Ezra Klein Is Right About Liberality — Here's What He's Missing

Why Liberalism Cannot Survive Without Liberal Citizens

The Word We Lost

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?