A compelling and deeply felt exploration and defense of liberalism: what it actually is, why it is relevant today, and how it can help our society chart a forward course. This book represents four decades of thinking and writing about contemporary politics by Alan Wolfe, one of America's leading scholars. Wolfe mines the bedrock of the liberal tradition, explaining how Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, John Dewey, and other celebrated minds helped...

What does it mean to be an American today? What does it mean to be middle class? Public opinion polls tell us that the nation is deeply divided between the Right, which is religious, traditional, as well as distressed by the belief that the nation has gone seriously downhill, and the Left, which is pro-choice, pro-welfare, as well as sympathetic to multiculturalism and gay rights. After spending two years speaking with middle-class Americans of many...