Where do you get your values and sensibilities from? If you grew up in a Western democracy, the answer is probably liberalism.
Conservatives are right about one thing: liberalism is the ideology of our times, as omnipresent as religion once was. Yet, as Alexandre Lefebvre argues in Liberalism as a Way of Life, many of us are liberal without fully realizing it-or grasping what it means. Misled into thinking that liberalism is confined to politics, we fail to recognize that it’s the water we swim in, saturating every area of public and private life, shaping our psychological and spiritual outlooks, and influencing our moral and aesthetic values-our sense of what is right, wrong, good, bad, funny, worthwhile, and more.
In conversation with historian Helena Rosenblatt, Lefebvre will discuss how so many of us are liberal to the core, why liberalism provides the basis for a good life, and how we can make our lives better and happier by becoming more aware of, and more committed to, the beliefs we already hold.
Alexandre Lefebvre is Professor of Politics and Philosophy at the University of Sydney. He teaches and researches in political theory, the history of political thought, modern and contemporary French philosophy, and human rights. Lefebvre is also a specialist on the work of the early twentieth-century philosopher, Henri Bergson (1859-1941). For the past decade, his research has focused on one big idea: what we typically think of as “political” ideas can and do inspire rich and rewarding ways of life. He has written three books on the topic: Human Rights as a Way of Life: On Bergson’s Political Philosophy (Stanford, 2013), Human Rights and the Care of the Self (Duke, 2018), and Liberalism as a Way of Life (Princeton, 2024).
Website: www.alexlefebvre.com/
Helena Rosenblatt is Distinguished Professor of History, French, and Political Science at The Graduate Center at the City University of New York, specialising in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European intellectual history, liberalism, republicanism, Christian thought, the Enlightenment, and Early Modern and Modern Europe. Her latest book is The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century (2018) which has been translated into nine languages.
Website: www.gc.cuny.edu/people/helena...