The Roots of Liberalism - Encounter Books

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The Roots of Liberalism

What Faithful Knights and the Little Match Girl Taught Us about Civic Virtue

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Publication Details

Hardcover / 296 pages
ISBN: 9781641774031
Available: 9/10/2024


The Roots of Liberalism
What Faithful Knights and the Little Match Girl Taught Us about Civic Virtue

Liberalism is under attack from both left and right, but anti-liberals have failed to understand how the tradition defines our idea of civic virtue. Liberalism is not an ideology that stands above our practices and judges them, but a practice itself, an inheritance of virtues, institutions, customs, and longings embedded in our culture and passed on through our memories and stories of moral heroes.

In this book, Buckley tells how we learned magnanimity from the Code of Chivalry and that brutishness is illiberal from the Code of the Gentleman; how, through the stories of Hans Christian Andersen and the novels of Charles Dickens, kindness became a liberal virtue; how the Republican Virtue of the Founders can be traced back to fourteenth century Sienese merchants. From the stories that comprise the Western Tradition of liberalism, we learned the civic virtues that are the efficient secret of American constitutional government.

The anti-liberal cult of wokeness has attempted to cancel this tradition, but it will not long survive. It offers a creed of sin without absolution, of guilt without soul-easing joys, of frowns without laughter. It rejects the West’s high culture and offers nothing in its place. Without learning, art, industry, or anything that might attract a person, its emptiness will soon be seen by all, and liberalism will continue to supply the civic virtues of our culture.


About the Author

F.H. Buckley is a Foundation Professor at George Mason University’s Scalia School of Law. He is a frequent media guest and has appeared on Morning Joe, CNN, The Rush Limbaugh Show, C‑SPAN, NPR and numerous other outlets.

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