The Book That Changed How I Think About Liberalism

What It Covers

Ezra Klein interviews historian Helena Rosenblatt about her book *The Lost History of Liberalism*, tracing how "liberality" — a Roman civic virtue centered on generosity and communal obligation — predates liberalism by two millennia, and how recovering that moral tradition could address liberalism's current political exhaustion and identity crisis.

Key Questions Answered

• •Liberality vs. Liberalism: The root concept predating liberalism by roughly 2,000 years — "liberalitas" in ancient Rome — combined freedom with generosity and civic obligation, not individual rights maximization. Cicero, Seneca, John Locke, and George Washington all wrote about it. Rosenblatt argues modern liberalism abandoned this virtue-based foundation, leaving it philosophically hollow and unable to articulate a compelling moral vision to counter illiberal political movements.
• •Cold War as the turning point: The strand of liberal thought focused on self-cultivation, communal duty, and state-assisted citizen formation collapsed specifically during the Cold War. Witnessing fascism and communism made liberals recoil from any government role in shaping citizens, pivoting sharply toward individual rights and property protections. This strategic retreat, while understandable historically, stripped liberalism of its moral and civic vocabulary for decades afterward.
• •The Napoleon-to-Trump pattern: Early liberals developed constitutional safeguards — separation of powers, free press, independent institutions — specifically after Napoleon exploited revolutionary optimism to consolidate personal power. Rosenblatt draws a direct structural parallel: charismatic figures who claim to speak directly for the people, bypass representative institutions, reward loyalists, and use foreign conflicts as domestic distraction represent a recurring threat liberals have faced and theorized responses to before.
• •Toleration as strategy, not niceness: Early Protestant liberals — including Madame de Staël and Benjamin Constant — advocated religious toleration not as civic politeness but as a marketplace mechanism. Competing religions, freed from state or church monopoly, would refine one another toward more rational, ethics-centered belief. This framing — that open disagreement produces better outcomes than enforced consensus — is the philosophical ancestor of free speech and free press arguments still central to liberal political theory.
• •The American liberal split: "Liberalism" globally means laissez-faire, small-government, free-market politics — the classical tradition. The American usage, meaning interventionist government and social welfare, traces to German social policy influence in the late 19th century. Bismarck's state health care and worker protections demonstrated that healthier, better-educated populations produced stronger societies, prompting British "New Liberals" to adapt those lessons, a tradition that eventually shaped Wilson, FDR, and the American Democratic Party.
• •Liberal arts as civic formation: The original purpose of a liberal arts education — rhetoric, history, philosophy — was explicitly to cultivate leaders capable of persuading citizens toward the common good, not to prepare students for employment. Rosenblatt argues that defending humanities today by citing job market outcomes represents a complete inversion of the tradition's intent, and that the disappearance of civic formation as an educational goal directly weakens democratic participation and liberal political culture.