For Your Weekend Reading: When Freedom is Not Enough

Plus some reading & listening recommendations.

If you're a new subscriber, welcome—and thank you so much for being here.
In addition to my Tuesday and Thursday essays, which are free to all, I put out a Weekend Reading piece for paid subscribers. These are a bit more reflective. I also include some reading links and listening recommendations at the end, for anyone looking to go further. Happy Sunday!

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Last week, I wrote about the collapse of the social contract—the quiet breakdown of trust between citizens and the institutions meant to serve them. Without material dignity, I argued, there can be no political legitimacy.

But maybe the problem goes even deeper than that. Maybe the crisis we’re in isn’t just structural. But philosophical.

Because beneath every political vision—beneath every party platform, protest chant, or campaign promise—is a more basic question:

What does it mean to live a good life?

And in our political discourse today, that question barely registers.

Instead, we’re offered a thinner substitute: freedom. Or more specifically, liberalism’s particular understanding of it—freedom as individual autonomy, as choice, as movement, as escape from constraint. It's powerful. It’s also profoundly limited.

Liberalism taught us how to win rights. But it forgot how to build relationships.

Freedom can get you away from something. But it can’t tell you where to go.

Liberalism promises progress: in rights, in representation, in GDP, in education, in access and visibility. The idea that more is better, that newer is fairer, that forward is always the right direction. But what if that promise—while real—has crowded out something more fundamental? What if in making freedom our highest value, we’ve forgotten how to ask what’s worth staying for? What’s worth preserving? What’s worth building and keeping?