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A Thousand Small Sanities

The Moral Adventure of Liberalism

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A Thousand Small Sanities

Written by: Adam Gopnik
Narrated by: Adam Gopnik
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About this listen

The New York Times best-selling author offers a stirring defense of liberalism against the dogmatisms of our time

Not since the early 20th 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.

©2019 Adam Gopnik (P)2019 Hachette Audio
Great Britain Ideologies & Doctrines Modern Political Science United States Women World
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What the critics say

"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." (Stephen Greenblatt, author of The Swerve: How the World Became Modern)

"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." (Krista Tippett, host, On Being)

What listeners say about A Thousand Small Sanities

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Boring and Obvious.

This author reads like hes speaking to a child. The amount of condescension coming from his words is shocking. it was shocking the amount of obvious nonsense the author spewed within the first part of the book. Way too much labeling of left and right...Wasn't able to get through the rest of it too easily unfortunately. Might be a nice book for a hardcore Liberal. A regrettable purchase for an audiobook though. Peace.

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Compelling and urgent call to action.

Thoughtful, reasoned and fair (offering charitable readings of liberalism’s critics) - yet still manages to be a powerful, persuasive and passionate argument in defence of liberal humanism. Needed now more than ever with illiberal authoritarianism is on the rise everywhere.

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