Transcript

Alan Wolfe: At least that’s what I felt in the last few years. In striking contrast to the past, in striking contrast to the America that I grew up in, when writers like Louis Hartz, the Harvard Government Professor, could write a book called The Liberal Tradition in America in 1955, in which he essentially argued that we’re all liberals, and that liberalism was the only tradition in this country. So I wondered, you know, what had happened to produce this kind of lack of confidence, this defensiveness on the part of my fellow liberals, and it struck me that one way to do that was to try to do pretty much what Bill Galston suggested in his introduction, to remind us that while liberalism is a term that has political resonance in contemporary politics, it’s also a philosophical tradition, and that there are things of enormous value in that philosophical tradition that are extremely relevant to the way we think today.

In the book, I offer a one sentence definition of liberalism, and it’s this, that liberalism is committed to the proposition that as many people as possible should have as much control over the direction of their lives as feasible.

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