The Struggle for a Decent Politics: On Liberal as an Adjective

A testament to what it means to be liberal by one of the most prominent political philosophers of our era

There was a time when liberalism was an ism like any other, but that time, writes Michael Walzer, is gone. Liberal now conveys not a specific ideology but a moral stance, so the word is best conceived not as a noun but as an adjective-one is a liberal democrat or a liberal nationalist. Walzer itemizes the characteristics described by liberal in an inventory of his own deepest political and moral commitments-among other things, to the principle of equality, to the rule of law, and to a pluralism that is both political and cultural. Unabashedly asserting that liberalism is a universal set of values ( it must be universal, he writes, since it is under attack everywhere ), Walzer reminds us in this inspiring book why those values are worth fighting for.