Freedom of Religion and the Secular State (2012), Humanity Enhanced (2014), The Mystery of Moral Authority (2016), Science Fiction and the Moral Imagination (2017), The Tyranny of Opinion: Conformity and the Future of Liberalism (2019), and At the Dawn of a Great Transition: The Question of Radical Enhancement (2021). In 2014, he was inducted as a Laureate of the International Academy of Humanism.
Blackford applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, How We Became Post-Liberal: The Rise and Fall of Toleration, and reported the following:
How We Became Post-Liberal: The Rise and Fall of Toleration is about the evolution and seeming fall of liberalism in its traditional sense: a political tendency emphasizing individual liberty and especially freedom of speech. Page 99 begins an analysis of John Stuart Mill’s classic defence of free thought and discussion in his famous book On Liberty, first published in 1859. As I explain there, Mill saw value in the expression of diverse opinions – whether they turned out to be true or false – as a social resource for current generations and for posterity.Learn more about How We Became Post-Liberal at the Bloomsbury Academic website.
Mill’s argument was a crucial turning point in the history of liberalism, so my account of it is an equally crucial turning point in How We Became Post-Liberal. Readers of this one page wouldn’t be able to grasp my total thesis, but they’d get a good idea of the issues at stake and my style of thinking and writing about them. In all, the Page 99 Test works fairly well.
How We Became Post-Liberal goes beyond describing liberal values and principles, such as we’d find in Mill’s writings. It traces the history of liberal thought and its antecedents (going back to ancient history), and how it fell out of fashion in recent decades and is now attacked from all sides.
On the political Left, and among large swaths of the highly educated classes, including much of academia, “quality” journalism, and the legal profession, commitment to liberal values and principles is now superseded by a kind of political religion based around group identities. This provides something of a comprehensive guide to how we can live our lives and understand the world. Like other political religions, it tends to be highly intolerant of dissent.
But there’s also illiberal thinking on the political Right, which should not be surprising. Traditionally, opposition to liberal ideas came from the institutions of the Right (the Church, the autocratic state, defenders of Christian morals, etc.).
How We Became Post-Liberal explains how we reached our current predicament where, for example, no major political party in what we call the Western liberal democracies is strongly committed to liberal ideas. It is both a prequel (digging deeper into history) and a sequel (developing the ideas further and updating developments) to my earlier book The Tyranny of Opinion: Conformity and the Future of Liberalism. The two books complement each other, but they can each be read independently.
One difference is that I’ve grown more pessimistic. I don’t think it will be easy to escape our illiberal predicament, and I don’t have a magic bullet to offer. But a good start is to understand how the situation came about, and to see how it’s a product of historical contingencies.
It didn’t have to be this way. Even that much is a liberating thought.
--Marshal Zeringue
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