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Podcast: New Books in Political Science
Episode: What happens when liberalism stops feeling like a victory and starts feeling like an exhaustion?
Description: In this episode of International Horizons, RBI Director (acting) Eli Karetny speaks with philosopher Alexandre Lefebvre about liberalism not merely as a political doctrine, but as a lived way of life.
Against the backdrop of rising populism, nationalism, and post-liberal regimes, Lefebvre revisits the liberal tradition—from Locke and Mill to Rawls and Berlin—to argue that liberalism has always contained a moral and existential core. Drawing on John Rawls’s early work and Pierre Hadot’s idea of philosophy as spiritual exercise, the conversation explores freedom and generosity as liberal virtues, the tension between neutrality and perfectioni...