origin of the word liberal and liberalis in Latin, which is on the one hand to be someone who is free and on the other hand to be someone who is generous. And if I had to nominate the two kind of core principles of liberalism, it would be that freedom and generosity, or if you want to stick to the roots of the word liberty and liberality. And that was at least how the founders of liberalism understood themselves, trying to recover these qualities, both politically but also psychologically in the 19th century, given all the new challengers on the scene, modern life, capitalism, democracy. Just the general standardization and what we would today call the inshitification of everything and just trying to recover a sense of a gravity to our souls, as it were, through those two qualities of character. In the later evolution of liberalism, it gets complicated. The I put a lot of, I put all my bets on, in one sense, the Rawlsian idea of fairness. That that is something liberals sign up to, if at a minimal level, which is a commitment to a society as a fair system of cooperation. And that's where the book takes me. That said, I've tried to make the definition capacious, but it won't quite cover liberals of all stripes. I once had lunch with Michael Frieden, who is a political historian at Oxford, recently retired, but he's kind of the great historian of liberalism, of our times. And he wrote Liberalism a very short introduction amongst other pieces. And he said that, look, look, Alex. I remember he was eating his toast at the time and he said, Alex, liberalism is like a room full of modular furniture. You know, like furniture you can just move, like corporate rooms or just move bits and pieces here and there. And he says that the complexion of liberalism will totally depend on what bit of furniture you move to the center of the room. So if you park freedom right at the center of the room, pretend that's a couch or whatever, then all the other furniture has to arrange itself in its orbit. And that would be say, a libertarian, maybe a neoliberal tradition. Or you could have a more robust kind of social democracy aspect as your centerpiece. Call that the kitchen table, whatever you want. But there's. It's just this kind of family resemblance. Not resemblance, family orbit of concepts that always gets rearranged according to the different emphasis. But I put my chips on fairness.

[B]

Are there non liberal pieces of furniture that can be part of the, part of the assembly and still, still kind of retain a liberal space? Let's say aristocratic honor or excellence, these kinds of ideas.

[C]

Yeah, that's a great question. There's so many, there's so much that question. You're squeezing the furniture metaphor. All right, I think you can definitely have a liberal concept, like not illiberal, not pro liberal concepts in the orbit of, of liberalism. So for example, let's take your notion of honor. Honor is a tricky idea that tends to get a little bit starved out in liberalism because it often depends on relations of asymmetry, such that one honor goes to one person and not to another. And then you get the kind of whole Rousseau scene, kind of psychological chasing after goods, etc. Etc. Whereas liberalism tries to kind of, to use a trite metaphor, that's still kind of true, tries to level the playing field. So if you want social relations structured according to loyalty, it's going to be an uphill battle in a liberal environment, and you're going to have to make place and try to carve that out. But certain thinkers have tried to do that. Sharon Krauss, for example, wrote the terrific book called Liberalism with Honor. But it's something Tuck Ville was very interested and concerned with honor. But it's something liberalism has to work uphill to try to do. But there are of course, certain values that really are starved out in liberalism that are genuine human excellences. I think that we would acknowledge that they're human goods. They just find it really hard to get a foothold in liberalism. I think of things like self sacrifice, piety, loyalty can have a tough time in liberalism and other things. So it definitely has a certain atmosphere that will favor, to change the metaphor again, give a kind of hot house environment for certain plants, but not for others.

[B]

So when I come back to Rawls, who you mentioned, he essentially is the hero of the book in many ways. Let's talk a little bit about his framework and how it provides a way of kind of calling the essence of liberalism and at the same time offers a way of life to liberals who care not only about self interest, but also about self development, maybe even self elevation, not to say perfection. So say a little bit about both his framework and the way of life that you see embedded in it.

[C]

So let me start off with what no one on this podcast needs to hear. But John Rawls was the major political philosopher of the 20th century, born in Baltimore, where I did my PhD, which is a nice little touch for me, and then educated at Princeton and then worked at Harvard the rest of his life. So what Rawls really tried to, this is the way Thomas Nagel puts it, I think it's right. Rawls's big achievement in terms of kind of like as a syncretism, as trying to hook up traditions, was to try to combine American style liberalism with its more kind of freedom oriented aspect with European social democracy. And these were taken to be traditions that were, if not anathema to one another, then they just didn't play nicely together. And so what Rawls tried to do with a tradition that stressed freedom on the one hand, another that stressed equality, was to try to reconcile them with his idea of fairness. And so providing a society that would be, as I said, a moment ago set up and run and maintained as a system of fair cooperation from one generation to the next, allowing individuals to pursue their own conception of the good in life and their own ends, but also with an infrastructure that would provide opportunity for everyone to do so and guarantee respect for persons such that I see you doing your thing, you see me doing my thing. And we both kind of affirm that in their various. In their various qualities. So that was what Rawls tried to do. Rawls had two major. There's early Rawls and late Rawls, which is very. This is going to sound pedantic, but it's very important for the question you asked. So the early Rawls was much more comfortable with allowing for the idea that liberalism might become a pretty robust ethical framework by which it's not just how we behave as citizens, but it's how we comport ourselves just as people in our everyday lives, as colleagues, as friends. And he had some great. He's not known as a kind of a subtle psychologist, but I think that's undeserved. And the back end of his great work, A Theory of justice, really has a lot of stuff on moral development and how we acquire through childhood, through adolescence, a commitment to liberal values that isn't just kind of notional and abstract, but is lived and embodied and really felt, and it's emotionally resonant. So that was the early Rawls. And he concluded his great work with this kind of hymn to. Well, at least this is the way I read him, to this kind of hymn to what it means to live as a liberal person, someone who is free and also generous. And I thought for. I think for him, he tried. He's. He's a crypto theologian. He's. He's. He lost. He was. He was going to be a priest. Not priest. He's going to be a minister. And then lost his faith in the Second World War. But I don't think he ever lost that impulse that we strive for something beyond ourselves, something redemptive. And I think he found that in his own way, in the. In the liberal tradition of political thought anyways. And he tried to restore that in his great early work, Theory of Justice. So short version, that's that then in his later work, he received a challenge which would occur to anyone kind of, but a philosopher that dismantled his whole edifice, which is like basically, hey, Jack. How he was known to his friends, hey, Jack, what if people don't want to live according to liberal principles? What if they don't want to be all kind of like Low key Kantians along the lines you lay out. He's like, oh no, that's right maybe. And so then he had to recast his whole system so that liberalism may be an ethical framework, but for most other people it can also just be a political set of commitments. And he called that version of liberalism political liberalism. And the goal was to try to reconcile a liberal political order with deep pluralism, with the fact that we have committed Christians, Jews, Muslims and people of various moral philosophies in any mature society. And how do we get them on board if they don't recognize themselves in this kind of liberal ethos as a character, as a set of character qualities? So that was his later work. So liberalism becomes this thinner in some sense. And the thinner is the wrong word, but it becomes less comprehensive certainly. And I think that that is where he sort of left off. And what my book tries to do is for those of us who want to recover that prior vision of liberalism as a, as a way of life.

[B]

Who were the voices that you know that, that he was responding to? Judas Clar. Others who were, that were the kind of the loving critiques that he took to.

[C]

Yeah, I forgot his name. We can put this in the show notes. There's. He cites him. Sorry, I'm just. It's for listeners. It's early ish morning in Sydney and so my Rawls, my Rawls brain only kicks in at like 11am I'll get you a name. He has a specific interlocutor in mind and he uses a specific term of criticism to, to, to, to fault himself on his earlier model, which is that he says ultimately his work in a theory of justice like it was, it was he, he, he still approved of it, he still thought it was good. But he called it quote unquote unrealistic. And by unrealistic he, that word was meant to refer to that. He didn't think it would actually achieve sufficient buy in by a sufficient number of people who believe in different ends of life, different faiths, so as to be able to reproduce itself indefinitely. So that's why he had to recast the whole edifice of his theory to try to provide a more stable account of liberalism, which is to say one that would achieve wider buy in.

[B]

Is part of your project to kind of in, to recover the, the, the, the possibilities of, of his initial theory of the theory of justice. To say that that's right. In fact it is. It, it may be more realistic than, than he thought.

[C]

I think it's. Yeah, I think the times yes, absolutely. I think. Short answer. Yes, I think there's a very important development that happened. So Theory of Justice published 71. Political liberalism was published in 90, 91, 93, 93. But between that time, especially 1971 and 2025, on the cusp of 2026, I think what we have gone through is a large number of people living in Western democratic societies are no longer theist. If you look at the numbers, the biggest growing category of religious faith is precisely people who don't profess a religious faith. So in the US I think right now it's like 30% and Australia it's like 40. Then you get countries like the UK I think it's like 60 now almost. And New Zealand's like downright Godless at like 80 or. I don't know what it is, but. So I think that people have lost theism as a consciously affirmed framework. But of course we still live in a theistic kind of orbit, whether these concepts have a tremendous half life. We live secularized versions of Christianity all the time. And I think that's what Rawls was picking up on and try to how to make a secular version, let's say, of reform Protestant Christianity. And that was a theory of justice. He would deny that, I'm pretty sure, but I think retrospectively we can look at a certain kind of cultural set of attachments that he had to a faith that he lost and trying to recover its best ethical bits and best bits that would allow for flourishing both for himself, but also wider. Anyways, so I think that between now and then we lost religion and there's a religion. I don't know if there's a God shaped hole in everyone's heart. I don't think there is, but I definitely think there's a God shaped hole in our society and that liberalism is a thing that I think ended up rushing in to fill that. Though most people don't have that word available, they know what the word means, but they think it's just a political thing. But what I'm trying to say is, hey, wait a minute. Your liberalism may run quite a bit deeper than you suspect and it may go down not just from your citizenly comportment, but go tip to tail. And it's just how you comport yourself in friendship and marriage and love as a co worker, et cetera and just as a kind of unconscious framework that you navigate the world with. And I'm happy to talk about examples of how that, how I think that plays out. But that would be the big difference so I'm trying to recover early roles for a changed time, which is when a lot of people have lost faith but still have a framework. They just don't know the word for it. And I'm certainly not suggesting that everyone adopts a liberal way of life. My book, I should admit I didn't make this sufficiently clear in my book, but I need, I'll just do it, do it here and at any opportunity. My book is written for liberals to commit to a liberal way of life. I'm not trying to convince conservatives or Christians or Muslims or whatever, people who have some other framework to switch, they do their thing. Maybe that might be the liberal in me, but they're good in some sense. What I'm trying to do is get people who are already liberal to recognize the depth of their liberalism and commit to that because not because they have to with a capital kind of moral imperative, but rather because I think it's a good, fun, rewarding, and worthy way of living.

[B]

Wow. So much I want to ask you about in, in the context of that answer, and I'm going to go off script, though, first to say I want to come back to the spiritual kind of element in Rawls's work and what you call spiritual exercises. But I want to hold off for a minute to ask a few questions about. This is the podcast of the Ralph Bunch Institute for International Studies. So I want to ask at least a few questions looking at liberalism from that dimension from the perspective of kind of internationalism. But I do want to first say, just in response to your answer, had Rawls been taught to me in graduate school, the way you're presenting him, I would have spent a lot more time, energy and heart with him.

[C]

You're very kind.

[B]

Sincerely, I, you know, I, I, I kind of passed over him in the way it was presented. I'm remembering now it was kind of Rawls versus Nozick. Maybe Nozick was the thinker you had in mind, is that there was a kind of.

[C]

No, no, it wasn't. No, no, no, it was, it was a pretty minor thing anyway, I'll get you the name. But it was a minor thinker. It wasn't a big, a big luminaire, wasn't a Martin Sen or it wasn't nosing.

[B]

I see, I see. But I remember, you know, there was a kind of the social democratic Rawls, the original position, the veil of ignorance and the kind of the libertarian critique. And, you know, and, and that, that, that felt kind of boring and flat and like, you know, but had had this kind of richer, more comprehensive Rawls been presented to me, I would have really, I would have spent a lot of more time with them. And, and here's an opportunity to do that. So I, I. Your book was great on so many levels. And, and one of the things it's done for me is it's gonna bring me back to Rawls.

[C]

That is a great compliment. Thank you. And if any listeners out there, Rawls is a very touching man. If anyone, reach out to me by email if you want, and I'll send you his autobiography. It's not published. It's 10 pages, and it's very touching. Anyways, just shoot me an email, dear listener, and I got you.

[B]

I appreciate that. Yeah, listeners take Alex up on that. In another podcast, I remember me mentioning something about, or actually was in the book, right, where he. In the Harvard archives, there's this. It's a very short autobiography, right, where he also asks himself questions or questions that weren't asked of him. He then answers which have a kind.

[C]

Of those you're remembering, right, but you're smooshing. So there's. Those are distinct pieces. So he has the autobiography, which is called Just Jack. And then he had this weird interview that he gave to students. Well, he gave a normal interview to students, but then he went home and just for himself, wrote down and answered questions that he wished the students had asked him, which are very revealing. Interesting question, because they're all theological questions. They're like, what about meaning? What about the. What about. Yeah, meaning at the deepest kind of level of human orientation. Anyways, we'll come back to that. And also with this last bit of Rawls weirdness, he had many copies in the Rawls archive of a theory of Justice. He kind of. They just boxed all this stuff and ordered it. But he would take notes, fresh notes on different editions of a theory of Justice. So you have his own annotations in different iterations on his own books. One of them is just such a lovely artifact because he kept on adding different epigraphs that he wished he had put into a theory of Justice. None of Rawls's work at all. The articles, the books have epigraphs to them, but he collated them. He seemed to be epigraph curious, as it were. And he just had this list of, I don't know, 30 potential epigraph from just all kinds of different people, some from scientists, from. Some from philosophers, some from theologians. Yeah. And. Yeah. Oh, and the epigraph for my own book, Liberalism as a way of Life is drawn from one of the epigraphs he didn't use, which is a joke. And the short version, I can tell the jokes, it's a 10 second joke. He just stages a little philosophical dialogue between two people. One is called the optimist. And the optimist says this is the best of all possible worlds. And then next line, pessimist replies, I know, right? So very weird mordancy on the part of. I don't think he was known as a kind of like a. That's salon level wit, which Rawls was not known for.

[B]

There was. There are a lot of great jokes and anecdotes and use of pop culture in your own book, which again, I'm going off script here, but whether it's David Foster Wallace, you know, talking about the old fish passing by, the two young fish, I think that's a great story which kind of reminds us all that we swim in the waters of liberalism, whether we know it or not, or your use of Borad or the Good Life, which I think is a fantastic show. In any case, you really do an amazing job in the way you find important lessons and meaning in even our liberal pop culture. So I want to ask a few questions about looking at liberalism from a more international perspective. And you had mentioned earlier that part of Rawls's project, as it were, one of the things that may have motivated him was to bridge American kind of more say libertarian version of liberalism, kind of freedom centric and a more in a European social democratic tradition of liberalism. And maybe you could say a few words about how it is that liberalism lands in different places on the political spectrum depending on where you're looking. You mentioned in your book that in the US liberalism is associated with a more kind of progressive. The progressive left and liberals are criticized from the right as tax and spend do gooders in your words. Whereas in Europe liberalism may land in a kind of on the center right and liberalism is criticized from the left as again in your words, liberals are criticized as heartless small government individualists. I find that really interesting. And maybe you could say a few words and maybe also kind of point out some other places where liberalism lands differently and the discourse surrounding it sounds very different.

[C]

Yeah, I think that, that. So you're okay, so. Yeah, so you're right. So it depends when you say the word. If someone is declare I am a liberal, it really depends on the patch of land that they're saying that on because it means quite different things. So that's what I tried to bring out so I'm. I'm citizen of two countries. I'm Canadian and Australian. Here in Australia it means you're center right, and in Canada it kinda. I don't know now, but it kind of means that you're center left. Carney's kind of changing that up to mean kind of more center. Center, center right. But yeah, so it depends on where you're standing. In part, that's because we're exactly where we started, that the liberal tradition is so very capacious and it has all these different inflections according to what bit of furniture or central concept that you park at its center. I think that here, I mean, your question pushes me towards geography, but my natural response to this is history a little bit, which is that. So I just think that we live. I think it's an indisputable fact that today we live in a golden age of histories of liberalism. There's so many good works coming out on this right now. There was kind of a boom five years ago and now, but there's still great stuff coming out. And two books that I've learned so much from is Helena Rosenblatt's Lost History of Liberalism and also Samuel Moyn's Liberalism Against Itself. And those are two books that try to show how the evolution of liberalism is always in response to certain crises or challenges within liberalism itself. So we take for granted, for example, the term classical liberalism. And we think that, like, people of the 19th century called themselves classical liberals. But if you think about it for like one minute, that doesn't make any sense. No one who is the originator of a tradition calls themselves a classical whatever. Original gangsters don't call themselves original gangsters. They're just straight up gangsters. Right? So when the 19th century, liberals were crafting their tradition, which is when it was created, they were just liberals, straight up. But so the term classical liberal is itself an invention of the early 20th century. In particular, people freaked out by New Dealism, the kind of socialist bent of American development, and also European liberalism. And then they tried to kind of do a retrospective historicism campaign to try to polemical, but effective, to try to recover, try to plant their vision of liberalism back in the 19th century. So you got born an idea of free market individualism as the heart of the tradition, when really it's just a later add on retrospectively read back. Or you get Cold War liberalism. So that's Rosenblatt. Now you get Moyn talking about Cold War liberalism. And very understandably, Cold War liberals were freaked out by the Soviet Union, they were freaked out by its, sure, it's central planning and its heavy handed kind of infrastructure, but they were really worried about its perfectionism too. The sense that the Soviet Union really wanted to create the Homo Sovieticus, a new kind of man with a new set of values. And they were like, fuck that, that is terrifying. State engineering, we don't want that. And so then they created a cold war. Liberalism really centered on basically institutions being a prophylactic between state power and individual freedoms. And so really narrowed the scope of liberalism to mean basically individual liberty as against a state imposition. So here you have people like Sklar, like Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, you got a whole bunch of people in that tradition. And so liberalism just keeps on getting reinvented according to certain crises. And I suppose what I tried to do in my own little way was to try to reinvent, not reinvent or reassert a certain strand of liberalism that had been forgotten about. But that I think is core not just to the tradition, which I think is true, which I say is certainly true, but also core to, just to the lives that we live right now, which is to say that our liberalism may be very, very present in it without us being aware of it. So that was my attempt. It's not really answering your question as to why it changes, but the short answer to your question is it's simple. It's a great question, but it's simple. It's that liberalism contains multitudes and depending on your orientation, you can definitely find a strand of the liberal tradition to defend your commitments. And so you can just run with that. So if you want to be a free market kind of guy, you can do that. You can find a tradition that defends that within liberalism. If you want to be a almost crypto socialist, you can do that as well.

[B]

I'm tempted to jump into Isaiah Berlin now, but I want to hold off for a minute because his work has been very influential for me and there's some important ideas there that I want to bring out.

[C]

If you want to go for it, I'd be happy to defer to you for a bit, but this is your podcast.

[B]

I want to get there in a roundabout way. I want to first ask you about still looking at things from a kind of international perspective. A question that I don't think you talked about in your book is how national sovereignty and the liberal values of peace and cooperation factor into your conception of liberalism. And I'm gonna set it up this way. Ever since Kant, liberals who focus on questions of international Peace talk about the importance of regime type. And they emphasize that liberalism, and sometimes it's associated more with democracy than liberalism. And there's a kind of tension there and maybe a complementarity there as well. But to kind of, let's say liberal democracy produces institutions that are conducive to international peace and security. And some Kantians, and I know many of them, not Kantians in the political theory space, but Kantians in the international relations world, they go even a few steps further when thinking about questions of national sovereignty and international cooperation. I'm thinking here first I'll kind of stay within the world of philosophers. A liberal philosopher who you didn't mention in the book, Jurgen Habermas, he talks about the completion of the modern project and he sees the universal principles of liberalism pointing to kind of eventually global constitutionalism, something like that, kind of, you know, a global liberal order. No hidden conspiracies here, more like what H.G. wells called an open conspiracy. But there are others, not Kantians at all. I'm thinking here of the Hegelian thinker Alexander Kozhev, whose work influenced Fukuyama's end of history thesis. He claimed that a universal state was the only way to satisfy what he called the human struggle for recognition on a universal basis. So my question is, and there's lots of questions bound up here, but let's start with the question of the nation state. Is the nation state the best way to house the liberalism you have in mind?

[C]

There's a lot of depth in that question and you're more competent to answer a lot of it. But let me cut in at it at this way. So I'm right now my work is turning towards non liberal stuff right now. And an author that I'm very interested in, I bet you've probably read him, is Yoram Huzzoni. So he's one of the. He's a. He's the director of the Edmund Burke Foundation. He runs the National Conservatism Conference every year. He wrote a book that got a lot of airtime. I mean, it was on Ezra Klein a couple months ago and on Ross Douthat. Interesting times, like a few weeks ago is the Virtue of Nationalism. And his pitch is kind of, he kind of takes Habermas as his poster boy for everything that's wrong with the, with the hegemonic world. And he basically says that liberalism is imperialistic. And he wants to say it's basically there's no difference in kind between the Catholic Church, the Roman Empire, jihadists and liberals, because all of them want in their various ways to import to, to spread or impose a universal set of norms where there would be certain kind of like light cultural differences then between governing entities. Maybe they would be different fast foods or whatever. But basically we're all in the same, we're all singing from the same, same hymn sheet. Whereas he wants to, so he wants to contrast that mindset with what he calls the nationalist mindset, which is one of real deep pluralism. And I agree with that. I think the nationalist mindset is it might, it's not internally pluralist like country, like Israel, Hungary, Russia. Name a kind of nationalist country, they know what it, what people in those countries should be like. But it is internationally pluralist in that they. I don't think, I don't see China or Hungary having an ambitious, an ambition to spread the Chinese or Hungarian way of life all across the world in the way that liberals very often do. So I think that sometimes it sounds polemical to say that liberals are imperialist and it feels like a strawman. But the other time if I squint a little bit, I see that as not altogether groundless or baseless. How does that scan with you? And so they want to say that it's just a very aggressive revival of a natural justice program and that basically nation states become administrative units towards some bigger liberal game plan. And for some it would be more heavy handed. I think Habermas has a more kind of robust apparatus in mind. Fukuyama, at least back then, thought that it would, that that global picture would evolve by each nation state arriving at that conclusion on their own kind of terms, because that was just the bent of history. So, yeah, how does that scan for you?

[B]

That's a fantastic setup and a kind of transition into, into, into Isaiah. Discussion about Isaiah Berlin. But let me say I, I kind of in graduate school and, and at our institute, I was moving in the direction of what Hazoni sees as a kind of, you know, imperialistic liberalism. Although of course I didn't then see it, nor do I really see it now as imperialistic, but certainly universalistic. A lot of the kind of UN practitioners, NGO people that I know in the human rights world and the academics that have kind of gone in that direction very much embrace the kind of Habermas's framework, a Kantian framework where, you know, a supranational framework where nations are like you say and like he says, ultimately administrative units of a kind of global system. I think I'll answer from their perspective because I no longer, I wobble here, but I no longer fully see myself in that kind of mold. But I answer from their point of view. And a great mentor of mine, Thomas Wiese, our former director, former UN official who then taught at Brown and then came to the Graduate center and was our. Was Ralph Bunch Institute director for many years. When we've had this conversation, his response, and he's not a theorist, but he was response in a very practical respond in a practical way to say it's a system of international laws and cooperation, and there's no domination. There's no imposition from the point of view of a kind of dominating or hegemonic power imposing order. It's a cooperative framework oriented towards primarily collective security, but ultimately beyond just security, a kind of a global governance framework in a kind of functional global governance. So this is not kind of either Fukuyama or kind of the hard version of neoconservative imperialism. The neocon version, certainly imperialistic, but that version, that kind of at its most delusional, was universalist, but that was a kind of an American imperial vision of global hegemony. The un, you know, kind of UN at its best, or un kind of an idealized, kind of Habermasian supernational framework, wouldn't be at all imperialistic in the way that the neoconservatism was, because there's no militaristic, you know, kind of dominating power, enforcing order on others against their will. It's a kind of cooperative framework. So I think there's a pushback there against the charge of it being imperialistic. But again, I'm speaking from a perspective that I no longer fully embrace because I've been swayed by the thinking of liberals like Isaiah Berlin. And I think Berlin's liberal pluralism, which. Which is. Which is also. It contains a justification for liberal nationalism, is a way of, you know, I think, taking what's true in the Hazoni position. You know, it's not only the reactionaries or the nationalist conservatives who see virtues in nationalism. There are liberal pluralists like Berlin who do as well. So I kind of kick it back to you and say, what are the key differences, then, in the kind of liberal pluralist version of nationalism that embrace this kind of a global pluralistic kind of system versus Hazoni's version of it. And just kind of parenthetically, I had a really interesting conversation with him on Zoom when I was. I had a sabbatical year in Israel immediately after October 7th. That's a story in itself. But he saw an exchange I had with of all people. Bap, Bronze Age pervert on X. And he was shocked at my. The way I was curious about baps. Nietzscheanism. So he invited me to a zoom. We had a long zoom where we talked about BAP and Nietzsche, basically. But anyway. But back.

[C]

Because he thought he was Sorry. Because Bronze Age pervert is beyond the pale like that. That's as part of his coalition.

[B]

He doesn't see it that way. You know, maybe playing the role of, you know, William F. Buckley in another era, you know, policing. Policing the, you know, the boundaries of legitimate conservatism. So I think he was looking for why is it the young people are so drawn to bap? What is it about? And Hazoni's not a Nietzschean at all. So part of that discussion is about Nietzsche, but part of it is also just kind of this, you know, what is it about this weird guy that so many young people are drawn to. And I'm not drawn to Bach, but I find him fascinating and curious and I follow him pretty closely. So we had a.

[C]

Interesting. No. Right. Okay. Yeah. No, I should. I misspoke. Sorry. I know Harzoni is not a. No enemies to the right guy. He is. He's very much not that. And especially now with the. What's it. What's it called? I'm not American Roperism? The. The Fuentes crap. Yeah. I mean, just coming out, swinging against that. Okay, but look, the power of Harzoni's argument, the power of any argument when, you know it's really powerful is you. Its opponents start adopting their terms and then they're done for. So, like, I hear Hazoni talk and he talks about liberalism as imperialistic, and I'm like, no, no, it's not. I don't want to be imperialistic. And then I think for a moment, like, what is the imperialism he's actually talking about? And I'm like, fuck, yeah, I'm imperialistic. I do believe in human rights norms and I do believe in their universality, and I do believe in respect for persons. So it's a very interesting thing of me kind of wanting to take liberalism out of the box that he put it in and situated elsewhere, but then realizing that the box he put it in is actually first, probably appropriate and second, maybe awesome and something I affirm. So I think that's a very interesting power of his argument to make me kind of reevaluate that way. Does that make sense?

[B]

I think so. You could say. Say a little bit more about that. I think I'm Hearing an interesting kind of liberal justification for a certain kind of imperialism. Well, I think that goes back to John Stuart Mill and other and other liberals. Right.

[C]

If you think there's, let's say natural morality, I'm already on the wrong team here. If you think that there are certain universal standards of morality in politics and you want to codify them in, let's say call them human rights instruments, then on something like Harzoni's terms, debt is at least imperial adjacent, if not fully imperialistic. So let me take a concrete example just because I'm working a little bit about on this right now. So I'm about to take a trip to Hungary, spend a couple months there. I'm going to work on kind of the conservative coalition building up there because it's sort of a clearinghouse of who's who of non post liberal thought. And one of the main areas I want to look at is there is Hungary's natalism policy. Do you know anything about this?

[B]

No.

[C]

Interesting. Okay. So Hungary is like every country in the western world. It has a very low birth rate, well below replacement. But unlike most liberal or most western countries, it absolutely refuses to shore that up with immigration. So it wants to keep Hungary for Hungarians. It has a declining birth rate and it doesn't want to admit non Hungarians to solve that problem. So there's only one solution left which is to bump up the birth rate as quickly as possible. So they have an extremely aggressive, aggressive, favorable, generous set of policies around encouraging families to have children. So if you're a woman in Hungary and you have two kids, you no longer pay income taxes for the rest of your life. If you have three kids, you get a sweet deal on a minivan. I'm not kidding. That's actually if you have four kids, you get generous home loans, very generous home loan setups. And, and they, there's special incentives if you're married, if you have kids when you're young, etc. Etc. Now that favors a very those policies, they're not punitive at all. They're in fact incentivizing policies. But they are very consciously skewed towards favoring a certain way of life for certain kinds of people. First of all, you have to be basically heterosexual and married. You have to have a large number of children. Second, women have to get back into the workforce to make it work for them because they need, they get, only then do they get the income tax break that they've acquired. It blocks out certain kinds of nationalities in Hungary from really gaining from this. So The Roma in Hungary really can't do this because they're kind of off book in so many ways and they won't be able to, to reap the official rewards. So all of these things are very aggressive ways that Hungary has tried to establish a pro natalist policy. I wonder if it would be vulnerable and I'm sure, I'm sure I could just do some Internet searching here, but to see how it's been challenged in European governance, European courts, to threaten because of its perceived attack on LGBTQ stuff or its discrimination against Roma people, how that could be used by an international governance like the EU to withhold funds from Hungary, etc. Etc. So liberal imperialism doesn't have to be kind of bayonet style. It could be through these much softer coercive mechanisms that forbid nations from pursuing policies that they find is integral not just to their own maintenance, but to remaining the kind of people that they are. Namely Hungary, seeing itself as pro family, pro big family kind of country. Does that, does that make sense?

[B]

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So, so where are you then on the question of liberal states using the instruments of state power to further certain policy objectives? Because it sounds like, I think you're fine with it. Because that sounds like we're kind of like veering out of the, out of the liberal space. Is it different when, when the organs of kind of, you know, international institutions are doing it? Is that different than when the liberal state is doing it to its own citizens?

[C]

I think, I think that, yes, I think that's an important distinction to draw. I think that, I think liberals haven't come up with a good answer to this yet. I think they want to draw lines and distinctions that in reality are at best muddy but really almost non existent. So liberals want to say that the state should be kind of fastidiously neutral as to the ends of life and it shouldn't promote certain ways of living over others. Okay, I get like on paper, I get that it doesn't, obviously it doesn't want to state religion. So at like a super high level, that makes a lot of sense. But then of course, the liberal state in all kinds of ways supports and not punishes, but disincentivizes ways of living that it either want, does that are desirable or undesirable. So for example, funding for museums, for PBS in the us, the ABC here, I mean, those are all, if we just left them to market forces, they'd be done for. But the liberal state recognizes a certain value in these, a certain conception of, of Culture and it funds those. So there's no liberal state that is not at least lightly perfectionist. And then what troubles me though is that post liberals, let's call them conservatives, roughly then pounce on this to basically say, well, the liberal state is totally un. Neutral. Let's just replace it with a hardcore version of our conception of the good life. So let's become integralists. So like this is someone like Adrian Vermeule will say, look, the liberal state is so thoroughly promoting a liberal way of life a la me that it's no different than the kind of. It's ethically different, but it's not formally different than the kind of vision that I have of common good constitutionalism, of reintegrating church and state, etc. Etc. And that troubles me a lot. So I think liberals and I guess this, if you want a job done, you gotta kind of do it yourself. I guess it's false to me in so not me, but like I gotta try to find a way in which to mark that distinction between a liberal state saying no, we're pluralist and we're neutral, and then also admitting that it's clearly not pluralist and neutral without going whole hog and just saying we should recommit to the project, to an old Aristotelian project of common ends of life that the state should fund and support.

[B]

Wow, so much good stuff there. And we don't have the time to get into much of it. But. But you know, one thing that strikes me you said there in bringing up Adrian Vermule, is you said post liberal slash conservative and kind of conflated those two. And that's interesting in itself to me because it is. Do you not distinguish kind of, you know, one kind of conservative from another? You know, the, the kind of Burkean conservatives and libert conservatives are maybe still within the kind of. Within the liberal world. Maybe they're still are. Maybe they deserve to be kind of. They're. They're the, they police the borders of liberalism. Whereas, you know, the post liberals have really kind of fully left the, the liberal orbit. Is that, is that a wild distinction to make?

[C]

Oh, definitely.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Yeah. So I think, I don't know, to use a term that doesn't mean much anymore, the Never Trumpers. For example, like I just take the New York Times editorial writers, the op ed writers, like, I don't know, David Brooks, Bret Stephens. Douthat has now kind of is no longer in that. But let's take Brooks and Stevens, totally different thinkers, but they're both self consciously Claim the liberal mantle. And really. So one is a neocon, one is, I don't know, kind of a virtue theorist Brooks here. But. But they're both definitely liberals and they both really would want to carve out that distinction. And I think it's meaningful. There's a couple, two directions I want to go here. So the first direction, this is my new work and we can. I don't want to force the conversation here, but I think it's relevant. It is that what I think unifies what I'm trying to come up with, an elegant theory, which is to say a theory that explains a lot with a little. And my theory is, is, is that all the non post liberal countries around the world that prima facie look totally different. I'm talking India, Israel, maga, Russia, Hungary, China and more and more Brazil. Sometimes they look totally different on paper. Like what the hell would unite these things besides being post liberal or besides being kind of anti liberal in some sense. And my. So but that's a negative explanation. What I want to try to say is that all these countries are in fact united by their willingness to recover maybe the oldest tendency of political philosophy, which is to use the state to promote certain visions of human flourishing. So MAGA has a definite idea. It's fractured and there's different strands of it, but it has an idea of what it means to be an American. Russia definitely has an idea of the kind of the Russian soul with its deep history. China has an idea of what it means to be kind of this Confucian come Marxist come legalist subject and they're trying to fit that together. Hungary, Orban says that being Hungarian is the most beautiful task in the world. So Israel is more and more becoming kind of a. This sounds too harsh but theocratic state or a state that. Yeah, Iran, Iran's been there for a while. So all of these countries are basically repudiating this stance that liberals claim for themselves, which is neutrality and pluralism. And they're saying that we know what, how people like us, the Chinese, the Hungarian, whatever, Israelis, Jews should live. We have the resources to further that. So why the hell aren't we doing that? Let's do it. And that's what I want to say unites all of these non liberal things. It's a return to, I mean China wouldn't see it this way, but it's a return to Aristotle is to say that the priority of the polis or the political organization is to promote the good life. Boom. That's no fuss, no muss. It's a positive explanation that could account for the attraction of these. So when, sorry, last thing I know I'm rambling here, but when critics look at these other countries and thinking like top notch, big platform critics, I'm talking Anne Applebaum or Timothy Snyder, Jason Stanley, like these kind of like big liberals, they look at these places and they just see kleptocracy or repression from the top or else populations that are just like, kind of like prejudiced, that just are cling to their guns and religion, etc. Etc. And I just don't think that that, I mean I descriptively, that can't be true. These regimes couldn't have the popularity and the stability they have if it was simply negative in that way. So what I'm trying to do is furnish a positive explanation for why these post liberals are eating liberal lunch on a daily basis. And I want to try to say it's the return of the idea of the good life. The good life might be abhorrent for liberals, but it's still say what you like, it's still an ideal.

[B]

Wow, there's so much important stuff there. And I. So seeing the kind of post liberal, the project, it varies across these, these different countries. But if there's something that unifies them, you know, using the instruments of the state to promote the good life, if there's something legitimate about that, and I think there is, what should liberals learn from that? And what, how does that translate into like liberal state policy where we don't lose our liberalism?

[C]

Yeah, that's the big question. So the first thing, how it should translate that just to kind of, I think the minimum standard of any scholarship or journalism should be to describe your opponents in ways that they could potentially recognize themselves in. So I just don't think that any post non liberal subject reading an Applebaum or a Snyder book would say, yeah, that's me, I am a sado populist or whatever they want to go. I mean that's just not right. So I think descriptively we need to change the head. Liberals need to get in the headspace of recognizing the human value, worth and seriousness of their opponents. Step one, step two though is you're totally right with respect to how liberals are hamstrung because they cannot go down that path. It is core to their commitment as being liberals that they can't push a liberal way of life or can't promote ends of life in the way that these other regimes have absolutely no scruples in doing. And I guess what I would say I don't have a firm answer yet. This is what I'm working on. I need that kind of a. I need a stump speech here. But what I would say is, is that liberals.

[B]

Should.

[C]

We, liberals think that it's almost natural or normal that the state should allow its individuals freedom to figure out what the good life is for them. I think we need an ounce of historical perspective to notice how irregular and exceptional that is. No state organization, maybe the Ottomans at some point in time, but really in kind of collective consciousness, no political organization except liberalism, has refrained from pronouncing on the good life. And that then takes civilizational labor to maintain and maintain a commitment to. So I think that what would need to be done here is to recover a sense of tolerance and of pluralism as deeply important to one to liberal conception of the good life as not just it's nice for other people, but it's central to who I am as a person and my orientation and my own good that I support these ideals. So try to recover a sense of the ends of life through the kinds of attitudes that maybe Berlin had a sense of affirming negative liberty, but also recognizing the value of nation states and of traditions, seeing he was always. Berlin was such a flirt with romanticism and with that, like, those are the guys he loved. But he's like, no, no, I can't, I can't. Like, he was like the Last Temptation of Isaiah and what's that?

[B]

I love that. That's great.

[C]

Yeah, yeah, you can use it. Just talking here, but I think we got to get. I mean, I don't think we need to recover Berlin's project as a whole, but I think that temperament is something that liberals need to recognize the good of our way of life and its tolerance and its negative liberty, but also recognize the attraction of the other way, all the while not jumping on board.

[B]

So I want to respond in two different directions. One is to say respectfully that part of what you said started sounded like a kind of social justice warrior woke liberalism, kind of finding the commitment to, you know, to fighting the good fight in terms of, you know, DEI or pushing a certain kind of, you know, you know, liberal values. But now kind of, you know, with this kind of social justice warrior mindset and, and, and, and that, that it doesn't work. You know, I have lots of critiques about it, and I'll kind of, I'll maybe let you, Let you respond, you know, where, where your vision, and I'm guessing it does go, is. Is something other than that. And and the other thing I want to say about Berlin, who I, you know, really and, and drawn to in so many ways, he has this line about, you know, why he was so drawn to, to these kind of romantic thinkers. And he said something like more drawn to the enemy because the enemy gets behind the defenses, you know, and I, and that, that really resonates with me. And I've, I, I, I wrote my dissertation on Strauss. I'm, I'm fascinated by, by right wing thinkers of all different kinds. Nietzsche has always been, you know, really drawn to, but, but you know, how to maintain your liberalism and still incorporate some of the really important wisdom that we see on kind of, you know, on the right. But I wonder with the kind of Cold War liberalism, Berlin's version of it, if one, the role of the enemy. And that's a kind of, that's a problem like, you know, liberalism at war, there is a purpose and meaning and commitment, but if you need an enemy, what kind of liberal are you? And then the other thing and just kind of shooting from the hip here. But I remember now in grad school, my teacher, my dissertation supervisor was Corey Robin and he really at the time, strong influence in terms of thinking about all conservatives as counter revolutionaries, as reactionaries, as even liberals. He presented that way. I'm again no longer in that kind of space, but I was for a while and I didn't write my dissertation on Isaiah Berlin because I was being told over and over that even Berlin was a liberal counter revolutionary. And I don't believe that. But there's something to it that I'm still struggling to kind of reconcile that, that flirt to the liberal flirtation with a certain kind of conservative way of thinking. Maybe blocks, I don't know, I don't know, you know, kind of blocks us from or, or change changes the nature of our liberalism and becomes something else. I don't know. I kick it back to you.

[C]

No, that's good. Okay, so first of all, it's the danger of thinking out loud on a podcast. So I think I misspoke. So I think I need to work on my messaging. I, I wasn't, I'm not a progressive in the sense that you kind of characterized it there, the standard sense. And this isn't wasn't a pitch for DEI or social justice warrior stuff. What I guess I'm saying is that. Look, let me just reset the answer. I think liberalism is in a uniquely hamstrung position in respect to, to the global culture war. It's not that they bring a knife to a gunfight, it's that they can only bring a knife to a gunfight. It's not like they forgot their gun. They just can't bring the gun. And the reason they can't is because these other regimes types have no problem, whether that's China or it's Russia, whatever, have no problem just saying, we know the good life, we're going to do that. Liberals can't do that. If you call yourself a liberal, you absolutely cannot do that. And you have to have some breathing room between state power and ethical goods and human flourishing. So it can't pursue that path. What I tried to write my book Liberalism as a way of Life to do is to suggest. So I these were in the early days when Trump, Trump too was question mark. So there was a, it was the Summer of Hope and et cetera, et cetera, or whatever. And so it could have gone either way. And so what I wanted to say in that book is, look, liberals wake up. If you lose, if, if we lose the liberal political framework, if this becomes displaced as the hegemonic option of political organization in the west, let's call it, we liberals are going to lose a whole lot more than just a political framework. We're going to lose the whole basis for our ethos, our vibe, our character, the grounding of our existential orientation. I didn't want, I don't want to catastrophize it, but I think that liberal hegemony means a whole lot more than just legal and political dominance on the part of liberals. And so what I wanted liberals to do is recognize where their way of life comes from, why it might be good and why it might be imperiled at this moment in time. And so when I observe now that perfectionists all around the world are eating liberal lunches and could be coming for us, I don't have the answer because there's no there there that the liberal state can promote in the way these other regimes can. But there is certainly something liberals can lose should the liberal state be displaced. And it would be no more of an existential or excuse me, it would be no less of an existential loss to have that framework displaced than for the catastrophe of disestablishment was for the Christian faith and losing hegemonic Christianity, it would be of the same order. Does that make sense?

[B]

Yeah, that's great. That's.

[C]

Yeah. So that's what I want to say. So then you have to find a defense of the liberal good life without being tag teaming in the top partner you could have for that, which is the liberal state, that, that's the bind liberals are in. And that's what makes us kind of like fighting with one hand.

[B]

So enter the other hero of your book, Pierre Hadou. So maybe to say, say a few words about who he is, why he, you know, he's been so influential to you and, and the idea of spiritual exercises, where is, you know, out of ancient philosophy, where are we getting spiritual exercises? What makes them spiritual? And how could this be part of this puzzle?

[C]

Good. Okay, so at the beginning I said Rawls needed no introduction when he was mentioned on this podcast. This other guy might. So his name is Pierre Ado. He's recently deceased, like 10 years. 10, 15 years. So he was a historian and philosopher and classicist in France. And he's the guy that kind of reoriented study of ancient philosophy towards realizing that it was not so much just a body of knowledge or of philosophical ideas or arguments, but really what philosophy meant back then was to commit oneself to a certain way of life, to live wisely, and a certain vision of human flourishing that comes with that. And basically all of ancient philosophy is a set of arguments to try to get people to that state of being, depending on what camp you are. So Stoics will have one, visions, Platonists another, but they're all kind of, they're all sharing this framework that philosophy means living well. And what Edo then tried to do is reread the whole ancient canon that way and tried to suggest certain modern revivals of it when philosophy went towards a different direction, more theoretical, more abstract, more kind of a professional practice. So what then Edo does is that he. So philosophy is a way of life is his like slogan, as it were. And he's at the. If you haven't heard of him, dear listener, have a look or have a read. He is. If you think French writers are obscure and you'd be right, he is the anti French French writer. He is lucid, he is calm, he is human, he is just generally awesome. I recommend starting with his great essay Spiritual Exercises or else grabbing his book what is ancient Philosophy? And just reading the first 10 pages, you'll get, you'll get hooked, believe me. All right, so then philosophy is a way of life, is his brand. And then he came up with this other big concept called spiritual exercises. And spiritual exercises are just day to day practices that people can do voluntarily in order to bring themselves to the kind of person they want to become. And so religions are just paradigmatic here because they have. There's zillions of spiritual exercises within any particular religion. Christians have prayer, repentance, confession, fasting, ascetic exercises, you name it. And all of these are trying to bring us more and more into the image of Christ. Judaism has its own set is all the religions have it, but philosophy has it too. And like to dialogue with a friend, to keep a journal. So what he tried to do is recreate ancient philosophy as grounded in so many respects on these daily practices that people could do, reflect on death, etc. Etc. So fast forward I don't know, 2500 years and we get to liberalism. And if I claim that liberalism is a way of life, then it most certainly has to have spiritual exercises in it. Or if it doesn't quite have them, then we need to build some up quickly because we need devices, techniques for people to be able to commit themselves to the body of. Of thought and a practice that they already profess. So how to get people to become better liberals? So what I tried to do in the book is. I mean I jokingly call this book a self help book for liberals, but it's not, it is no joke. It's an open conspiracy to use your earlier term. And I tried to furnish some spiritual exercises for liberals to do right now. This part of my book, people liked it in kind of criticism of it, but I think it's a bit cute. It's fine, it's. It works. But I think I could have been more expansive. So what I do is I locate, I use Rawls and then I try to locate spiritual exercises in Rawls, which I So I nominate three of his main concepts, Original position, Reflective equilibrium and public reason as spiritual exercises. Things that aren't just kind of theoretical heuristics or whatever they do in his work, but that people like you and me can just do on a Friday night if you're bored on a Saturday morning when you're recovering to try to become the kind of liberals we want to be. So I like that part of my book. I think it's a. I think it's. It's smart in the pejorative way that I'm basically found these things in Rawls and read these con. These core concepts that everyone thought worked one way in this different spiritual direction. On my reading I just think that it was a bit too. Rawls confined that section of the book. So I wish I could have furnished broader spiritual exercises within liberalism than just kind of let's go back to Rawls's text and reread these concepts. But I did what I did. And it's an invitation for further readers or lovers of liberalism to go create their own spiritual exercises. Because that can definitely be done.

[B]

I take you up on that invitation. I like this part of the book. I wonder if in the next book in Soul Crafters you'll kind of work out some of these exercises even more. I was curious.

[C]

100 yes, not for liberals, but I'll look at the more powerful ones that these other regimes have for sure.

[B]

So I know we've already, over time and I will kind of conclude with this and maybe this is kind of a little too personal, but I'm, you know, I'm in the spirit of being fully, you know, transparent and exploring these ideas that I find both fascinating and I think really important. I want to say, kind of admit here, come out of the closet that I'm not a liberal all the way down in the way that you talk.

[C]

About it with this I gotta go.

[B]

In the spiritual, in my spiritual life. What I now recognize as my spiritual life, that I would have never said that a few years back. I didn't even know that I had a God sized hole in my liberalism until some experiences kind of, you know, that are hard to talk about because they're strange and mystical and, and you know, led me down a path, you know, from my fascination, you know, my fascination with Nietzsche that took me to Strauss was kind of redirected towards Jung and Rudolf Steiner. And then ultimately I landed in practicing and studying Kabbalah. And this is all to set up a question about the second spiritual exercise, what you call, you know, using Rawls's terminology, reflective equilibrium, where it's a kind of, you know, exercise towards greater self knowledge and self coherence. I want to say a word about my own spiritual practice as a setup to the kind of final question. So in my practice we've rooted in both Kabbalah and kind of universalized Kabbalah and Anthroposophy. A lot of the work is about aligning the will with, quote unquote, your higher self. There's a conception of the higher self which is a kind of a divine element within that recognizes the deficiencies within the soul which are related to our egotism and what the Kabbalists call the kind of the will to receive, the will to receive in order to receive. And by reorienting that will away from kind of an egotistical will to receive towards a posture of bestowal and giving to others, we can better the soul, can kind of patch its deficiencies, better receive and retain divine light, we can kind of discover our spiritual destiny and align ourselves with a higher purpose. Now, in that, in the way I'm presenting it, there's still no, I don't need the God concept. I don't necessarily need a creator concept, although those things are useful and also maybe true. But my question, there's a question in here somewhere. Not just the kind of pulling back my own kind of curtain, but the question here is, is there in your conception of liberalism, a kind of liberalism that's, that's ready to do these spiritual exercises, is there a conception of a higher and lower self? You know, you talk about, I think you used the Greek word Akrasia as a kind of a weakness of will. So is there a kind of high, low, strong, weak dynamic? And if so, are the weaknesses for us liberals, whether liberals all the way down or not, are the key weaknesses like hypocrisy and inconsistency? Or, or are the weaknesses like, you know, each, each soul has its own weaknesses that we have to kind of figure out and patch. So again, back to you.

[C]

No, okay, okay, Good, good. Last question. This will sail us out. All right. The first thing I want to say is, is that, and I should always lead with this. I don't mean to say that people who are not so liberal all the way down is my term to mean someone who's basically all their kind of like principles and vibe, let's call it, come from liberalism. And that's the kind of the addressee of my book. But people like you who have something else in their back pocket and who are composed of like, who really claim a different tradition. I don't want to say that you're not just as deeply liberal than me. In fact, you're probably a richer. You're not a richer liberal than me, but you're a richer person than me because you got this other thing going on that you synthesize with your liberalism, such as to become. So I'm not trying to say that in any sense it's a, it's a deviation from liberalism to believe other stuff, to be a Christian, a theist or Kabbalist or what, whatever it may be. I just want, I'm trying to write for people for whom that option isn't live. Because it's not like I could wake up tomorrow, Sunday morning and just say, fuck it, I'm a capitalist. I mean, that's just not how human belief works, works. It takes a lot of work, self training, etc, to come to that area, to come to that, to come to that transformation and I need to put in the work. But what I'm saying is that liberals can be just as well off as it were with just their liberalism. So that's the first thing I want to say is a big caveat. I've said this a few. So you're asking, you're asking a very good question. Do liberals believe in a higher and lower self? Yes. My vision hard. Yes, absolutely. I believe there. But I would call it higher, lower skews in a direction. I don't like it. I would call it a good or a shitty self. Like I would like preferred language like that, like a self as you are and a self as you want to be, like something like that. I just feel higher and lower. It becomes. It's theological very quick. Berlin uses that language too. So maybe it's more safe, it's safer than I think it is. But I don't want a transcendent element to my liberalism because I just don't think it's in liberalism can support that very well. So what I would say is that there's definitely a notion of a worse self that and a one that you want to become. And the what I've landed on, I've said this in a few podcasts now, but I'll say it again, is I think that and I didn't say this in the book though, is that I think that all. I'm a liberal, so I'm kind of naturally misanthropic. So start from there. But I think that every. Everyone basically spends most of their life trying to dodge the main moral commitment that their moral system makes on them. So you got to figure out what the main moral commitment of your moral system is. For liberals, the main moral commitment, the really tough one, the sticky one, is that to be a generous person, being a free person may be hard, but I think it's less difficult than being a genuinely generous person. And not just with your wallet, but with your attention, your hermeneutic generosity, all of that stuff, not leaping down people's throats, et cetera, et cetera. And that's the thing that I think that liberals need to work on. And that's why. So liberals tend, historically, liberals have. Tend to emphasize the free bit of their doctrine, not the generous bit. But that's no surprise because the free bit's easier to do. So most of our lives, liberals are just like, yeah, I'm free. But then they forget the responsibility, generosity, receptivity part Christian. Okay, so that's liberals. Christians, on the other hand, they have a different core belief at the heart of their belief system, which is I think love. And so when I think of a shitty Christian, what I think is someone who is very judgy. And why I think that is because the demand of non preferential love is so very exorbitant and difficult to make, that the natural relapse is to become a kind of judgmental individual. Or take Confucianism. I think the main moral demand that Confucianism makes on its subjects is harmony, to try to balance difference within structures that are sometimes hierarchical. And I think that the main character deficiency of Confucianism, if I can speak this broadly, would be something like authoritarianism would be to avoid the claim to harmony by just kind of dominating and setting order that way rather than letting things be in their place. So my point is that everyone tries to dodge the main moral claim made on them. So we're all shitting our distinctive ways because we're all trying to be good in our distinctive ways, if that makes sense. So what I would try. So I think the main character failing of liberalism is individualism because it's so tempting, it's so easy. So then I think that that would indicate the direction of work that we need to put ourselves in. And so this brings me to. You want to talk about spiritual exercises. And I'll come back to your Kabbalism in a moment because I want to hear more about it. So you can close out the podcast. The podcast, but you want to talk about reflective equilibrium. The important one for me here would be the original position. And that I think if I have three spirit tracks in my book, if you haven't, if you're listening to this, just read the original position One, that one's good, I believe in that one. The other two, I'm like, yeah, it works, but it's a. It's a bit fuzzier. But the original position one, Rawls really, I think deeply believed in this. And he said, look, everything about us at some level is just chance. Like, I'm a white heterosexual dude who lives in Australia. Like, that has nothing to do with me. That's just a bunch of forces that I was either born into or kind of swept me away and here I am. And so what Rawls says is to. We have to do. The main existential mission for at least liberals to do is to try to recover a sense of who they are outside the contingencies that befall us. So we have this idea of liberals as, like always about positionality, like as A white man who was raised in a lapsed Catholic family. And we always kind of like, dig, dig, dig, dig, dig. Rawls goes the other way. It's like, no, no, no, Set. Try to set all that stuff out. Pretend it's like clothing you're taking off to finally get to your true body. And he asks us to try to consider the social world and consider our own psychology outside of all the predicates that we think make us ourselves. Why? Because we want a kind of release from the egoism of the self. This yapping little subject that's always trying to hustle and play games to try to try to realize positional power. And he's like, fuck that. If you do that, you're going to be led on not just towards socially unjust ends, but towards a really damaging psychology. Basically the one that Rousseau outlined with Amour prop. So the whole goal of a liberal way of life is to try to step back from who we are, not be so gripped by the meanness of me and try to set out what I would look at, how I would look at the world, if I weren't shaped and captured by all of these nasty forces. I think that that is a really powerful redemptive vision of what it means to be a very difficult one to achieve because we are so hell bent on claiming our individuality in this narrow way. And he's like, no, man, we got to step back from that.

[B]

I love that. I really love that. It's a great place to end. And I gotta say, when I learned that in grad school, when I had like zero spiritual practice, when I. It didn't resonate, it landed like, very flat. It felt like I was being asked to strip away the things about me that are most meaningful. And I was left with a kind of neutral, kind of meaningless self. And now when I hear it, when I hear you say it, when I went back and I read some of these things, I found my notes on Rawls. And now maybe because I, you know, have. You know, and I meditate and I have this kind of some. Some spiritual concepts that mean a lot to me. When I hear it now, it sounds like a secularized expression of deeply spiritual idea of not stripping away yourself, but of like, ascending above a kind of lower self, a kind of embodied self, to like an almost God's eye perspective from a kind of a higher, universal kind of vantage point. So if you once felt flat, now feels very spiritual in the secular language.

[C]

It's interesting. I have the same experience, right? So I'm a. I mean, I'm 46. I came to Rawls at 40. For most Rawls, they're captured in their tender 20s. But you and I, we. We. We're. We're. We're wise old men, but we're the old fish who have come back to. To check out the Rawlsian water.

[B]

That's great. That's perfect. Alex. Thank you so much. This has really been great. Not only did you leave me with a lot of good stuff to think about, but you feel like you left me with some. Some work to do and work that I'm going to really enjoy doing. So thank you very much for being.

[C]

My pleasure. Thank you. This is.

[B]

Sam.