Author(s): Paul Starr

Current Affairs

In this book, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, journalist and intellectual argues for liberalism as the only viable response to the political and economic challenges of the modern world. Liberalism in America is in greater peril today than at any other time in recent history. Conservatives treat it as an epithet, and even some liberals have confused it with sentimentality and socialism. But Paul Starr, one of America's leading intellectuals, demonstrates that, properly understood, liberalism is a sturdy public philosophy, deeply rooted in America's traditions, capable of making the US a freer and more secure country. "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" remains as good a definition of liberalism's aims today as it was when Thomas Jefferson borrowed the language of John Locke for the Declaration of Independence. From its origins as constitutional liberalism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to the complexities of today's global political systems liberalism has provided the basis of the most prosperous and powerful states in the world.