There is a word that’s been hiding in plain sight for two thousand years.

The ancient Greeks called it eleutheriotes. The Romans translated it as liberalitas. Both words share the same Indo-European root — the same syllable that eventually gave English the word liberal.

And for most of Western history, neither word meant what we think it means today. Liberalitas was not a political position. It was not a party affiliation. It was a character trait — the disposition of a free person, a soul capable of genuine generosity, self-governance, and civic virtue. To be liberal was to be formed, in the deepest sense. Shaped into someone capable of freedom.

We have forgotten this older, truer meaning of the word liberal. And this forgetting is costing us more than we know.

Ezra Klein has been circling this wound for years — in his columns, his podcast, his recent turn toward what he calls a politics of meaning, and his recent interview with historian Helena Rosenblatt.

He is right that something has gone wrong at the center of liberal politics. He is right that procedural neutrality has left people hollow, that the Democratic Party’s brand of technocratic management has failed to speak to the hunger most Americans feel for purpose, belonging, and moral seriousness.

He is diagnosing a real disease.

But his cure stops too soon — because the problem isn’t just that liberals have forgotten how to speak the language of meaning. It’s that the philosophical tradition they inherited — somewhere around the mid-twentieth century — surgically removed the concept of human formation from the very definition of freedom.

That surgery left a wound that has never healed.

The Operation

Helena Rosenblatt’s The Lost History of Liberalism tells the story of how this happened. For centuries, liberals — from Cicero to Montesquieu to Tocqueville — understood that free societies required liberal citizens: generous, educated, morally serious, capable of self-rule. The liberal tradition was not neutral about human character. It was deeply, almost urgently interested in it.

Then came the Cold War.

Faced with the totalitarian temptation — the terrifying spectacle of states that tried to shape citizens into ideological instruments — liberal thinkers made a fateful retreat.

Isaiah Berlin drew his famous line between positive and negative liberty.

John Rawls constructed his theory of justice from behind a veil of ignorance, a thought experiment so carefully purged of any particular vision of the good life that it could not, by design, say anything about what a good life actually was.

The procedural became paramount. The state would be neutral. Citizens would choose their own values. Liberal institutions would hold the ring while individuals pursued whatever ends they preferred.

This was understandable. It was also, slowly, catastrophic.

Because the market was not neutral. Chicago School economics quietly smuggled in its own vision of the human person — the rational actor, the utility-maximizer, the sovereign consumer — and dressed it up as a description rather than a prescription.

When Michel Foucault analyzed neoliberalism in his Birth of Biopolitics lectures, he saw what the liberals could not: that the market does not merely reflect human nature — it produces it. It forms us. It shapes us into entrepreneurs of the self, competitive, calculating, instrumentally rational. Neoliberalism is not the absence of formation. It is formation in the image of the market.

The liberal tradition abandoned the field of character. The market moved in.

What the Conservatives Knew

Here is the uncomfortable part for those of us who call ourselves liberal: the social conservatives might have been partially right all along.

Not about everything. Not about their preferred solutions — like abortion bans and anti-gay crusades — many of which ranged from misguided to actively cruel. But about the diagnosis — that a free society requires the formation of free people, that liberalism without virtue is a contradiction in terms — social conservatives were onto something that the liberal tradition largely abandoned after the Second World War.

Aristotle understood that eleutheriotes, liberality, was not a natural condition but an achievement. It had to be cultivated, practiced, and taught.

Thomas Aquinas agreed.

Even John Stuart Mill — whose On Liberty is often read as the founding document of neutralist liberalism — was never quite a neutralist. His harm principle was embedded in a richer, messier, more perfectionist vision: the goal was the development of human individuality in its highest forms.

T. H. Green, the Victorian philosopher who helped give birth to progressive liberalism, was explicit: freedom was not the absence of constraint — it was the positive power to realize the best in oneself.

Joseph Raz, more recently, argued that autonomy — real autonomy — requires not just the removal of obstacles but the presence of adequate options and the capacity to use them well.

Real freedom requires formation. This is not a conservative insight. It is the oldest liberal insight. We have simply forgotten that we knew it.

Formation as Policy

Formation is not merely an abstract problem. It is a concrete one.

Formation happens — or fails to happen — in concrete institutions, programs, and relationships.

The family. The school. The congregation. The military. The union hall. The apprenticeship. The civic association.

Edmund Burke called these the little platoons of civil society — the places where character is made. And one by one, over the last fifty years, they have been hollowed out, defunded, suburbanized, algorithmically disrupted, or simply abandoned.

Robert Putnam named this quiet unraveling decades ago: we are bowling alone, trading the thick reciprocity of liberal life for the thin isolation of private pursuit.

Gavin Newsom, of all people, has begun to grasp the gravity of this crisis. California’s recent initiatives to connect young men — particularly young men of color — with government service, mentorship, and structured opportunity are not just workforce programs. They are formation programs. They are the state saying, tentatively and imperfectly: we have a stake in who you become, not just in what you earn.

This is the direction liberal politics needs to go. Not in a paternalistic direction — not toward the state prescribing the good life from above — but toward what we might call a civic perfectionism: a politics that takes seriously the conditions under which human beings can actually flourish, that asks not just how we distribute resources but how we cultivate the capacities, relationships, and moral seriousness that make a democratic society worth having.

The Liberalism We Need

Ezra Klein is right that the hunger is real. People are not just looking for better policy papers — though better policy that promotes abundance without extraction is essential.

They are looking for meaning, for belonging, for the sense that their lives are embedded in something larger than their own preferences. The Right has been feeding this hunger — often with poison, grievance, nostalgia, and scapegoating. The Center and Left have largely refused to acknowledge this hunger at all — aside from a brief foray into woke identity politics.

But the resources for renewal are there. They are hiding in plain sight, in the word liberal itself — in liberalitas, in eleutheriotes, in two thousand years of thinking about what it means to form a person capable of genuine freedom.

The task is not to invent a new politics. It is to remember an older, richer one.

To be liberal, in the truest sense, was to be formed into a kind of person: generous, capable, public-spirited, genuinely free. Not free from obligation, but free for something — for participation, for contribution, for the demanding, beautiful work of self-governance.

That is the tradition Ezra Klein is reaching for, even when he cannot quite name it. That is the tradition we need to recover — not as nostalgia, but as a living inheritance, a set of questions we have been asking for two millennia and urgently need to ask again.

What kind of people does a free society need?

And what are we doing to form them?

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From the populist right to the radical left, the verdict is clear: liberalism has failed. The great project of the Enlightenment and the organizing principle of the free world are on life support

And yet the critics agree on little else.

Some say liberalism is too individualistic, dissolving all bonds of solidarity and community. Others say it’s insufficiently free, captured by bureaucratic elites who stifle innovation and liberty. Some blame it for producing atomization. Others blame it for producing conformity. The diagnosis differs, but the patient is pronounced dead either way.

At Proliberal, we begin with a different premise: that liberalism is worth recovering, not discarding—if we’re willing to remember what liberalism once knew.

The Forgetting

Somewhere along the way, liberalism forgot its own foundations.

It became a thin proceduralism: a rulebook for neutrality that honored preferences without questioning them. It promised freedom but offered no account of what freedom is for. It guaranteed rights but lost sight of the virtues needed to exercise them well. It built markets but forgot that markets are human institutions—legally constructed and morally accountable.

This wasn’t liberalism at its best. This was neoliberalism, a particular, impoverished mutation that emerged in the late twentieth century and mistook price for value and transaction for relationship. Neoliberalism told us markets were natural, neutral, and self-correcting. It promised that if we got the incentives right, outcomes would take care of themselves.

This was always a category error.

Markets don’t emerge from nature; they’re designed, constructed, and maintained. The rules of property, contract, competition, and corporate governance are political choices. They determine who thrives and who doesn’t and what gets valued and what gets discarded. To pretend otherwise is to naturalize power and make political arrangements invisible by calling them inevitable.

Neoliberalism gave us extraordinary technological progress alongside spiraling inequality. It delivered innovation alongside extraction. And it generated growth alongside scarcity. It told us this was the best we could do and proclaimed there was no alternative.

We reject this resignation.

There are always alternatives. The question is whether we have the moral imagination and institutional courage to pursue them.

The Recovery

Before liberalism was a doctrine, liberality was a virtue.

In the classical and medieval traditions, liberality meant the art of giving well, knowing when to be generous and when to be prudent, and understanding that resources are held in trust rather than possessed absolutely. It recognized that wealth and power carry rights and duties. It was the virtue of a free person, one who possessed enough autonomy to exercise judgment about how to use what they had wisely for the common good.

Liberality wasn’t naive. It didn’t assume everyone was virtuous or that generosity alone could solve systemic problems, but it did insist that freedom without formation was merely license; that rights without responsibilities were hollow; and that the flourishing of individuals depended on the health of the whole.

This is what liberalism forgot when it became neoliberalism.

Freedom is not just about the absence of coercion, but about the presence of capability. Markets are not just mechanisms for aggregating preferences, but institutions that shape what we value and who we become. Equality before the law means nothing if the law itself is structured to entrench advantage. Neutrality is impossible—every institutional design embeds a vision of the good, even if that vision is simply “let the powerful do as they please.”

We seek to recover this richer inheritance and bring it to bear on the challenges of our time.

The Reconstruction

But recovering the past isn’t enough—we must also rebuild the future. That means translating liberality into the institutional architecture of our age, which requires us to rethink everything from the rules of our economy to the formation of our character.

First, we champion a political economy that rewards production over extraction.

Markets left to their own devices rarely remain free for long. Private actors, if unchecked, often distort law and regulation to rig the game in their favor, breeding enclosure, capture, and rent-seeking. We therefore focus on predistribution: shaping market outcomes at their source as a crucial first step before redistribution after the damage is done. This means championing market design that rewards long-term investment over short-term financial engineering, and value creation over rent extraction.

Second, we demand a state that doesn’t succumb to capture.

Public institutions are just as susceptible to corruption as private ones—by bureaucracy, incumbency, and political rent-seeking that erode state capacity and transform governance into another arena for self-dealing. We insist on renewing governance to preserve the integrity and capability of public authority—ensuring the state remains an instrument of the common good rather than another site of extraction.

Third, we fuse empirical rigor with moral inquiry.

Knowledge itself fragmented in the twentieth century—separating facts from values and analysis from meaning. The social sciences tried to become “value-free” by modeling human behavior while sidestepping moral claims about human flourishing. Arts and humanities swung in the opposite direction, embracing pure critique over construction and regularity. This was a mistake. It created a generation of technocrats and managers that can speak about efficiency but not about purpose, and a generation of activists and critics that can deconstruct power but not build institutions. We seek to recover a mode of inquiry that is equally capable of rigorous analysis and normative aspiration—one that can diagnose with clarity and build with purpose.

Fourth, we reject the false choice between technocracy and critique.

The dream of depoliticized administration was an illusion, but so is the fantasy of politics without knowledge and expertise. Our moment demands capability and contestation. We insist that governing well requires empirical sophistication and normative clarity and that these reinforce rather than undermine each other.

Fifth, we reconnect freedom with formation.

Liberal institutions don’t just protect freedom—they shape the kinds of people we become. Education, media, corporate governance, and urban design all form character, cultivate capacities, and influence what we desire and who we aspire to be. Neoliberalism pretended these were private matters, outside the scope of political concern. But there is no outside. The only question is whether we design our institutions intentionally or let them evolve by default in ways that undermine freedom itself.

The Stakes

We stand at an inflection point.

The old order is dying, but what will replace it remains uncertain. Authoritarian capitalism promises efficiency without freedom. Nostalgic nationalism promises identity without pluralism. Democratic socialism promises solidarity without dynamism. Accelerationism promises disruption without wisdom.

At Proliberal, we offer something different: a liberalism that has learned from its failures, one that honors markets without worshipping them. We seek abundance through inclusion rather than extraction and view freedom as capability rather than mere license.

This is not a return to some golden age. The past was never as golden as we imagine, and nostalgia is a poor guide for the future, but neither is this a clean break or a revolution that burns down the old order to build something entirely new. Revolutions have a way of devouring their children.

Instead, we focus on reconstruction and take the best of the liberal tradition—its commitment to human dignity, its faith in reason and argument, and its recognition that pluralism is a feature rather than a bug—to build institutions adequate to our present challenges.

The metacrisis of our time demands nothing less.

We face cascading crises on all sides: climate catastrophe, runaway inequality, institutional decay, the erosion of democratic norms, and the weaponization of information. These crises are not separate problems but manifestations of a deeper failure: the failure to build institutions that align private incentives with public goods, that distribute both the burdens and benefits of social cooperation fairly, and that cultivate the virtues democratic self-governance requires.

We can do better. We must do better.

And the resources for doing better lie not in an alien ideology, but in recovering what liberalism always stood for—or at least, what it promised to be.

An Invitation

This essay is just a beginning.

In the essays that follow, we’ll develop these ideas in detail by exploring how markets are legally constructed, how predistribution works in practice, why the Enlightenment stalled and how we might revive it, and how institutions form character and make freedom possible in our fractured world.

But the project of Proliberal is not mine alone.

It’s a conversation, an experiment, and an ongoing inquiry into how we might build a world that is both free and fair, innovative and inclusive, and dynamic and sustainable.

At its core lies a conviction: that liberalism remains the essential tradition for building a shared world—not as an unchanging catechism, but as a living inheritance capable of learning, adapting, and growing.

Whether liberalism can be renewed is the defining question of our era. This project is a living experiment to recover liberalism’s promise and remake it for our time.

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