Clearing Our Minds of 'Cant'.

• Author: Leef, George

Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All By Deirdre Nansen McCloskey 400 pp.; Yale University Press, 2019

Several years ago, economics professor Daniel Klein of George Mason University began an effort to revive the word "liberal" in American political discourse, rescuing it from its erroneous association with big, interventionist government and restoring its original meaning of liberating people from the clutches of coercive institutions. Deirdre McCloske's latest book, Why Liberalism Works, gives Klein's project a gigantic boost.

She explains over and over that what most Americans call "liberalism" is an ugly morass of authoritarian beliefs and policies that threaten to slow or even reverse what she calls "the Great Enrichment." Thanks to (true) liberalism in the last three centuries, ordinary people have enjoyed a huge increase in their standard of living, roughly 3,000%, she calculates. Lamentably, few people connect their prosperity and freedom to liberal philosophy and economic policies.

McCloskey writes,

I began to realize around 2005 or so that a liberal "rhetoric" explains many of the good features of the modern world compared with earlier and illiberal regimes--the economic success of the modern world, its splendid arts and sciences, its kindness, its toleration, its inclusiveness, its cosmopolitanism, and especially its massive liberation of more and more people from violent hierarchies ancient and modern. But there are ominous clouds. She continues:

From the Philippines to the Russian Federation, from Hungary to the United States, liberalism has been assaulted recently by brutal, scare-mongering populists. A worry. Yet for a century and a half, the relevance of liberalism to the good society has been denied in a longer, steadier challenge by gentle or not-sogentle progressives and conservatives. Time to speak up. Indeed so and speak up McCloskey does. The book is a collection of 50 fairly short pieces written over the last decade (some interviews, some magazine articles, some book reviews, some short essays) that advance her argument that people should stop giving power to the enemies of liberalism. Naturally, there is a considerable degree of overlap between the pieces, but that isn't a bad thing: many readers will take her point more fully for having heard it repeated and made from different angles. What makes the book especially effective, though, is her bright and...