Walzer is one of my favorite living political theorists and he has been a longtime contributor to Dissent Magazine going back, I think, to the Vietnam War. This is definitely worth reading. It's a...
Walzer is one of my favorite living political theorists and he has been a longtime contributor to Dissent Magazine going back, I think, to the Vietnam War. This is definitely worth reading. It's a thoughtful meditation on what Liberalism means and why it's a different kind of thing than most other ideological frameworks (e.g. Marxism, Socialism, Conservatism, Fascism).
Tl;Dr: Liberalism is not about what you believe in, it's how you do it and what you allow others to do to you, which is let them be. You can believe in anything but so long as you stick to these...
Tl;Dr:
“Liberals” are still an identifiable group, and I assume that readers of Dissent are members of the group. We are best described in moral rather than political terms: we are open-minded, generous, tolerant, able to live with ambiguity, ready for arguments that we don’t feel we have to win. Whatever our ideology, whatever our religion, we are not dogmatic; we are not fanatics. Democratic socialists like me can and should be liberals of this kind. I believe that it comes with the territory, though, of course, we all know socialists who are neither open-minded, generous, nor tolerant.
But our actual connection, our political connection, with liberalism has another form. Think of it as an adjectival form: we are, or we should be, liberal democrats and liberal socialists. I am also a liberal nationalist, a liberal communitarian, and a liberal Jew. The adjective works in the same way in all these cases, and my aim here is to describe its force in each of them. Like all adjectives, “liberal” modifies and complicates the noun it precedes; it has an effect that is sometimes constraining, sometimes enlivening, sometimes transforming. It determines not who we are but how we are who we are—how we enact our ideological commitments.
Liberalism is not about what you believe in, it's how you do it and what you allow others to do to you, which is let them be. You can believe in anything but so long as you stick to these principles, you are a liberal [blank]. The importance of this is that anyone can speak their beliefs so long as the paradox of tolerance isn't a concern and they're not being coerced into it. Liberalism is basically not shaming people for what they can't control and what they believe so long as they do so too.
Walzer is one of my favorite living political theorists and he has been a longtime contributor to Dissent Magazine going back, I think, to the Vietnam War. This is definitely worth reading. It's a thoughtful meditation on what Liberalism means and why it's a different kind of thing than most other ideological frameworks (e.g. Marxism, Socialism, Conservatism, Fascism).
Tl;Dr:
Liberalism is not about what you believe in, it's how you do it and what you allow others to do to you, which is let them be. You can believe in anything but so long as you stick to these principles, you are a liberal [blank]. The importance of this is that anyone can speak their beliefs so long as the paradox of tolerance isn't a concern and they're not being coerced into it. Liberalism is basically not shaming people for what they can't control and what they believe so long as they do so too.