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C.S. Lewis on why we must read old books — and why history matters…

From The Weight of Glory (1941)

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Public Reason: Yes, “liberalism” is very much a plural noun: it is large, it contains multitudes. And yet it does have boundaries: Classical Athens does remain pre-liberal, and utopian socialists are non-liberal. I think much becomes clear if you start with Judith Shklar and the Liberalism of Fear and with Alain and Tolerance Is a Treaty, and pick up all of the threads that pass through those two nexuses:

Amicus: Liberalism is a Plural Noun: ‘Liberalism, like any syncretic faith, has more than one true origin. Liberalism, like any state cult, has but a single lawful present…. Received Liberalism takes an expansive view of its ancestry… Hamilton and Paine, Mill and Bastiat, Voltaire and Montesquieu….[But] consider Rights…. For Bentham… legal constructs with a practical aim…. For… Paine… written into the laws of nature…. And for William Lloyd Garrison…rights… [were] written in the hearts of men. These are not the same concept…. In virtue of what, then, are these thinkers part of a single liberal tradition, while Athens remains pre- and the utopian socialists non-?… Market society… is the distinctly liberal political economy, and yet we find no shortage of liberal giants recoiling from it in well-justified horror…. Pluralism…. Robespierre…? Rousseau? Roosevelt?… There is no pluralism to be found in disposing of reactionaries, and not much more to be found in welcoming their hatred. And yet these are liberals, or else liberalism is… sad and small…. You can call it “liberalism”… [but] it’s just modernity. Marx… as much as Mill… Proudhon, and Owen too…. There is no such thing as liberalism: only liberalisms, or else the Enlightenment, of which the Left is the best and truest heir. But that story, too, will have to wait… <homosum.substack.com/p/…>

Liberalism is a Plural Noun
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Dec 14
at
2:03 PM