But he fails to offer an alternative for disadvantaged and oppressed groups who naturally want to band together to better fight for their rights, a strategy which has undoubtedly been successful in the past. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.

By the end, I had inserted so many little fluorescent yellow tabs to mark moments in this book that I wanted to quote in a review that I had lost my way through it. Australia is no better, we invented some of the modern immigration rhetoric and policy as one of our biggest contemporary intellectual exports. Do the damaging excesses of laissez faire liberalism such as austerity still count as representations of liberalism, when the direct and deliberate harm they inflict is so intrinsic ?

But the victory of unconstrained capitalism did not always safeguard the prosperity of individuals, and increased the fragility of the financial system. Dunt believes the current liberal crisis could and should lead to liberalism reinventing itself in ways which will guarantee the freedom of individuals in the future.

I particularly enjoyed learning of how its development intersected with economic theory throughout the 20th century and into the 21st; the pull between Hayek and Keynes, the former’s recent dominance causing many of the problems we now face. A liberal monarchy is possible, which is why we use the adjective “absolute” to describe the illiberal version.Later, in the twentieth century, liberal regimes in both Italy and Germany allowed the rise of fascism rather than risk succumbing to communism. A tour de force ; a mighty trumpet blast for the forces of liberalism and enlightenment in the face of a global tide of ignorance and populism. The majority of the book is a history of Liberalism, which while valuable, seems at variance with the title of the book. Liberals instead should be out, proud and optimistic in their capacity to help shape the future for the better. This is a shame beacuse that subtitle is a more accurate description of what this book is all about.