The Book That Changed How I Think About Liberalism
About this episode
The episode revisits what 'liberalism' means through Rosenblatt's history of the idea. Her central finding is that the original liberal project was not individualism but civic duty and the common good: early liberals like the French thinker Mme. de Staël and her circle prized moral and civic education, and liberalism was understood as an ethical system meant to restrain selfishness, not license it. The conversation traces how liberalism degenerated into its modern caricature — consumerism, atomization, and the thin procedural liberalism of John Rawls — and how both critics and champions have misread it. Klein and Rosenblatt discuss the Catholic Church's fraught relationship with liberalism, the appeal of Catholic integralism and post-liberalism to young men, and whether the tradition's older emphasis on sacrifice and the common good can be recovered rather than lost forever.