An Interview With Alexandre Lefebvre

How to Live as a Liberal — and How to Discreetly Slip John Rawls Into Your Conversation

Dear Republic,

I’m trying to do interviews with people who have fundamentally changed my worldview — and Alexandre Lefebvre is one of them. His Liberalism as a Way of Life, which I would argue is a major book, is not only a full-throated defense of liberalism but makes a separate and far-reaching claim, that liberalism can best be thought of as a secular religion and a near-comprehensive ethical system.

-The Editor

AN INTERVIEW WITH ALEXANDRE LEFEBVRE

1.How did you become a liberal? Or maybe the better way to put it is, at what point did you notice you were a liberal?

Thank you, Sam, for the interview. I’m really glad to be here.

So, liberals are made, not born. And if you ask me how I came to my liberalism, the answer is pretty simple: I was raised that way. But before I get into biography, I want to frame the question a bit.

My book Liberalism as a Way of Life begins with what seems like a very basic question—and yet, when you think about it, it’s actually kind of startling. I ask: where do we, meaning those of us who live in Western liberal democracies today, get our values from?

For people who are religious, this is usually a piece of cake to answer. They can point to a tradition, a scripture, a church, a set of rituals. But what about people who don’t profess a religion? That’s a rapidly growing number—about 30% in the U.S., and closer to 50% in places like Australia, New Zealand, and my native Canada.

For the unchurched, it’s much harder to say where our values come from. And yet we still manage to lead integrated, morally coherent lives. That puzzle is what animated the book. Where do our values come from if we’re not getting them from religion?

The answer I propose is: liberalism. We live in societies where liberal ideals—tolerance, freedom, fairness, reciprocity, even a certain kind of irony—are so widespread, so ambient, that we absorb them without thinking. They become second nature.

As to your more specific question—when did I have that awakening moment and realize I was a liberal?—I’d say there are two answers.

The first one is actually in the book, right at the beginning. I had just moved to Sydney, and I went to this wild Christmas party—on Christmas Day itself—on the beach. It was the most godless Christmas scene I’d ever witnessed: beer, bikinis, tattooed flesh as far as the eye could see. And nothing was wrong with that! I had fun, I enjoyed myself. But I found myself reflecting: what kind of society does this? What kind of society treats its ostensibly most holy day as an occasion for a big, messy beach party?

And what I realized is—it’s a secular one. Not one that’s lost its moral compass but whose compass has shifted. The ways we celebrate, what we choose to mark as sacred or important, what we collectively recognize as meaningful—it’s all changed. That wasn’t exactly a “liberal moment,” but it was a prompt for me to start thinking seriously about the kind of society I live in, how it shapes me, and—especially—how I’m going to raise my own kid in it.

The second moment is a little more distant, but intellectually important. Before this book, I wrote one on human rights, called Human Rights and the Care of the Self. And while working on it, I became fascinated by how some of the great figures in the history of human rights—people like Eleanor Roosevelt, Mary Wollstonecraft, and my philosophical hero Henri Bergson—saw human rights not just as a way to protect others, but as a way to improve themselves. That struck me as strange and fascinating. We tend to think of human rights as outward-facing: they protect the vulnerable, serve global justice, help others. But these thinkers saw something inward too: a tool for self-cultivation. Almost a form of moral or spiritual self-help.

I found that idea compelling and tried to trace it forward. But when I looked at how human rights function today, I saw that self-reflective, self-improving dimension had largely vanished—except maybe in certain NGO cultures or activist spaces. At the societal level, it just wasn’t there.

So I started asking: what is the broad value system that actually does shape people today, if not religion, and no longer human rights in that older sense? And the answer I arrived at was liberalism.

2.Where/when were you when you read John Rawls for the first time? What was that experience for you? And how many times a day do you think about John Rawls?

Rawls is the hero of Liberalism as a Way of Life, but it might surprise you to hear that I came to him relatively late. I was trained in the Continental tradition, and my early philosophical heroes were people like Henri Bergson and Michel Foucault. I only started to read Rawls seriously in my 30s. Sure, I glanced at him in undergrad, but it didn’t stick. But maybe, like a lot of late converts, I’ve fallen for him a little harder than most.

What struck me about Rawls, once I did finally engage with him, is how strange and interesting a writer he is. On the surface, he presents as the most formal, abstract, technical kind of analytic philosopher. And in some ways he fulfills it. I mean, people make fun of French theorists for inventing new words, but Rawls has a neologism for just about every moral intuition and institution in liberal democracy.

But if you can get past Rawls’ formidable technical apparatus, there’s something else there: a deep, humane thinker, trying to articulate the kind of person we might aspire to be—and the kind of society that might support that aspiration.

There’s a common image of Rawls as a rights-based or rule-based political philosopher. That’s how a lot of people have read him. For instance, I think of Stanley Cavell, his colleague and sometime philosophical frenemy at Harvard, who made a version of this criticism throughout his career—that Rawls misunderstood morality as a kind of bureaucratic system of rules, and that you could basically achieve moral virtue by ticking the boxes.

I think that’s badly wrong. Rawls wasn’t animated by rules. Rules, for him, were the expression of something deeper: a vision of moral personality—of the self—that he believed liberal democracy could help nurture.

In that sense, I don’t think of him as a rules-based thinker at all. I think of him as a self-conception-based thinker. Someone who sets an ideal of the kind of person we want to be, and then offers a searching critique of how far we fall short of the values we publicly endorse.

So—how many times a day do I think about Rawls? Not that often, if you mean John Rawls the man. But if you mean the kind of moral standards he tried to articulate and uphold—then yes, all the time.

3.Is there a particular look that your wife and daughter have anytime John Rawls happens to slip his way into your conversation?

Look, I’ve learned to keep my Rawls references brief. My wife tolerates them, but my daughter is sixteen now, and I’ve got to maintain my credit with her. I still get Rawls in there from time to time, but let’s just say my references are coded. It’s my household version of Leo Strauss’s Persecution and the Art of Writing.

4.So as I was reading your book I felt myself becoming a Lefebvre liberal. Then, by the time I wrote my review, I decided that I wasn't. Then I thought about it some more and decided that I probably was. So I'm very curious where I get to by the end of this conversation. And what I'd like to do is poke as hard as I can at some of the different premises of ‘Lefebvre liberalism.’ But first, I guess, we should define it. So what does ‘liberalism’ mean to you?

I love your reaction to the book. One step forward, two steps back might just be the path to becoming a Lefebvrian liberal.

You’re right to ask what liberalism means. It’s a complicated and often confused term. By liberalism, I mean a political ideology that emerged in the 19th century—interestingly, in many ways as a reaction against democracy, which we can come back to later. The word “liberal” itself means two things: to be free and to be generous. From that we get both liberty and liberality.

So I take liberalism to be a political ideology that puts a certain cluster of values at its core—foremost among them: personal freedom, fairness, and reciprocity. That’s my working definition.

But my thesis is that those values haven’t stayed confined to politics. Over time, they’ve migrated beyond the political domain and come to shape a more full-blown worldview—one that people like me (and maybe you, given the question) carry with us into all areas of life: political, personal, professional, and private.

5.'Liberalism’ seems like about as useless a term as there is because there seem to be so many different forms of it. So let's do a brief taxonomy. There's ‘classical liberalism,’ what I guess I would call a kind of ‘progressive liberalism,’ ‘political liberalism,’ ‘philosophical liberalism’ (which might be the term I'd use for your ‘liberals all the way down’), the colloquial use of the word ‘liberal’ as being extremely individualistic and kind of easygoing, and the additional term you introduce, ‘liberaldom.’ Can you give a quick glossary? My understanding is that you are a ‘political liberal’ but you are also a significant step beyond that, a ‘philosophical liberal,’ or ‘liberal all the way down’?

You’re completely right. The word “liberalism” is a historical mess—its meaning shifts not just over time, but also across places. There’s a long internal evolution of liberal thought, but even today, depending on where you are, the term means radically different things.

In the United States, it means a progressive—a kind of tax-and-spend Democrat. In Australia, where I live, it refers to someone center-right. In Canada, where I’m from, it means center-left. In France, it can signal cold-hearted individualism. The list goes on.

One of the most useful conversations I’ve ever had about this was over lunch with Michael Freeden, one of the great historians and theorists of liberalism. He told me he likes to think of liberalism as modular furniture. You’ve got your couch, your dining table, your credenza, and depending on the historical moment or national context, a different piece gets moved to the center of the room—and the rest rearranges around it.

So, in classical liberalism, individual liberty is at the center. In a social democratic form, fairness takes that spot. Neoliberalism moves markets and deregulation back to the center again. Liberalism, in this view, isn’t totally unmoored—there’s a shared vocabulary and set of principles—but the arrangement varies widely depending on context.

To your specific question about political versus philosophical liberalism: you’re exactly right. I’d love to live in a world of political liberalism. By that, I mean the tradition that began maybe 30 or 40 years ago, which sees liberalism as a framework for peaceful pluralism. The goal is to create a society where people with radically different views of the good life—Christians, Muslims, Jews, Kantians, hedonists—can not just coexist, but affirm the same political values as free and equal citizens. That’s the liberal ideal: robust mutual respect, grounded in a shared political framework, even when deeper moral or religious disagreements remain.

But I also think that picture is outdated. For a lot of people today, liberalism isn’t just a political framework. It’s a worldview. And for some of us—especially among the growing number of people who don’t identify with a religion—liberalism is the thing that has quietly shaped our outlook on life, our sense of ethics, our sensibility.

So when I talk about being a “philosophical liberal” or a “liberal all the way down,” I don’t mean that liberalism is superior to other traditions. I mean it’s the one we’ve absorbed by growing up in a certain kind of culture and it’s formed our worldview, our habits of mind, our, dare I say, vibe.

6.You have this really beautiful line that: “When morality sheds (or just plain forgets) its vertical dimension, being a good person means not harming others. That’s all there is to it.” And that becomes Lefebvre liberalism — it's the ‘golden rule,’ reciprocity and fairness as a set of interlocking rings strung all the way through the society, which by the way sounds kind of Jainist. Do you want to add to that definition?

Thanks for flagging that line. It’s my writing, but I can’t take full credit for the idea. It really comes from one of my liberal heroes, Judith Shklar—the great political theorist and historian of political thought from Harvard. If John Rawls was the king of liberal political philosophy, then Shklar was its queen. They were contemporaries at Harvard and had a rich, mutually respectful intellectual friendship.

The key idea comes from one of my desert island books: Ordinary Vices. In it, Shklar argues that at a certain point in modern history, the dominant moral orientation shifted. She identifies this turn with two thinkers in particular—Michel de Montaigne and, a century later, another nobleman from Bordeaux, Montesquieu. What they represent is a move from a vertical to a horizontal vision of morality.

In vertical morality, the most important moral relationship is between the individual and something higher—God, or a transcendent source. The key moral failing in that framework is pride: separating oneself from the divine, or thinking too highly of oneself in relation to something greater.

But in horizontal morality, the focus shifts. The morally salient relationships aren’t between us and the divine, but between us and those around us—how kindly or cruelly we treat others on the same plane. The shift is from transcendence to immanence. And I think that’s the fertile soil in which liberalism grows.

So yes, when I write that “when morality sheds (or just plain forgets) its vertical dimension, being a good person means not harming others,” I mean it. It’s a horizontal morality. At its most minimal: don’t be a jerk. And at its best: treat others well.

I’ll also add something I only hinted at in the book, but wish I’d developed more. I think liberals, in an interesting way, are superficial. Not in a pejorative sense, but in a way similar to Proust or Richard Rorty: we don’t spend much time agonizing over the ultimate origins of humankind or the metaphysical grounding of morality. Those questions don’t grip us in the same way anymore. What does grip us is how we treat one another—how decently, how gently, how perceptively.

That said, your comparison to Jainism or ahimsa is an interesting one. There is a kind of ethic of restraint or non-harm at the heart of liberalism. But I’d also want to deflate that slightly. I don’t think liberalism extends that ethic to all living beings in the way Jainism might. It’s primarily oriented around respect for persons.

And honestly, that’s something liberalism isn’t great at. It tends to have a pretty instrumental relationship to nature. The kind of respect it champions is usually human-centered. Critics like Martha Nussbaum have rightly pointed this out—especially in her work Frontiers of Justice, where she argues for expanding obligations of justice beyond the human. I agree with that critique. Liberalism isn’t fated to fall short here, but it often does. When it comes to persons, it’s doing its best. With everything else—it has work to do.

7.I'm curious to know what you think of Joseph Henrich's The WEIRDEST People in the World, and whether you feel that Henrich's framework maps onto yours at all.

I haven’t read Henrich’s book yet, so I’m not in a position to say anything authoritative—or even a proper hot take. But from what I understand of the argument, it syncs well with the perspective I try to develop in my own work.

His core claim, as I take it, is that many of the psychological traits we associate with modern Western individuals—things like individualism and analytic thinking—aren’t universal. They’re the product of a very specific cultural and institutional history.

I think that’s true. And while I haven’t read Henrich, I have read—and deeply admire—another massive book that makes a similar point in a different register: Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age. That book is foundational for my understanding of liberalism. Taylor shows how modern secular liberalism could only have emerged out of a once deeply religious West, through a series of contingent developments—within church doctrine, within spiritual practice, within political arrangements—that slowly transformed the moral and intellectual landscape. And yet, as Taylor insists, secular liberalism still bears the marks of its Christian and Protestant origins in profound ways.

This historical lens is crucial. Because I think liberalism does certain things exceptionally well—no other tradition rivals its ability to accommodate pluralism, individual self-determination, tolerance, and maybe even fairness. But I’m also the first to say: liberalism doesn’t do all human goods well.

There are entire dimensions of human excellence that liberalism tends to neglect or even flatten—things like self-sacrifice, courage, harmony, piety, connectedness with nature. It’s not that liberalism is hostile to these virtues, but that they don’t fit easily within its moral grammar. And that’s where I want to turn next in my work: to examine non-liberal conceptions of the good life—not as threats or regressions, but as inspired by values that liberalism is unable to properly honor.

A lot of the dissatisfaction with liberalism today doesn’t stem from fear or closed-mindedness, even though liberals often tell themselves that story. It comes from the sense that liberalism is simply inadequate to certain human longings. That it elevates some goods—like autonomy—at the expense of others that are just as fundamental. (And to be clear, I think those other ideologies also crowd out genuine human excellences, very often the ones liberalism is good at.)

8.The reason I'm asking you this is that I think about it every day, actually. I live in Central Asia, which is outside the ambit of what Henrich calls the Catholic Church's “Marriage and Family Program” — and it's also, and I think for that reason, outside the ambit of ‘liberalism.’ Things work perfectly well, my life is comfortable, but I can feel the absence of liberalism all the time. It shows up in a certain unfriendliness to strangers, an attitude bureaucrats have that anything you bring to them is ‘not their problem,’ and more importantly a series of unequal relationships that define just about everything in the society — older children bossing younger ones, a heightened respect for elderly people and guests, a tendency to fall into various hierarchies. My working theory is that liberalism of the kind you describe settles itself very easily on the territory of the MFP, with nuclear families, centralized administrations, strong notions of individual autonomy, and the residue of Judeo-Christian ethics, which emphasize the journey of the individual soul — but maps much less well on to other societies. This is what I suspect happened in the post-Cold War, and what the Bush administration particularly discovered in Iraq and Afghanistan, that having liberal institutions isn't enough — that people might like free markets and shopping malls but that doesn't actually mean that they'll take on liberal ethics as well.

Hard agree with everything you say here.

I’ve given presentations of my argument recently in Japan and China—different context from Central Asia, of course, but the point still transfers. One question that often comes up is whether, in those non-Western societies, you can really be “liberal all the way down.” And my answer is: not really—or yes, but only with great effort and constant vigilance. It requires being in a near-continuous negotiation with, and often resistance to, dominant features of the surrounding culture.

That’s why the inspiration for my next book is Montesquieu. What I love about him is that he understood regimes not just as forms of government, but as moral ecologies: interwoven combinations of laws, institutions, worldviews, habits, rituals, humor, and affect. It’s a rich and textured way of understanding political life—as something embedded in a way of being, not just a set of rules.

I think that’s exactly right. These are packaged deals. Sure, you can transplant bits and pieces—a shopping mall here, a minority protection there—but to wholesale export a worldview, as the Bush administration tried to do, isn’t just wrong, it’s foolish. It ignores what we’ve known since Aristotle: that political systems are not just legal system—they’re ways of life.

9.You draw this distinction that sounds very technical — but is really clarifying actually — between Rawls I and Rawls II. Can you spell that out?

Sure, let me give it a go.

In 1971, John Rawls published a monumental work of political philosophy, A Theory of Justice. In it, he tries to articulate the basic principles of justice that are most appropriate for a liberal democratic society. He famously proposes two: the first concerns individual liberty and self-determination; the second concerns social provision—making sure those freedoms aren’t just theoretical but are genuinely accessible and meaningful for all.

Once he sets out those principles, the final third of the book takes on a new task: explaining why ordinary citizens—people like you and me—should want to endorse them. And here, Rawls becomes what I’d call the greatest salesman for liberal democracy that has ever lived. He is, sincerely and without irony, hustling. He wants to give real, no-bullshit reasons why we should commit to these ideals of justice.

Some of those reasons are moral—about being a good person and living up to a higher ideal. But others are what I’d call perks: lived benefits that would follow from living in a just society. He talks about the joys of friendship, of encountering difference, of seeing human talent realized in others. He’s trying to make liberalism appealing in both moral and instrumental terms.

But then Rawls realized—perhaps a little belatedly, as only a philosopher might—that not everyone shares his Kantian conception of the good life. Not everyone wants the same moral vision, or values the same perks.

That realization led to his second major book, Political Liberalism—a.k.a. Rawls II. This book is, in a sense, an internal critique of the first. Rawls doesn’t change his two principles of justice—they stay exactly the same. What changes is how he justifies them.

In Political Liberalism, Rawls shifts from trying to ground justice in one comprehensive moral view to showing how people with many different views—religious, philosophical, moral—could still converge on a shared political framework. He wants Muslims, Christians, atheists, Jews, secular humanists, and Kantians like himself to all be able to affirm the same political principles, for their own reasons. The aim is stability within pluralism.

So that’s the key distinction. Rawls I grounds justice in a particular conception of the good life. Rawls II grounds justice in a shared political framework that accommodates deep pluralism. They’re very different projects—but animated by the same commitment to fairness and freedom.

And if I can recommend one book that’s been hugely influential for me on this point, it’s Paul Weithman’s Why Political Liberalism. It’s a far more technical book than mine, and Weithman is a much closer and smarter reader of Rawls than I am—but it’s an essential guide to why Rawls made that transition, and what it meant.

10.And my understanding is that you are pretty much explicitly a Rawls I? You respect the ‘bright line’ he drew between political liberalism and comprehensive liberalism, but you're willing to say to true-believing liberals, that we can step over the bright line, and turn the lights back on in ‘The Cathedral’ and live a good life within liberal values but while being respectful of differences of opinion, etc?

Yeah, that’s exactly right—with a few qualifications.

I’m a Rawls I kind of guy. And that works really well for people who are liberal all the way down. The point of my book isn’t to construct a general framework for pluralistic democracies—that’s not my goal. I think Political Liberalism does that admirably, and I’m happy to endorse Rawls II for that purpose.

But for people who have already internalized liberal values—who don’t just live under liberal institutions, but feel shaped by them—Rawls I remains incredibly powerful. It offers a compelling account of why you might want to be liberal, and what kind of life liberalism makes possible. It speaks to the kind of moral personality liberal societies can foster—and why that’s something to embrace.

So yes: Rawls I for me, and for others like me who are looking for a full-throated liberal ethos. Rawls II for everyone else—for the project of building a pluralistic political order where people with different worldviews can live together respectfully.

They’re both excellent. They’re just aimed at different questions.

11.And then you have this really nice line about what it's like to live as a true-believing liberal. You write, “And it is transformative, magnificently so: autonomy, impartiality, purity of heart, grace, and self-command are all to be won.” Want to say a little more about what you mean?

That line comes in response to the final paragraph of A Theory of Justice, which I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.

I’m 45 now, and as I get older, I find myself wondering how many books still have the power to really shake me—to shift my ideas in a deep and lasting way. Most of us, especially as we age, become more fixed in our thinking. And if I had to guess, I’d say that each of us only has five or maybe ten books in a lifetime that can hit us that hard. And those moments of real impact become increasingly rare.

Theory of Justice didn’t rock me while I was reading it—at least, not at first. But the final paragraph did.

This is a massive book—600 pages—and Rawls’s most famous idea, the original position, appears throughout. It’s a thought experiment where we bracket our knowledge of who we are—our class, race, gender, religion, etc.—in order to reason about what a just society would look like. It’s been endlessly discussed, and often presented as a kind of philosophical gadget: a heuristic, a tool, a piece of conceptual machinery.

But then, at the very end of the book, Rawls takes a step back. He asks himself: what has all this been for? What is the original position really good for?

And his answer, to me, was startling. He states that, properly undertaken, the original position can allow us to see the world through the eyes of God. Sub specie aeternitatis—that’s his phrase.

Now, this is coming from someone who famously lost his faith in his twenties. And yet, there it is—at the end of this secular work, a deeply spiritual aspiration.

When I read that line, I put the book down. Then I picked it up again. And then I reread the whole thing. Because suddenly the text lit up in a different way.

I began to see A Theory of Justice not just as a blueprint for liberal institutions—though it absolutely is that—but as something deeper: a kind of spiritual exercise, a secular path to grace. A moral vision that offers redemption—not in the theological sense, but in the sense of helping us become better, fuller versions of ourselves. It’s for people who have lost a transcendent inheritance but still feel the itch of it in their hearts.

That’s how I read Rawls. His ambition, as I see it, wasn’t just to lay out principles of justice. It was, to use a word with a Rawlsian flavor, to schematize the liberal soul—to inspire, and to practically engender, a certain kind of person. Someone shaped by autonomy, impartiality, self-command, grace. Not abstract virtues, but lived ones. And that, to me, is magnificent.

12.Ok so now the lights are back on in the cathedral, everybody's politely lining up for all the various liberal goods and (politely but fairly) scolding anybody who cuts a spot in line. Hymns are being sung to liberal virtues, and lots of Michael Schur TV shows are being watched in liberal Sunday school. Now let me try to poke holes in the system. And it seems that there are four of them. The first is the most famous. It's ‘what can the tolerant do about the intolerant’? And it's a real problem. You admit that Rawls' answer is “just so helpless” — that, basically, the tolerant have to reason with the intolerant whenever they get a chance, and have to constrain intolerance, and basically just have to hope that the intolerant remain in small enough numbers. And this becomes a major issue whenever there’s a cult or religion or fanatics of any kind with a value system that they feel is more important than liberal tolerance. So what do you do with this issue?

Let’s get into the holes and gaps in my argument—there are plenty.

The Rawls question here is a really important one. As you can tell from this interview, I love Rawls. But on this particular issue, I think his theory is badly outdated.

He was writing in what we might call the good times—though we only recognize them as such in hindsight. A Theory of Justice came out in 1971, at the height of the American welfare state. Political Liberalism arrived in the Clinton-era 1990s, a time of relative prosperity and comfortable pluralism. Rawls was working within a broadly stable liberal order.

But we don’t live in that world anymore. And Rawls’s suggestion for how to deal with people who reject liberal democracy outright—who repudiate its ideals of reciprocity and fairness, especially for those outside their in-group—is totally inadequate now.

As you note, his response was to “contain” them—not through force, but by hoping they’d remain a small minority, without much cultural or political traction. But the horse has bolted. We live in an environment—social media in particular—where illiberal ideas are amplified constantly. Support for liberal democracy is peeling away by the day.

So the million-dollar question is: what do we do? My sense is that liberals need to start by looking inward. As Voltaire might say, we need to cultivate our own garden. That is: take care of our doctrine, our practice, and how we carry ourselves in the world.

And here I think liberals are failing in two big ways. First, there’s the condescension. Liberals often assume they have a monopoly on correct opinion and virtuous living. That’s manifestly untrue, and more than that, it’s damaging. Nothing fans the flames of illiberalism like liberal contempt. If we don’t learn to drop the smugness, we’re done.

Second, liberals need to do a much better job living up to the values we profess. When someone like Nancy Pelosi sees her stock portfolio outperform the market by several hundred percent, that’s not just a political optics problem—it’s a betrayal of liberal ideals. You can’t defend a doctrine of fairness while obviously gaming the system to your advantage. That hypocrisy undermines everything.

So yes, we need civic education. Yes, we need to engage across divides. But the deeper work is internal: to ensure that liberals actually live the values we espouse. That we embody the generosity and moral reciprocity we claim to hold dear. That’s where the repair work has to begin.

13.The second major problem is with the family — and this gets back into some of what I was saying re Henrich earlier. That any kind of familial attachment seems like an existential challenge to liberalism because it interferes with the ideas of perfect fairness, equality, and reciprocity. The ‘rules’ of a family are that everybody chooses their own family members over strangers, no matter how wrong their family members may be. And, since there will always be families, that strikes me as an insuperable problem for liberalism — and the conservative critique, basically, is the only way liberals can get around this is to break up the family as a system of values and to impose a weak-bonded, overly individualistic society in its place. What do you do with this issue?

I want to tread carefully here, because I think this critique—especially as it’s often made by right-wing commentators like Patrick Deneen, Yoram Hazony, Adrian Vermeule—tends to misrepresent liberalism. I’ve learned lots from their work, but I think they strongly strawman the tradition: portraying it as focused only on maximizing individual freedom, as if liberalism naturally erodes every form of relational life—family, community, tradition—by its very logic.

I don’t think that’s right. Or rather, if that is liberalism, it’s not a version I recognize or defend.

Liberalism, as I understand and defend it, is just as committed to generosity and fairness—strongly relational values—as it is to personal freedom. It doesn’t deny that we have partial attachments to friends, family, loved ones. It simply insists that those relationships be tempered by a broader moral concern for fairness. That we shouldn’t use our nearest and dearest as vessels of inherited advantage—especially when doing so entrenches inequality and injustice.

But let me be clear: this is hard. It often results in tragic trade-offs.

One point I make in the book is that while I may be a full-throated salesman for liberalism, I’m not close to being its saint. And this issue, around family and fairness, is where my own liberal commitments run aground.

My greatest personal failing as a liberal is how I parent my daughter. Specifically, how I lavish on her advantages that I know, in my heart, can’t be squared with my professed values. I live in Australia, and in the part of the country where I’m based, roughly half of parents send their kids to expensive private schools. I’m no exception. My daughter attends a very good, very expensive school—one that gives her all kinds of leg-ups that less affluent children simply don’t have access to.

I know that isn’t fair. I know it perpetuates inequality. And I know it can’t be reconciled with my liberalism. But I also don’t want my liberalism to override what I think is best for my kid. So in that case—and I say this plainly—I’ve made a choice against my principles. And I live with that.

Liberalism isn’t a machine for producing perfect decisions. It’s a framework that makes certain demands of us. Sometimes we meet them. Sometimes we fall short.

14.The third major problem is power. That power is inherently unjust and unequal — it's the few making executive decisions on behalf of the many. And that's in kind of the best-case scenario — usually what it tends to be based on are these very deep-seated human instincts to dominate. And since there's always going to be power — you usually need certain types of inequality in order to organize anything, and power seems to be just a fact of human relations — that seems like another existential challenge to the liberal presupposition of equality. How do you deal with that?

I’m not sure I agree with the premise of the question. It’s true that some ideologies—anarchism, for example, or certain forms of communism—struggle to square their ideals of absolute freedom or absolute equality with the reality of political power. But I don’t see why liberalism should, at least not in principle.

You’re absolutely right to say that in any functioning society, there will be both inequality and coercive state power. Liberalism doesn’t deny that. What matters, for liberals, is how that power is justified—and under what conditions.

In a liberal democracy, all citizens are, at least in theory, co-holders of political power. That means legitimacy depends not on the absence of coercion, but on whether coercion is exercised in ways that others can reasonably accept.

If political power is justified by appeal to controversial or sectarian visions of the good life—say, laws imposed in the name of Christian morality—that’s a problem. That’s not legitimate in a pluralist society. But if power is exercised in the name of values we can expect all citizens to endorse—like personal security, fairness, equal rights, and due process—then liberalism can, I believe, exercise political power with a clear conscience.

Power will always be part of political life. The liberal wager is that it can be made publicly accountable and morally legible.

15.And then there's sex. There's something, it must be said, that's pretty sexless about liberalism — and that feels like a deeper issue actually. Sex is built around inequality, around people choosing someone over someone else, and around proving oneself to a potential mate — and that runs counter as well to the principles of equality and reciprocity. So it often feels like — in school settings, for instance — everybody is a good liberal until the moment a pairing opportunity comes up and then a very different ethic comes into play. And since sexual charge is the runway into politics, that kind of inequality seems like it’s always going to be an issue.

That’s a funny question. My first reaction is: what political ideology is sexy? But sure, liberalism can feel a bit sexless. The thing is, though, that sex always finds a way—or rather, human desire is like water. It flows into everything.

And that can lead us into uncomfortable places. This is a part of my book that lots of critics ridiculed, but I stand by it: just look at mainstream pornography today. What’s it about?

If you go to Pornhub and search by “most viewed,” the answer is pretty clear. Popular porn today takes the shape it does in negotiation with and in negation of liberalism. Most of those videos revolve around playing with the boundary of consent. You see scenarios that try to trick, bribe, or pressure an initially unwilling partner into sex—or else you get more overt forms of aggression, like choking, which have now become completely mainstream.

That’s not a coincidence. If liberalism draws the line between licit and illicit sex entirely on the basis of consent, then it’s no surprise that pornography—this heat-seeking missile of taboo—homes in on precisely that boundary. It doesn’t frontally violate consent, but it dances on its edges, undermines it, plays with it, blurs it.

So the criticism for me isn’t that liberalism is sexless. It’s that sex—at least in its commercialized, mainstream form—has formulated its own response to liberalism. And it’s a pretty bleak one that harms men and women alike—though certainly not in equal measure.

16.I guess another way of voicing my objections is to say that the Machiavelli-Hobbes tradition seems like it’s closer to human nature — at least when push comes to shove. That liberalism and reciprocity are all good and well if everything is in great shape, but in anything other than the ‘well-ordered society’ you get into 'law of the jungle' type stuff.

I think human beings are malleable. We adapt to conditions. And under certain conditions, we can certainly become the kinds of people that the “bad boys” of political thought—Machiavelli, Nietzsche, or their OG precursor, Thrasymachus—believed us to be: people for whom might is right, and justice is simply the advantage of the stronger.

But I don’t think that’s inevitable. What I will say, though, is that raising liberals—that is, cultivating people who internalize liberal values—requires a formidable infrastructure of civic and moral education.

This is something Rawls understood very well. In one of my favorite chapters of A Theory of Justice, called “The Sense of Justice,” Rawls lays out a developmental psychology in an ideal liberal society. And it’s rigorous. He proposes what is essentially a cradle-to-grave moral education—one that begins with teaching children what it means to love, continues through friendship and trust in adolescence, and culminates in adulthood with the internalization of abstract principles like fairness and justice.

This account has a great virtue and a great liability. The virtue is that, if successful, the liberal order would be incredibly stable. Because the moral commitments required to sustain it wouldn’t just be taught abstractly—they’d be rooted in the emotional and social development of citizens from the earliest age. The ideals of justice would live in people’s hearts, not just in their heads.

But the liability is obvious: that kind of education is tremendously hard to achieve. It depends on institutions, families, schools, and a broader moral culture all pulling in the same direction. And that kind of coherence is rare.

So no, I don’t side with Nietzsche or Machiavelli in thinking that human beings are doomed to be base or power-hungry. But I do believe it’s easy to be cruel, easy to give in to the darker pulls of the human psyche. Liberalism, to me, is a civilizational project to keep those impulses at bay. Shklar once said that great liberals are misanthropic: they know what human beings are capable of and design systems—political, constitutional, educational—to save us from ourselves. I don’t think she’s wrong.

17.You have this kind of neat pairing that as true Christianity is to ‘Christendom,’ so liberalism is to its degraded form ‘liberaldom.’ But is it really possible to separate a true faith from the hypocrisies of its attendant community? Isn't to some extent Christianity ideologically responsible for what Christendom became? How exactly is liberalism to separate itself from liberaldom — other than everybody reading your book and rigorously practicing 'reflective equilibrium'?

I think you’ve put your finger on something very true and important. Let me put it this way. Every great spiritual or moral tradition places a core demand on its followers. And that demand is always difficult to live up to.

In Christianity, the demand is to love. In Confucianism, it might be to cultivate harmony. And in liberalism, I believe, the core moral demand is to be both free and generous.

So when you ask whether liberalism bears responsibility for its degraded form—what I call “liberaldom” in the book—I have to say yes. Just as Christianity inevitably gives rise to Christendom, liberalism gives rise to liberaldom. Because we’re fallible, self-interested creatures, and we tend to evade the hardest parts of the moral systems we profess.

And that evasion, interestingly, takes a different form depending on the tradition. When I think of a “bad Christian,” I think of someone who is rigidly judgmental—because judgment is the easy substitute for the much harder call to love.

When I think of Confucianism gone wrong, I think of authoritarianism—whether in the family or in politics. The demand for harmony collapses into top-down control.

And liberalism, too, has its shadow form. If liberalism’s moral core is the balance of freedom and generosity, then its degraded version is individualism—freedom stripped of responsibility and restraint.

That’s what I think has happened across much of the 20th century. We’ve jettisoned the harder half of the equation—generosity, fairness, public-mindedness—and doubled down on freedom, understood narrowly as autonomy or the satisfaction of individual preference. The result is a liberalism that’s hollowed out, defensive, and, in many cases, indistinguishable from selfishness.

So yes, liberalism is responsible for liberaldom—just as Christianity is responsible for Christendom. And the solution isn’t particularly sexy or radical. It’s simply this: to live up to the values we profess, as best we can, individually and collectively.

That’s always going to be an unfinished task. We’re bound, inevitably, to live somewhere between our ideals and their corrupted reflections. But acknowledging that tension—and refusing to let the corrupted reflection define the whole—is the only way forward.

18.You don't talk about this so much, but I would to tend to separate a liberalism based on reciprocity from liberalism as it tends to be constituted in our society, where liberalism is understood as paired with a notion of an inexorable arc of history — with history leading dialectically to perfect justice and equality. My inclination is to split the two and to have a liberalism based on reciprocal ethics as a sort of spiritual discipline but without assigning an historical valence. Is that split possible?

I agree completely with how you’ve set this up. There are two distinct elements that liberals—especially in good times—often conflate, to their detriment. First, there’s the moral core of the doctrine: reciprocity, fairness, and respect for persons. That’s where liberalism’s normative power lies. But second, there’s this widespread belief that those values are somehow inevitable—that history naturally bends toward justice, or that freedom and fairness are somehow hardwired into the human condition.

That second belief has taken a beating over the past decade—and rightly so. If the past ten years have shown us anything, it’s that liberal values are not self-realizing. They don’t follow automatically from progress, prosperity, or human nature. They have to be defended, practiced, cultivated—again and again, under changing conditions.

When liberals forget this, we become complacent. Worse, we become baffled by the success of our opponents. We struggle to understand how anyone could be drawn to illiberal alternatives, and end up attributing their appeal solely to ignorance, fear, or bad faith.

So yes, I absolutely believe we need to re-center liberalism around reciprocity and fairness—as a kind of ethical discipline, not a historical destiny. That means letting go of the myth that liberal values will win out on their own. They won’t.

19.Last objection. You seem to be — especially for a philosopher — a remarkably kind person. The same has been observed of Mill and Rawls and other liberal saints. Is that a real weakness in the whole structure? That the system only works for people who are already that way inclined? But in the rough and tumble of politics, and the ‘real world,’ more egocentric approaches may be necessary?

Thanks, Sam. A little bit of sugar to close the interview!

I’m reminded of something Rawls wrote in one of his very last pieces, a short text called On My Religion, which he composed just for friends and family. There’s a throwaway line in it that really stuck with me. He says: “A person’s religion is often no better or worse than they are as persons.” I think that’s exactly right.

Rawls himself, by all accounts, was a kind of secular saint. Every personal anecdote I’ve ever heard about him—from some of the most eminent political philosophers alive—testifies to his goodness, his decency, and his unshowy integrity. (Mill, by contrast, was—at least in my view—a total moral neurotic. He managed to alienate almost everyone around him. But we don’t need to get into that here.)

The book I’ve written isn’t really about politics in the narrow sense. It’s about how liberalism can serve as the basis for a good, rewarding, and worthy way of life. I’m trying to exhort liberals—especially those who already claim the label—to live up to it. To inhabit their commitments more fully. If the book helps even a few people do that, I’ll consider it a success.

Now, politics is a different arena. It’s messier, more transactional, more constrained. You can’t always abide by the finer points of your moral philosophy in the heat of the moment. Still, I’ll out myself here as an idealist. I believe that politics is driven—at least in part—by ideas. And sometimes, those ideas are ideals.

Liberalism has a generous, capacious, and I think beautiful vision of what politics could be. That doesn’t mean liberals should be naïve or sanctimonious. Quite the opposite. Nor does it mean we have to be selfish. My feeling, rather, is that we need to be a little less pure, a little less self-righteous to keep this moral and political hegemony of ours afloat.