Sublime

Never before had human beings been so confident in their knowledge of physical nature, human nature, morality, and politics.

The freedom to decide what is my own good is enshrined in Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992): “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”

Mill held that truth emerges from an unfettered competition of ideas and that individual character is most improved when allowed to find its own way uncoerced. That vision was insufficient for 20th-century American liberalism.

I showed how this moral matrix leads liberals to make two points that are (in my opinion) profoundly important for the health of a society: (1) governments can and should restrain corporate superorganisms, and (2) some big problems really can be solved by regulation. I explained how libertarians (who sacralize liberty) and social conservatives (who

Modern politics and economics were built on the foundation of the rational pursuit of self-interest.

this so-called factual description might have made sense back in the days of Locke, Rousseau and Thomas Jefferson,

Its leading thinkers embraced a Renaissance humanism that put its faith in the dignity of the individual and in the aspiration to find happiness on this earth through knowledge.