I’m starting a new book project and I wanted to benefit from the wisdom of my colleagues from the get-go. The title is Liberalism as a Way of Life and it is about how liberal values and practices can be the basis for a personal worldview, way of living, and spiritual orientation. You don’t have to be liberal and something else, such as Christian, Buddhist, Kantian, hedonist, utilitarian, or otherwise. It is fully possible and, this book contends, fully rewarding and sufficient, to be liberal through and through. This means that the values and attitudes enshrined in liberal political institutions, and ubiquitous in the background culture of liberal democracies – such as reciprocity, tolerance, personal freedom, impartiality, equality of opportunity, and the like – have the potential to inform a much more general sensibility, one that is supple enough to be realized in all different aspects of life: from family to professional life, from friendship to enmity, from humour to outrage, and everything in between. 

About the Speaker

Alex Lefebvre is Associate Professor in the Department of Government and International Relations, and the Department of Philosophy, at The University of Sydney. He is author of Human Rights and the Care of the Self (Duke 2018), Human Rights as a Way of Life: on Bergson’s Political Philosophy (Stanford 2013), and The Image of Law: Deleuze, Bergson, Spinoza (Stanford 2008). He is currently working on a new book, Liberalism as a Way of Life, under contract with Princeton.