How To Be A Liberal: The Story of Freedom and the Fight for its Survival

by Ian Dunt

Both Orwell and Berlin had started with acceptance. They accepted that patriotism mattered to people. Not all of them perhaps, and not all the time, but enough to make it a powerful source of identity and self-definition. Orwell’s response to that acceptance was political and personal. Politically, he urged liberals to recognise the force of patriotism so that fascists could not monopolise it. Personally, he recognised that the tug of belonging and group membership must be mediated by a commitment to truth and objectivity. Berlin’s response was philosophical. If liberalism was grounded in the individual, he argued, then whatever the individual cared about was important. Liberalism was bound, by its own principles, to recognise and appreciate an individual’s aspirations. Patriotism mattered because it mattered to the individual. And it stopped mattering the moment it restricted the individual.