It is the primacy that liberals still place on the kind of fallibility that Montaigne described as foundational to our humanity—the same flawed but not in itself sinful nature that Smith and Hume thought could become the glue of social sympathy—that makes liberals favor reform through what we could call “provoked consensus.” The liberal idea of community is not one, as it is for many conservatives, of blood ties or traditional authority. It rests on an idea of shared choices.
