Great piece here, Helen, especially the dimensional clarity you provide in seeing how Liberalism spans the spectrum of Conservative <-> Progressive, yet sits above them as its own higher order set of values, virtues, and vision.
While there may not be much "common ground" in the particulars of all the various movements and moods afoot these days, your framing of Liberalism here offers a "higher ground" place where there is perhaps more "solid ground" to build a sustainable future for those interested and able to do so.
Delighted to trigger ideas in someone who thinks and writes much better than I do. This is one of my reasons for commenting and occasionally posting on Substack.
“2. The picture generally given of the relative position of the three parties does more to obscure than to elucidate their true relations. They are usually represented as different positions on a line, with the socialists on the left, the conservatives on the right, and the liberals somewhere in the middle. Nothing could be more misleading. If we want a diagram, it would be more appropriate to arrange them in a triangle with the conservatives occupying one corner, with the socialists pulling toward the second and the liberals toward the third. But, as the socialists have for a long time been able to pull harder, the conservatives have tended to follow the socialist rather than the liberal direction and have adopted at appropriate intervals of time those ideas made respectable by radical propaganda. It has been regularly the conservatives who have compromised with socialism and stolen its thunder. Advocates of the Middle Way[4] with no goal of their own, conservatives have been guided by the belief that the truth must lie somewhere between the extremes - with the result that they have shifted their position every time a more extreme movement appeared on either wing.”
"Contrary to narratives on the right (and occasionally on the left), these are not the same thing. Marxist critiques of liberalism have (since Marx) been economic. They are materialists who believe in objective truth and the importance of dialectic, but have a radical and single-minded focus on the source of societal injustice."
Marxist has been and remains a moral critique of capitalism. It's "economic" arguments have long since been dust. The reason people associate Marxism with Critical Social Justice is that they both have same attitude towards power and its morality (i.e., the powerful are immoral by definition, and the powerless are moral by definition, and our job is to arrange the revolution after which there are no more power structures). Marxist economic thought fails because it imagines a world with no scarcity. If we through some miracle arrived at a world with no scarcity, *we would create more of it.* As an economic model, Marxism simple does a poor job at predicting outcomes. It is first and foremost a moral critique of capitalism (and not an unfair one had capitalism not evolved at all, and even though it has, not entirely unfair or unuseful).
Thanks, that covers your ideas there in more detail. I suppose where I get confused is that, to me, Marxists today are not engaging in Marxism; they are moralists making arguments about what is economically moral (and pretending that economic moralism is upstream of cultural moralism, and thus is the "true" sight for justice; in fairness to them, I think Marx would have agreed with them morally and denied that what they were doing was his project analytically since they are prescriptive). Marx claimed he wasn't about justice, at least not theoretically; he was describing historical facts and analyzing their inevitable outcome, which is unsound in analysis and empirically incorrect. That moralism of the Marxists of today feels very much similar to the moralism of CSJ (there is an immoral edifice that must be torn down and made anew through its inherent immorality; it cannot be fixed, it must be eradicated), though obviously targeting different arenas of society.
Wonderful essay Helen. I would add a dimension, which is that unlike its opponents liberalism is not a zero-sum game and offers the chance of alternance and hence of correction. The best that both the Left and the Right produced was obtained through liberal means and because of that reason it also tends to endure.
While most of this is quite correct, you err when you say that "capitalism ... is a central pillar of liberalism." This conflates two quite different things: liberalism, which is foundational to bourgeois society, and capitalism, a contradiction that has arisen within that society that effectively negates the liberal values of the bourgeois revolution. As Erin Hagood of the Platypus Affiliated Society put it:
"Socialism is not opposed to liberalism but seeks to take up the desiderata of liberalism in its crisis. The proletarian revolution is not made against the bourgeois revolution, but rather works through the unfinished tasks of that revolution in its hour of need. Marxism as the highest critic of socialism sought to clarify the world historical task of human freedom." ("The American Constitution and the Left," Platypus Review # 180)
Interesting! You are American? "Liberal" is not associated with the left here. I wouldn't say that liberalism, despite being based on individual liberty, is defined by individual or collective purpose. It's that liberalism gives the individual the right to decide which collective, if any to belong to. I choose my own husband and whether or not to have a family and then I dedicate myself to our collective wellbeing. I choose my own political party and then dedicate myself to organising with it. I choose my own religion or not to have one and then hold myself accountable to the community and its rules if applicable.
Yes, I am American. Also notice that this post was written before Trump was elected -- before left illiberalism went fully mainstream.
I think many people who call themselves liberal are balancing liberalism (as I am defining it) against more collective interests. I place myself a third of the way above the center line because I think we need some collective purpose to have meaningful lives. But I want to choose the collectivity I join. Illiberals feel entitled to impose it.
Yes, I think it is absolutely true to say that liberalism places individual individual interests above collective ones and illiberal factions of various kinds place collective interests above individual ones. But those individuals that liberals protect do them typically choose their collectives. Some people (not suggesting you) mistake liberal individualism for selfishness or narcissism rather than the freedom to choose what we commit to.
Thanks Helen for your comprehensive setting the scene and the challenge of holding on to liberal ways. The term liberal has so many variants and meanings. What words best label and distinguish your clear case for “liberalism as a higher order”?
A commitment to individual liberty - freedom of belief, speech, association (individualism)
Tolerance of difference and a will to live and let live as well as a recognition of the value of viewpoint diversity to advancing knowledge and resolving conflict in a democratic society (pluralism)
Recognition of our shared humanity and the common rights, freedoms and responsibilities this bestows upon us all (universalism),
A drive for reform over revolution or reactionism as a model for resolving societal problems.
A commitment to actively protecting others' right to believe, speak and live as they see fit, provided they do no material harm to anyone else nor deny them the same freedoms.
The belief that all people come into the world with the same right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and this can only justifiably be removed from any individual due to their own demonstrable harmful actions.
An understanding that threats to freedom come not only from the state but from authoritarian ideologies, individuals and groups, so liberal principles need to be protected not only in law but widely understood and valued in society.
A belief that it is in the interests of the overwhelming majority to conserve liberalism and the liberal democracies within which it flourishes.
Many thanks. It’s good to have that repeated concisely. But I’m guilty of a typo: my question meant to be “ What word …?” In the singular. A single term or label that best denotes this “higher order liberalism”. One that distinguishes it from the wider variants of liberalism. A hashtag if you will. Sorry but I think it’s important to have one! 😟
There isn’t another word for liberalism. That’s why it is a problem that the US uses it to mean leftism. Normally, I think it is futile to try to reclaim words which have moved away from their original meaning, but with liberalism, there simply isn’t another word for it. It’s a whole cluster of concepts developed into a philosophical school of thought known as liberalism.
We can say that conservatism is, at root, the drive to conserve that which is good, progressivism is the drive to make positive progress, socialism is the drive to have the means of production socially owned and liberalism is the drive to protect liberty but that just gets at their core drivers. We need people to have a strong sense of liberalism as all of the above as well as support for capitalism and free trade because those are the principles that underlie liberal democracies. We still do have that sense in the UK so Starmer and Badenoch call themselves liberals. Much of Europe still has it. In the US, it is understood to mean left-wing and in Australia to mean right-wing. My friend who is staying with me is from Brazil and he says that liberal there is understood as centre-right but focused particularly on free markets.
Ok. I geddit. And I agree. You may not want any other name than just “liberalism”. But I insist that the rest of us — the world and any serious campaign to return the big meaning — have to have some tag or heading or website flag for such an overwhelmingly important purpose.
In the absence of a good self-descriptive label, any attention-grabbing tag can work. Think of the myriad nonsense words that got our worldwide attention: Google, Zoom, Twitter (RIP), Facebook. The key is to get someone to want an answer to the curious question: “Huh?! {%#^*}?! What’s that?” Leading to the longer conversation you have most excellently and repeatedly set out for those who didn’t need their attention grabbed thus.
I’ve been here before with how to name a broad — ie a broader approach than other brands of — “family therapy”, a broad but skilled principled method which any and all other modes would fit in with but still hold the important overall principles. Decades and the best we have is the less-than-clear “systemic (family) therapy”. It doesn’t actually pass the “WTF?!” test as people are put off by the obscurity of a word that has a score of meanings. Only the cognoscenti have a clue, and even then they don’t really!
So my best starting effort for us your followers (but not you) might be: #HPLiberalism. Hence: << WTF’s “HPLiberalism”?! >> Conversation follows. The “HP” need not be unpacked. But to us it might stand for “Helen Pluckrose” or “Higher Powers” or “(any) House of Parliament” (referring to the political dimension and “HP Sauce”)!!
Yes it is a process not a thing. But life is a process too. Everyone knows about life. So a universal word is enough to label it. Many other important specific processes have labels or headings so you can refer to them so that those who don’t know about them can be alerted briefly and search for them. No tag or heading and the important world-important resource becomes a private interest for those who already know. HPLiberalism (or better tag) is too important to hide under a mountain of words.
Me again Helen. Some better obvious ideas about this. I got there via the metaphor of liberalism being a mountain or a place that needs a signpost or way to attract and guide new people to it. But of course the missing third part of this metaphor is the expert guide who can tell us much more about the place, its history, why it’s important, the ways to explore it and so on. And of course there may be several expert guides to the same place. Who publish stuff too.
So, we have eg “Wainwright or (two) Cartwrights On The Lake District”. Or we have the Bible that might be called “Disciples On Christ On God”, or for another faith “Mohammed On Allah”. Then “Freud On Psychoanalysis” with his 24 volume collected works. And 100s more experts in their 100s of particular fields.
Your particular place is Liberalism. The shorthand/le I’m looking for is the Signpost. And you, Pluckrose, are our esteemed expert Guide. You haven’t written a book on this yet, but you could and, I say, you should! Your Substack is the internet equivalent of your Collected Works On Liberalism.
There are other experts On Liberalism. If JS Mill was alive you would have “Mill On Liberalism”. Oh hang on, of course his signpost would be “Mill On Liberty” the succinct name of his publication. Hashtag of course: #MillOnLiberty
So I say your “book” on liberalism would be called “On Liberalism” giving us “Pluckrose On Liberalism” to distinguish your guide from many other guides on the subject including “Sunstein On Liberalism”, the name of that book. At the moment, your “mountain”, your “book”, is online. Maybe that’s where you’ll keep it. To signpost it I suggest “Pluckrose On Liberalism”. You’ve not called it that, but you could. If you don’t, your fans could. And we then get the internet (URL maybe or) signpost: #PluckroseOnLiberalism.
I am supposed to be writing that book. It’s called Reformers, Revolutionaries and Reactionaries: Has Liberalism Failed or Are We Failing to be Liberal?”
I thought you might be writing a book. Great news. Good luck “fitting it in”! I suspect that, whatever you call it, if it’s about liberalism, then it (and your Substack / website) would lead your fans to hotlink the book title or website as they are or as a recommendation to read “Pluckrose On Liberalism” or tagged as #PluckroseOnLiberalism!!
Me again. In case you have been persuaded that there’s some point in my singular efforts to fan your work and the cause of your kind of liberalism, and in case you won’t fight against the idea of the hashtag or other signpost to it so that fans (if not you) can recommend others to read “Pluckrose On Liberalism”, I wonder if you (it would need to be you) could create with little trouble some kind of target / collection of your “top ten” or “starter for ten” articles as the place that signpost leads new readers to find? Or maybe you have already got a list of your or your readers’ favourites just waiting for a signpost to direct more readers to it?
Maybe in your standard intro to your Substack website (whose URL you might think is enough, but I don’t), #PluckroseOnLiberalism could be linked to the select collection. The collection would need to be on Liberalism of course. So, I reckon, that today’s on Apologising goes in, while (very sadly, I think) you might not include the festive one on being Human? There may be other ways to determine more widely what the best of PluckroseOnLiberalism may be. Anyway. What do you think?
Me again. Following up as I learn more to guide my presumptious fandom cause to promote your work. Anyway, this won’t be news to you: it’s what you do.
Recall my earlier praise for writing about mundane aspects of life in a way that brings them so well to life and shows liberal principles at work. Victoria Smith sheepishly gives her mundane picture of how her kind/unkind kind of feminism would look in everyday practice — it’s “unsexy, inexact, not dramatic” etc. This could well be a mundane picture of humanism, or liberalism, or “lived experience” aka common sense in everyday practice. I share it as a mundane description of a mundane world in order to illustrate how writing about the mundane can be rather boring.
“We can strive to make a better world, but in order to achieve it we will each have to suppress some of our own desires some of the time, accept the limitations of our bodies and cope with not everyone seeing us as we would wish to be seen, only with some adjustments made so that everyone has to do this to a roughly comparable degree, not just some people all the time so that others never have to”
Smith, Victoria. (Un)kind: How Kindness Culture Punishes Women (pp. 254-255). (Function). Kindle Edition.
Reference too my Rubik Cube metaphor today praising your recent hijab unpicking brilliance. The thing is, I see now, that your USP is to take a live public complicated event as it unravels in real time and attracts the world’s social media commentary, and then you do your Rubik Cube thing on it almost instantly to enlighten your readers.
It’s not your only skill of course, but it’s a really unique special skill and “selling point” — that seemingly easy live instant real human being, better-even-than-AI, “overflowing” stream of brilliant clear thinking. You can even do several a week. And BTW your blog using your own history of autism, mis-diagnosis, bisexuality etc was even more warmly engaging and hugely educational about the values that matter.
That instant experience here on Substack would not convert easily into a less live-response medium such as a book or standing website. Any signpost fans use should point, I think, more to your lively writing here on Substack (not as I was earlier imagining). But I don’t know what that signpost could say about Pluckrose bringing liberalism to life.
Excellent. I guess “create” means a book (ie to buy)? What might you call it? You’ll find me at the head of the queue! But presumably you’ll be reluctant to take the open-to-all originals offline. There must be ways to make the book special and allow some or the same online collection to be open to all. What will the signpost say? I’ve made my suggestion. At least you’ll have caught up with MillOnLiberty from the days when print was all there was! Anyway, I’m glad someone else is on your case too! 👍😊
I am not trying to rename liberalism, Helen. I too wish the Americans hadn’t messed up the meaning. But that’s an important reality we face. Being purist about it with friends is fine if it was just a private niche interest. But this is much more important. I hate labels too. I value that mountain of quality thinking words. In particular I value the Helen Pluckrose mountain of overflowing words. We should all want more people to find and value that.
Any professional campaigner or promoter (of course would do a more thorough work-up than I am but) would tell us that we and the world need to have a short signpost or handle to promote and find the mountain. I don’t know what the best shorthand/le would be. It could be “Sprogwangle” or it could try to be accurate: I think it can be called “negative liberalism”; Mounck and Kaufman avoid the common “woke” by using more academic shorthand/les “identity synthesis” and “sacralised cultural socialism”. A more accurate academic tag might be ok.
But whatever, the aim would be to have new people react with ordinary curious interest or the “What the heck’s that?” question that allows a longer strapline answer. You’ve done better than this top-of-my-head effort: “It’s the best place to learn thoroughly about the world importance of liberalism as a higher order way to respect and resolve differences”.
Yes I hate all that PR stuff. I am still an amateur campaigner but I learnt a lot working for the guy who takes credit for nearly every detail of this NGO with it’s rather intriguing shorthand/le name: twowishes.org.
Purist may not be the right word for it. I'm not renaming it. I'm arguing for a handle to get many more people to head toward realising and learning about liberalism of the kind or in the manner, it seems to me, you are uniquely able to expound. ... But, following my own principles, it is not a good use of my or your time talking to you here where there is no other audience for it!! If I continue to argue for the greater promotion of you and your overflowings about liberalism, it would need to be with a wider audience than you! ;-)
Great piece here, Helen, especially the dimensional clarity you provide in seeing how Liberalism spans the spectrum of Conservative <-> Progressive, yet sits above them as its own higher order set of values, virtues, and vision.
While there may not be much "common ground" in the particulars of all the various movements and moods afoot these days, your framing of Liberalism here offers a "higher ground" place where there is perhaps more "solid ground" to build a sustainable future for those interested and able to do so.
Thank you, David. This is my aim beautifully encapsulated.
Delighted to trigger ideas in someone who thinks and writes much better than I do. This is one of my reasons for commenting and occasionally posting on Substack.
Good article. I like the Left/Right/Liberal figure.
Hayek also wrote of liberalism being off the left-right continuum in "Why I am Not a Conservative"
https://press.uchicago.edu/books/excerpt/2011/hayek_constitution.html -
“2. The picture generally given of the relative position of the three parties does more to obscure than to elucidate their true relations. They are usually represented as different positions on a line, with the socialists on the left, the conservatives on the right, and the liberals somewhere in the middle. Nothing could be more misleading. If we want a diagram, it would be more appropriate to arrange them in a triangle with the conservatives occupying one corner, with the socialists pulling toward the second and the liberals toward the third. But, as the socialists have for a long time been able to pull harder, the conservatives have tended to follow the socialist rather than the liberal direction and have adopted at appropriate intervals of time those ideas made respectable by radical propaganda. It has been regularly the conservatives who have compromised with socialism and stolen its thunder. Advocates of the Middle Way[4] with no goal of their own, conservatives have been guided by the belief that the truth must lie somewhere between the extremes - with the result that they have shifted their position every time a more extreme movement appeared on either wing.”
Nate Silver wrote a "modern-day update" to this a few years ago as well: https://www.natesilver.net/p/why-liberalism-and-leftism-are-increasingly
"Contrary to narratives on the right (and occasionally on the left), these are not the same thing. Marxist critiques of liberalism have (since Marx) been economic. They are materialists who believe in objective truth and the importance of dialectic, but have a radical and single-minded focus on the source of societal injustice."
Marxist has been and remains a moral critique of capitalism. It's "economic" arguments have long since been dust. The reason people associate Marxism with Critical Social Justice is that they both have same attitude towards power and its morality (i.e., the powerful are immoral by definition, and the powerless are moral by definition, and our job is to arrange the revolution after which there are no more power structures). Marxist economic thought fails because it imagines a world with no scarcity. If we through some miracle arrived at a world with no scarcity, *we would create more of it.* As an economic model, Marxism simple does a poor job at predicting outcomes. It is first and foremost a moral critique of capitalism (and not an unfair one had capitalism not evolved at all, and even though it has, not entirely unfair or unuseful).
Capitalism is an economic system. The woke use it to their advantage. I linked to a piece of mine addressing your points. It’s under “lip-service.”
Thanks, that covers your ideas there in more detail. I suppose where I get confused is that, to me, Marxists today are not engaging in Marxism; they are moralists making arguments about what is economically moral (and pretending that economic moralism is upstream of cultural moralism, and thus is the "true" sight for justice; in fairness to them, I think Marx would have agreed with them morally and denied that what they were doing was his project analytically since they are prescriptive). Marx claimed he wasn't about justice, at least not theoretically; he was describing historical facts and analyzing their inevitable outcome, which is unsound in analysis and empirically incorrect. That moralism of the Marxists of today feels very much similar to the moralism of CSJ (there is an immoral edifice that must be torn down and made anew through its inherent immorality; it cannot be fixed, it must be eradicated), though obviously targeting different arenas of society.
Well, yes, to that degree all political systems are moral. People advocate for them because they think they represent the right way to go on.
Wonderful essay Helen. I would add a dimension, which is that unlike its opponents liberalism is not a zero-sum game and offers the chance of alternance and hence of correction. The best that both the Left and the Right produced was obtained through liberal means and because of that reason it also tends to endure.
While most of this is quite correct, you err when you say that "capitalism ... is a central pillar of liberalism." This conflates two quite different things: liberalism, which is foundational to bourgeois society, and capitalism, a contradiction that has arisen within that society that effectively negates the liberal values of the bourgeois revolution. As Erin Hagood of the Platypus Affiliated Society put it:
"Socialism is not opposed to liberalism but seeks to take up the desiderata of liberalism in its crisis. The proletarian revolution is not made against the bourgeois revolution, but rather works through the unfinished tasks of that revolution in its hour of need. Marxism as the highest critic of socialism sought to clarify the world historical task of human freedom." ("The American Constitution and the Left," Platypus Review # 180)
I've thought along very similar lines. Liberalism falls inside a gamut between left and right, but is not a balance, tension or mixture. https://www.anomalogue.com/2015/06/27/political-framework/
Interesting! You are American? "Liberal" is not associated with the left here. I wouldn't say that liberalism, despite being based on individual liberty, is defined by individual or collective purpose. It's that liberalism gives the individual the right to decide which collective, if any to belong to. I choose my own husband and whether or not to have a family and then I dedicate myself to our collective wellbeing. I choose my own political party and then dedicate myself to organising with it. I choose my own religion or not to have one and then hold myself accountable to the community and its rules if applicable.
Yes, I am American. Also notice that this post was written before Trump was elected -- before left illiberalism went fully mainstream.
I think many people who call themselves liberal are balancing liberalism (as I am defining it) against more collective interests. I place myself a third of the way above the center line because I think we need some collective purpose to have meaningful lives. But I want to choose the collectivity I join. Illiberals feel entitled to impose it.
Yes, I think it is absolutely true to say that liberalism places individual individual interests above collective ones and illiberal factions of various kinds place collective interests above individual ones. But those individuals that liberals protect do them typically choose their collectives. Some people (not suggesting you) mistake liberal individualism for selfishness or narcissism rather than the freedom to choose what we commit to.
Would you object to someone putting on a T-shirt your diagram of how "Liberal" relates to "Left" and "Right" (that is, this figure: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!6JMl!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8333f318-5e59-42b2-a8b0-2798b36f32f5_1384x468.png)?
Not at all, but I’m sure it could be done better. ChatGPT got quite confused!
Grazie, il post è veramente ben scritto ed esauriente.
Ho apprezzato particolarmente la sottolineatura a vigilare / contrastare l'illiberalismo della PROPRIA FAMIGLIA POLITICA.
Un buon proposito per il '26 ,cordialità.
Vincenzo Bertozzi
@Helen Pluckrose
Your essays on liberalism have alerted me to the misunderstanding that US "conservative" critics exhibit when sniveling about "liberals".
I point out similarities between left and right wings within the US at https://tinyurl.com/yc3jrr93
Thank you for this essay.
Thanks Helen for your comprehensive setting the scene and the challenge of holding on to liberal ways. The term liberal has so many variants and meanings. What words best label and distinguish your clear case for “liberalism as a higher order”?
This is how I set it out on my ‘about’ page:
A commitment to individual liberty - freedom of belief, speech, association (individualism)
Tolerance of difference and a will to live and let live as well as a recognition of the value of viewpoint diversity to advancing knowledge and resolving conflict in a democratic society (pluralism)
Recognition of our shared humanity and the common rights, freedoms and responsibilities this bestows upon us all (universalism),
A drive for reform over revolution or reactionism as a model for resolving societal problems.
A commitment to actively protecting others' right to believe, speak and live as they see fit, provided they do no material harm to anyone else nor deny them the same freedoms.
The belief that all people come into the world with the same right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and this can only justifiably be removed from any individual due to their own demonstrable harmful actions.
An understanding that threats to freedom come not only from the state but from authoritarian ideologies, individuals and groups, so liberal principles need to be protected not only in law but widely understood and valued in society.
A belief that it is in the interests of the overwhelming majority to conserve liberalism and the liberal democracies within which it flourishes.
Many thanks. It’s good to have that repeated concisely. But I’m guilty of a typo: my question meant to be “ What word …?” In the singular. A single term or label that best denotes this “higher order liberalism”. One that distinguishes it from the wider variants of liberalism. A hashtag if you will. Sorry but I think it’s important to have one! 😟
There isn’t another word for liberalism. That’s why it is a problem that the US uses it to mean leftism. Normally, I think it is futile to try to reclaim words which have moved away from their original meaning, but with liberalism, there simply isn’t another word for it. It’s a whole cluster of concepts developed into a philosophical school of thought known as liberalism.
We can say that conservatism is, at root, the drive to conserve that which is good, progressivism is the drive to make positive progress, socialism is the drive to have the means of production socially owned and liberalism is the drive to protect liberty but that just gets at their core drivers. We need people to have a strong sense of liberalism as all of the above as well as support for capitalism and free trade because those are the principles that underlie liberal democracies. We still do have that sense in the UK so Starmer and Badenoch call themselves liberals. Much of Europe still has it. In the US, it is understood to mean left-wing and in Australia to mean right-wing. My friend who is staying with me is from Brazil and he says that liberal there is understood as centre-right but focused particularly on free markets.
Ok. I geddit. And I agree. You may not want any other name than just “liberalism”. But I insist that the rest of us — the world and any serious campaign to return the big meaning — have to have some tag or heading or website flag for such an overwhelmingly important purpose.
In the absence of a good self-descriptive label, any attention-grabbing tag can work. Think of the myriad nonsense words that got our worldwide attention: Google, Zoom, Twitter (RIP), Facebook. The key is to get someone to want an answer to the curious question: “Huh?! {%#^*}?! What’s that?” Leading to the longer conversation you have most excellently and repeatedly set out for those who didn’t need their attention grabbed thus.
I’ve been here before with how to name a broad — ie a broader approach than other brands of — “family therapy”, a broad but skilled principled method which any and all other modes would fit in with but still hold the important overall principles. Decades and the best we have is the less-than-clear “systemic (family) therapy”. It doesn’t actually pass the “WTF?!” test as people are put off by the obscurity of a word that has a score of meanings. Only the cognoscenti have a clue, and even then they don’t really!
So my best starting effort for us your followers (but not you) might be: #HPLiberalism. Hence: << WTF’s “HPLiberalism”?! >> Conversation follows. The “HP” need not be unpacked. But to us it might stand for “Helen Pluckrose” or “Higher Powers” or “(any) House of Parliament” (referring to the political dimension and “HP Sauce”)!!
What do you (other followers) think?!🤔
I think branding would end up in packaging and constrict what i think of as a process rather than a thing
Yes it is a process not a thing. But life is a process too. Everyone knows about life. So a universal word is enough to label it. Many other important specific processes have labels or headings so you can refer to them so that those who don’t know about them can be alerted briefly and search for them. No tag or heading and the important world-important resource becomes a private interest for those who already know. HPLiberalism (or better tag) is too important to hide under a mountain of words.
Me again Helen. Some better obvious ideas about this. I got there via the metaphor of liberalism being a mountain or a place that needs a signpost or way to attract and guide new people to it. But of course the missing third part of this metaphor is the expert guide who can tell us much more about the place, its history, why it’s important, the ways to explore it and so on. And of course there may be several expert guides to the same place. Who publish stuff too.
So, we have eg “Wainwright or (two) Cartwrights On The Lake District”. Or we have the Bible that might be called “Disciples On Christ On God”, or for another faith “Mohammed On Allah”. Then “Freud On Psychoanalysis” with his 24 volume collected works. And 100s more experts in their 100s of particular fields.
Your particular place is Liberalism. The shorthand/le I’m looking for is the Signpost. And you, Pluckrose, are our esteemed expert Guide. You haven’t written a book on this yet, but you could and, I say, you should! Your Substack is the internet equivalent of your Collected Works On Liberalism.
There are other experts On Liberalism. If JS Mill was alive you would have “Mill On Liberalism”. Oh hang on, of course his signpost would be “Mill On Liberty” the succinct name of his publication. Hashtag of course: #MillOnLiberty
So I say your “book” on liberalism would be called “On Liberalism” giving us “Pluckrose On Liberalism” to distinguish your guide from many other guides on the subject including “Sunstein On Liberalism”, the name of that book. At the moment, your “mountain”, your “book”, is online. Maybe that’s where you’ll keep it. To signpost it I suggest “Pluckrose On Liberalism”. You’ve not called it that, but you could. If you don’t, your fans could. And we then get the internet (URL maybe or) signpost: #PluckroseOnLiberalism.
Any use, Helen?!
I am supposed to be writing that book. It’s called Reformers, Revolutionaries and Reactionaries: Has Liberalism Failed or Are We Failing to be Liberal?”
I thought you might be writing a book. Great news. Good luck “fitting it in”! I suspect that, whatever you call it, if it’s about liberalism, then it (and your Substack / website) would lead your fans to hotlink the book title or website as they are or as a recommendation to read “Pluckrose On Liberalism” or tagged as #PluckroseOnLiberalism!!
Me again. In case you have been persuaded that there’s some point in my singular efforts to fan your work and the cause of your kind of liberalism, and in case you won’t fight against the idea of the hashtag or other signpost to it so that fans (if not you) can recommend others to read “Pluckrose On Liberalism”, I wonder if you (it would need to be you) could create with little trouble some kind of target / collection of your “top ten” or “starter for ten” articles as the place that signpost leads new readers to find? Or maybe you have already got a list of your or your readers’ favourites just waiting for a signpost to direct more readers to it?
Maybe in your standard intro to your Substack website (whose URL you might think is enough, but I don’t), #PluckroseOnLiberalism could be linked to the select collection. The collection would need to be on Liberalism of course. So, I reckon, that today’s on Apologising goes in, while (very sadly, I think) you might not include the festive one on being Human? There may be other ways to determine more widely what the best of PluckroseOnLiberalism may be. Anyway. What do you think?
Alan Sokal wants to make a collection of my essays into a book edited by him
Me again. Following up as I learn more to guide my presumptious fandom cause to promote your work. Anyway, this won’t be news to you: it’s what you do.
Recall my earlier praise for writing about mundane aspects of life in a way that brings them so well to life and shows liberal principles at work. Victoria Smith sheepishly gives her mundane picture of how her kind/unkind kind of feminism would look in everyday practice — it’s “unsexy, inexact, not dramatic” etc. This could well be a mundane picture of humanism, or liberalism, or “lived experience” aka common sense in everyday practice. I share it as a mundane description of a mundane world in order to illustrate how writing about the mundane can be rather boring.
“We can strive to make a better world, but in order to achieve it we will each have to suppress some of our own desires some of the time, accept the limitations of our bodies and cope with not everyone seeing us as we would wish to be seen, only with some adjustments made so that everyone has to do this to a roughly comparable degree, not just some people all the time so that others never have to”
Smith, Victoria. (Un)kind: How Kindness Culture Punishes Women (pp. 254-255). (Function). Kindle Edition.
Reference too my Rubik Cube metaphor today praising your recent hijab unpicking brilliance. The thing is, I see now, that your USP is to take a live public complicated event as it unravels in real time and attracts the world’s social media commentary, and then you do your Rubik Cube thing on it almost instantly to enlighten your readers.
It’s not your only skill of course, but it’s a really unique special skill and “selling point” — that seemingly easy live instant real human being, better-even-than-AI, “overflowing” stream of brilliant clear thinking. You can even do several a week. And BTW your blog using your own history of autism, mis-diagnosis, bisexuality etc was even more warmly engaging and hugely educational about the values that matter.
That instant experience here on Substack would not convert easily into a less live-response medium such as a book or standing website. Any signpost fans use should point, I think, more to your lively writing here on Substack (not as I was earlier imagining). But I don’t know what that signpost could say about Pluckrose bringing liberalism to life.
Excellent. I guess “create” means a book (ie to buy)? What might you call it? You’ll find me at the head of the queue! But presumably you’ll be reluctant to take the open-to-all originals offline. There must be ways to make the book special and allow some or the same online collection to be open to all. What will the signpost say? I’ve made my suggestion. At least you’ll have caught up with MillOnLiberty from the days when print was all there was! Anyway, I’m glad someone else is on your case too! 👍😊
I am not trying to rename liberalism, Helen. I too wish the Americans hadn’t messed up the meaning. But that’s an important reality we face. Being purist about it with friends is fine if it was just a private niche interest. But this is much more important. I hate labels too. I value that mountain of quality thinking words. In particular I value the Helen Pluckrose mountain of overflowing words. We should all want more people to find and value that.
Any professional campaigner or promoter (of course would do a more thorough work-up than I am but) would tell us that we and the world need to have a short signpost or handle to promote and find the mountain. I don’t know what the best shorthand/le would be. It could be “Sprogwangle” or it could try to be accurate: I think it can be called “negative liberalism”; Mounck and Kaufman avoid the common “woke” by using more academic shorthand/les “identity synthesis” and “sacralised cultural socialism”. A more accurate academic tag might be ok.
But whatever, the aim would be to have new people react with ordinary curious interest or the “What the heck’s that?” question that allows a longer strapline answer. You’ve done better than this top-of-my-head effort: “It’s the best place to learn thoroughly about the world importance of liberalism as a higher order way to respect and resolve differences”.
Yes I hate all that PR stuff. I am still an amateur campaigner but I learnt a lot working for the guy who takes credit for nearly every detail of this NGO with it’s rather intriguing shorthand/le name: twowishes.org.
I’m not being purist, Nick. I just don’t know what else we could call liberalism or how renaming it would help.
Purist may not be the right word for it. I'm not renaming it. I'm arguing for a handle to get many more people to head toward realising and learning about liberalism of the kind or in the manner, it seems to me, you are uniquely able to expound. ... But, following my own principles, it is not a good use of my or your time talking to you here where there is no other audience for it!! If I continue to argue for the greater promotion of you and your overflowings about liberalism, it would need to be with a wider audience than you! ;-)