# The Eduaction of a European Liberal I am a liberal. I have been one since I first began to think seriously about politics as a teenager. Yet I rarely describe myself publicly as a liberal, because most people no longer understand what the word _liberal_ actually signifies. Many, infected by the polarized and dazzlingly stupid American political discourse that permeates the internet, take a liberal to be a leftist. I have never been a leftist. Ironically, many others — especially here in continental Europe, which I call my beloved home — take a liberal to be a disciple of some rigid Anglo-Saxon ideology worshipping markets, some -ism: libertarianism or liberalism, be it neo, classical or high. Both are wrong, and both misunderstandings share a cause: We — and with _we_ I mean especially Europeans today, but also the Americans — have forgotten our own history. Liberality is the soul of European Civilisation. The history of European Civilisation is the history of liberalism, from its dawn in ancient Rome to its dusk in today’s California. Being a good European means being a liberal. This essay is about why America will fall and Europe will not rise again without remembering that. ## The Liberalitas in Rome Let us begin _ab ovo_, with the latin origins of the word _liberal_ itself. _Liber_: free. _Libertas_: Freedom. _Liberalis_: befitting a free person. _Liberalitas_: liberality. The words and the concepts originate as much of European Civilisation itself with the Ancient Romans, who overthrew the last of their tyrant kings in 509 BC. Liberty blossomed in the Roman Republic for almost five centuries thereafter — twice as longs as it has in the US American Republic so far — before it was extinguished by the populist turned tyrant Caesar. In republican Rome, to be free meant to be a citizen and not a slave — to stand under no master’s arbitrary will. The Romans knew that this condition could exist only under the rule of law and a constitution ordered toward the common good, the _res publica_. From that insight they seeded constitutionalism, an idea that would spread across the world over the following millennia. But a constitution, as the Ancient Romans learned and the Americans today are learning again, does not safeguard liberty by itself. Freedom demands a certain character from the free for its survival through the generations; a virtue befitting a free person, _liberalis_. Cicero called this _liberalitas_ the bond of human society, a generous disposition of citizens toward one another, giving and receiving in ways that strengthen the common life and the shared prosperity and liberty. Its opposite was _illiberalitas_ — literally translated, _the conduct unworthy of a free man_; and this _illiberality_ was defined especially by _avaritia_ (greed) and _sordes_ (meanness). To live only for one's own profits and pleasures was, in the Roman Republican vocabulary, to act like a slave, whatever one's legal status. Seneca subsequently pictured the liberal virtue thus as the circular dance of the three Graces: _giving, receiving, returning_. This is what being a liberal actually means: cultivating and practicing the virtues that are both worthy for a free citizen, and also necessary to safeguard the free republican order and civilisation. From the same root grows liberal education, the _artes liberales,_ that survived the fall of the Roman Republic: not training for a job, but for a virtueous character; the formation of citizens worthy of freedom. That is the history and truth buried by the dumb culture wars and the ideologicals -isms of today alike. Liberality is a moral and civic ideal, not a theory of atomized utility-maximizers, not cult of capitalism for capitalisms sakes, not some blank check of rights, not some big government or small government fetish. Rights and liberties are not gifts of nature; they were wrested from the brutal state of nature, from tyrants and kings in bloody revolutions, and they rest on duties and virtues, are maintained by spine, education and empathy. Liberality is the discipline of being worthy of this freedom. And looking at the Western World today, there is much reason to doubt whether we are still worthy of it. ## No Liberty Without Solidarity That liberality means more than rugged individualism is not mere academic theory or etymological smart-assery for me; it is also european and in my case also very concrete family history. Both of my parents grew up in communist-occupied Poland. Not long after the declaration of martial law, my father’s anti-communist activism forced him to flee. He arrived in West Germany a stateless asylant. A few years later the tyranny fell — and not to some Randian fantasy of powerful individuals standing alone against the collective or by free trade. The chains of communism were broken by the proletarians uniting and rising up; it was broken by a workers union, by _Solidarność_: dockworkers striking in Gdańsk despite getting gunned down for it by the communist authorities in 1970s; church networks organising the resistance, underground presses; ten million workers unionizing in _Solidarność_ in defiance to the system thereafter and protesting until the free elections in 1989. People who owned almost nothing individually, and yet shared and risked everything collectively. The movement’s name was its political theory: _Solidarność, Solidarty_. As many Poles said it then and many say it now again, when standing with Belarusians, Georgians and Ukrainians against the Russian Imperialism of today: _Nie ma wolności bez solidarności._ _There is no liberty without solidarity._ Liberality, in the deep sense that underlies and defines European Civilisation, was never about some Randian megalomania of the Trumps and Thiels of today, not about giving free-passes for oligarchs to enrich themselves at the expense of their fellow citizens. It was about virtue, about the struggle against tyranny. Citizens mustering the bravery and dignity to come together to fight tyranny, to die for their shared liberty like the workers in the Gdańsk shipyard did in 1970, has much more in common with what founding fathers of European Civilisation, Republican Romans like Cicero, were describing as the virtue of liberalitas. The experiences of the 20th century — the totalitarianism of the Nazis, Fascists and Communists — taught us Europeans to not only fear the tyranny of the collective and of governments, but also to understand that the fight against evils as these cannot ever be won alone, but only by the free citiziens, by the free world, working together. ## The Californian Dusk Today many of the people framing themselves the loudest as the defenders of liberty hold the most wretched concept of it. In 2009, Peter Thiel argued in the infamous essay "[The Education of a Libertarian](https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian/)" that freedom and democracy are incompatible. The post-liberals and neoreactionaries following in his wake — the likes of Trump, Musk, Yarvin — preach more or less openly that freedom and democracy are enemies, that politics is a swamp to escape rather than a commons to govern, and that the future belongs to sovereign individuals who exit: into cyberspace, out into cosmic space. In the name of their own liberty they practice the vice the Romans called _illiberalitas_: they make their fortunes eroding human agency through addictive, polarizing algorithms, curating public discourse by engagement metrics, dismantling the constitutional order — and they brand their attacks as a fight for freedom. A misleading branding not much different from the lies told two millenia ago by oligarchs like Crassus and populists like Julius Caesar that smashed the Roman Republic and paved the way for the authoritarian Empire. Their exit from democracy is the tyranny of oligarchy; liberty for a few, tyranny for many, liberalitas for none. During the Cold War the mortal threat to liberality came from the socialist left. And while there are still some antiliberal, leftists forces attacking the liberal order today, the way larger threat to it today wears national flags as a costume. Trumpism, the AfD, the Identitarians and the likes, pose as saviors of European civilization; but they are its betrayers. Petty nationalism, racism, tribalism are not the hallmarks of our civilization but the symptoms of its decline. Both the oligarchs bankrolling the nationalists, and the nationalists shielding the oligarchs, are illiberal, in both the ideological and the truest moral sense. In Cicero’s vocabulary both are not proud but slavish: souls that regard only their own profit, tribe and grievance. Most of them have failed to grasp the civilisation they claim to defend; being too misled, agitated and resentful to realise they are burning down the house they are claiming to protect. The rest are lying about it; knowing very well which dirty treason they commit for the oligarchs paychecks. None of this makes me sentimental or more trustful about the state. A Pole needs no lecture on government as the enemy of liberty; it often is; neither the Nazi Concentration Camps nor the Soviet Gulags were built by private enterprise alone. But the state is also the only instrument that can ever secure liberty at scale. Civic liberty, as Machiavelli pointed out in the _Discourses_, lives not in anyone’s virtue but in the standoff created by a Republic — freedom survives where private and public power keeps each other in check; where pluralism allows difference to flourish. Thus: Whoever fights the governments tyranny while serving the oligarchic one is not liberty’s friend but the next master’s herald. ## The Liberal Renaissance _Libertas_ is in decline, and with it the spirit of Europe, the soul we have inherited from our ancestors who carved civilization out of the bloody state of nature and from the grips of tyrants. Today, our continent is trapped in a stupor of meekness, nepotism, visionlessness and economic stagnation. We are besieged by imperialists and oligarchs from without, and by tribalists and populists from within. European Civilisation will rise again, if it rises, by embracing its unity and re-embracing its soul, its liberality. We must remember who we are and act accordingly. Concretely, this means the rule of law with actual teeth. It requires a federal republican constitution for the continent, because unity is the only scale at which European liberty can defend itself. It means treating antitrust laws and algorithmic regulation not as bureaucratic burdens, but as existential defenses of human agency. It means rejection of chat controls and other temptations of mass surveillance. It demands markets freed for true entrepreneurship, not rigged as playgrounds for subsidized legacy corporations. And it requires a revival of the _artes liberales_, at least in concept if not in content: an education system that forms virtuos citizens, not just compliant employees; a task made urgent as both the pandemic and the rise of generative AI have eroded the civic foundations of our younger generations. We do live in a society. Or as Cicero put it elegantly: _Non nobis solum nati sumus._ *We are not born for ourselves alone*. No one beat the communist cadres alone, and no one will beat the techno-oligarchs and Autocracy, Inc. alone. There is no liberty without solidarity. Only when we remember this, we can hope to remain worthy of our liberty and see it not only survive but also thrive; and with it all of European Civilisation.