What Does the Word “Liberal” Mean?

Rosenblatt’s The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century , while ultimately disappointing, helps highlight the formidable challenge, if not impossibility, of settling on a single meaning of liberalism. The story Rosenblatt tells is an engaging one, and her effort to pin down the meaning of liberalism with history is commendable. First, although she claims a purely academic interest in the meaning of liberalism (there is no mention in her book of the political developments with which I began this review), her tone reveals a more polemical purpose: to oppose a liberalism that affirms individualism, self-interest, and rights, and to promote a liberalism that affirms “duties, patriotism, self-sacrifice, [and] generosity to others.”

Source: www.lawliberty.org