This presentation is based on Professor Lefebvre's new book, Liberalism as a Way of Life, and about how liberal values and practices can be the basis for a personal worldview, way of living, and spiritual orientation. You don’t have to be liberal and something else, such as Christian, Buddhist, Kantian, hedonist, utilitarian, or whatever else. It is fully possible and rewarding to be liberal through and through. This means that the values and attitudes enshrined in liberal political institutions, and ubiquitous in the background culture of liberal democracies – such as reciprocity, tolerance, personal freedom, impartiality, equality of opportunity, irony, and the like – have the potential to inform a much more general sensibility, one that is supple enough to be realised in all different aspects of life: from family to the workplace, from friendship to enmity, from humour to outrage, and everything in between.

Alexandre Lefebvre is Professor of Politics and Philosophy at the University of Sydney. He is the author of Liberalism as a Way of Life (Princeton 2024), Human Rights and the Care of the Self (Duke 2018), Human Rights as a Way of Life: on Bergson’s Political Philosophy (Stanford 2013), and The Image of Law: Deleuze, Bergson, Spinoza (Stanford 2008).