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

by Ian Dunt

And then two men in England tried to address the problem. One of them was English and never fitted in. The other wasn’t and always did. They were both, at heart, outsiders. Their names were George Orwell and Isaiah Berlin. Orwell was a stubborn socialist journalist, made for dirty typewriters and trench warfare. Berlin was a philosopher nestled into the institutional splendour of Oxford, made for fine restaurants and glamorous dinner parties. But as distinct as they seemed, they shared crucial qualities. They despised the Third Reich and the Soviet Union in equal measure. They were committed to the notion of the individual. They believed in basing political ideas on what could be practically demonstrated. And they were fascinated by the question of belonging. It was through their work, conducted at the same time and in the same country, but culturally a million miles apart, that liberalism’s relationship with identity started to be articulated.