Liberalism rejects the ancient conception of liberty as the learned capacity of human beings to conquer the slavish pursuit of base and hedonistic desires.
NO! This is an unwarranted exaggeration.
He used similar language previously, but his prior "rejection" was that [a Liberal] society could not be founded on the reliance on virtue — NOT that the possibility or aspiration towards virtue itself is rejected.
If the valuation of virtue was deprecated in the original formulation of Liberalism, he needs to provide more evidence than this implicit assertion.
