A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism

by Adam Gopnik

Overview

A stirring defense of liberalism against the dogmatisms of our time from an award-winning and New York Times bestselling author.


Not since the early twentieth century has liberalism, and liberals, been under such relentless attack, from both right and left. The crisis of democracy in our era has produced a crisis of faith in liberal institutions and, even worse, in liberal thought.


A Thousand Small Sanities is a manifesto rooted in the lives of people who invented and extended the liberal tradition. Taking us from Montaigne to Mill, and from Middlemarch to the civil rights movement, Adam Gopnik argues that liberalism is not a form of centrism, nor simply another word for free markets, nor merely a term denoting a set of rights. It is something far more ambitious: the search for radical change by humane measures. Gopnik shows us why liberalism is one of the great moral adventures in human history — and why, in an age of autocracy, our lives may depend on its continuation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781541699342
Publisher:	Basic Books
Publication date:	07/14/2020
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	190,154
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Adam Gopnik is a staff writer at The New Yorker; he has written for the magazine since 1986. Gopnik has three National Magazine awards, for essays and for criticism, and also a George Polk Award for Magazine Reporting. In March of 2013, Gopnik was awarded the medal of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters. The author of numerous bestselling books, including Paris to the Moon, he lives in New York City.

Table of Contents

Overture: A Long Walk with a Smart Daughter 1

1 The Rhinoceros Manifesto: What Is Liberalism? 23

2 Why the Right Hates Liberalism 83

3 Why the Left Hates Liberalism 145

Finale: A Thousand Small Sanities 213

Afterword 241

A Page (or Two) of Thanks 265

A Brief Bibliographic Note 269

Editorial Reviews

A Foreign Affairs Book of the Year, 2019—-


"Witty, humane, learned...An elegant discussion."—New York Times


"A stirring defense of liberalism's philosophical tradition and continued relevance against its critics on both left and right."—Jonathan Chait

"Written with Adam Gopnik's signature wit and charm, A Thousand Small Sanities is also a clarion call at a moment of great danger. This fierce, capacious, and startlingly intelligent defense of a whole political, social, and moral order is essential reading for our time."—Stephen Greenblatt, author of The Swerve: How the World Became Modern


"Adam Gopnik is one of the greatest thinkers and wordsmiths of our age, and this book may be his most masterful, meaningful, and enjoyable yet. He turns his sweeping intellectual imagination into a conversation with a cross-partisan American longing for a renewal of common life that scarcely knows how to name itself. In an age in which we've connected ourselves with scale but without quality, and fractured communal cohesion in part by forgetting our shared liberal inheritance, this book is essential, redemptive reading."—Krista Tippett, host, "On Being"


"It's a great book about liberalism. You'll read it in a day. Highly recommended."—Chris Hayes


"An elegant, impassioned, and rigorously reasoned effort to re-humanize the most humanistic moral and political philosophy our civilization has produced..."—Brainpickings

"The longtime New Yorker staff writer and prolific cultural critic once again shows his astute awareness of the public's political consciousness in this new work championing 'liberalism.' ... Gopnik's learned, lofty...study ultimately reasserts the belief in the 'infinity of small effect.'"—Kirkus Reviews


"A smart, exhilarating defense of the liberal tradition."—Publishers Weekly, starred review

From the Publisher

Witty, humane, learned…

The New York Times Book Review - David Frum

★ 04/08/2019

According to this militantly nonfanatical treatise, liberalism is the self-doubting creed of cautious, compromising, incremental reform—and that’s why it’s great. New Yorker essayist Gopnik (Paris to the Moon) grounds liberalism not in arid individualism but in emotion and social connection, an animus against suffering and for freedom and equality, an understanding of human fallibility, a tolerance for debate, and a search for lasting improvements through democratic action. To conservatives who say liberal rationalism erodes communities, families, and sacred values, he replies that it allows diverse communities and religious beliefs to flourish without bitter divisions; to left-wingers who condemn it as a cover for capitalist exploitation, he champions liberalism’s record of progressivism without the totalitarian repressions of communism or the essentialist identity politics of today’s left. Gopnik hangs his discussion on vivid profiles of liberal dreamers and doers, from theorist-lovebirds Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill to civil rights pioneers Frederick Douglass and Bayard Rustin. He writes with a pithy, aphoristic charm—“what we have today, the insistent sneering insists, is a long, permanent bar fight, where you can’t trust a liberal to throw a bourbon bottle at the bad guys”—that overlies deep erudition and nuanced analysis. The result is a smart, exhilarating defense of the liberal tradition. Agent: Andrew Wylie, the Wylie Agency. (May)

Publishers Weekly

Read More