The Roots of Liberalism

This spirited book traces the roots of liberalism through the noblest traditions, virtues, institutions and longings embedded in Western culture.


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 explains how we learned magnanimity from the Code of Chivalry and to avoid brutishness 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 inspire the civic virtues of our culture.