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A Thousand Small Sanities

The Moral Adventure of Liberalism

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A Thousand Small Sanities

By: Adam Gopnik
Narrated by: Adam Gopnik
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Summary

 'WITTY, HUMANE, LEARNED' NEW YORK TIMES

The New York Times-bestselling author offers a stirring defence of liberalism against the dogmatisms of our time

Not since the early twentieth century has liberalism, and liberals, been under such relentless attack, from both right and left. The crisis of democracy in our era has produced a crisis of faith in liberal institutions and, even worse, in liberal thought.

A Thousand Small Sanities is a manifesto rooted in the lives of people who invented and extended the liberal tradition. Taking us from Montaigne to Mill, and from Middlemarch to the civil rights movement, Adam Gopnik argues that liberalism is not a form of centrism, nor simply another word for free markets, nor merely a term denoting a set of rights. It is something far more ambitious: the search for radical change by humane measures. Gopnik shows us why liberalism is one of the great moral adventures in human history--and why, in an age of autocracy, our lives may depend on its continuation.

(P)2019 Hachette Audio©2019 Adam Gopnik Art Political Science Politics & Government Liberalism Morality Socialism Social justice Capitalism
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Critic reviews

Written with Adam Gopnik's signature wit and charm, A Thousand Small Sanities is also a clarion call at a moment of great danger. This fierce, capacious, and startlingly intelligent defense of a whole political, social, and moral order is essential reading for our time.
A smart, exhilarating defense of the liberal tradition
Adam Gopnik is one of the greatest thinkers and wordsmiths of our age, and this book may be his most masterful, meaningful, and enjoyable yet. He turns his sweeping intellectual imagination into a conversation with a cross-partisan American longing for a renewal of common life that scarcely knows how to name itself. In an age in which we've connected ourselves with scale but without quality, and fractured communal cohesion in part by forgetting our shared liberal inheritance, this book is essential, redemptive reading
Witty, humane, learned . . . By assimilating what was once radical to his variety of liberalism, Gopnik hopes to prove to contemporary progressives that they can champion the woke causes of the 21st century without surrendering the liberal heritage of free speech, rule of law, scientific inquiry and individual conscience. (David Frum)
An elegant, impassioned, and rigorously reasoned effort to re-humanize the most humanistic moral and political philosophy our civilization has produced... (Maria Popova)
All stars
Most relevant
Read this book, is all I can say. And listen to it, too, because his voice is as warm as his thoughts. Gopnik argues generously and persuasively for a political outlook that matches his generosity of mind. It is reinvigorating.

Sanity from start to finish

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Clearly believing in every word and proud as a shiny button, the author is like a missionary in his urgency and his garbled and trips over words often (but not too much so that it is intolerable). But his impressive book, while acknowledging the challenges to society that have arisen as a result of how liberalism has been implemented, and while speaking brilliantly of the need to hold contradictory thoughts in one's head at the same time, does not address these (climate change, inequality, market fundamentalism, underinvestment in common goods like education) in a way that helps balance the almost fanatical way he sells us the wonders of liberalism. I am a Liberal and read the book to explore how to counter critics both inside and outside of my own head. Gopnik needs to spend more time on that part in a next book. Despite the space given in this book, he doesn't appear to take these challenges on board seriously and they don't lead him to sufficient rethinking of his beloved (and mine) liberalism.

The reader/author sometimes trips over his words

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I’d highly recommend this to both friends and sceptics of liberalism. It defends its principles but recognises it’s shortcomings no less.

An eloquent and considered defence of liberalism.

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