Ezra Klein, Self-Harm, and Liberal Perfectionism
From the beginning, liberals have felt the need to promote the development and flourishing of human nature in light of the good even if they disagreed about what it might be.
Eric Schliesser
Eric Schliesser is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Amsterdam. He blogs regularly at digressionsimpressions.substack.com. He is a Visiting Faculty Fellow at The Murphy Institute of Tulane University for 2025-2026.
Public Reason and Unreasonable Pluralism
In the context of castigating authors’ servile dedications to superiors, and dedicating his own (1757) Four Dissertations to his cousin the playwright John Home, David Hume offers ‘liberty of thought’ as an example of ‘true liberty.’ When I first read it, I thought he meant to discuss what we now
The Harmony of Interests
Many liberal theorists have an implied distaste for politics. One prominent type of this liberal anti-politics presupposes a harmony of interests. This is visible, for example, in the following passage in Rawls: “Assume further that expectations are close-knit: that is, it is impossible to raise or lower the expectation of
Liberal Skepticism and the Gender Identity Culture Wars
This essay is cross-published on Substack for the author’s paying subscribers. In the Smithian version of its origin story, liberalism takes the modern (Mercantile) state for granted and understands itself from the start as a reformist and ameliorative project of the many violent tendencies in it. The key conceptual-political
The Two Origin Stories of Liberalism
This essay is based on the invited comments delivered on March 10, 2023, celebrating the Lee Kong Chian Chair Professorship of Chandran Kukathas at Singapore Management University. I congratulate Singapore and the faculty and students of Singapore Management University for luring the pre-eminent liberal theorist of our age, Chandran Kukathas,