As a political theorist at Oxford and Princeton, Alan Ryan has been a prominent voice in debates about liberalism for half a century. He knows well the conversation metaphor, and its crucial limitation: the dead cannot talk back. The texts that convey their thoughts do not speak to contemporary concerns. Indeed, what survives as the canon of political writing is partial, and is given status because it endured while much else has been lost. Key concepts are rarely stable; what we understand by ‘the state’ makes sense only for some communities, just as ‘religious freedom’ depends utterly on the setting.

Yet The Making of Modern Liberalism is itself a conversation of sorts. Ryan has collected a lifetime of essays stretching back to 1965. His writing ranges over the history of liberalism, influential thinkers such as J.S. Mill, Bertrand Russell, and John Dewey, and core concepts from freedom and rights to property. An elegant Introduction acknowledges earlier lapses and defends continuing preoccupations.

We glimpse a man constantly talking with himself, testing his beliefs, modifying earlier conclusions in the light of later scholarship. The youthful Ryan is judged not too bold but too cautious, accepting without sufficient reflection Isaiah Berlin’s characterisation of negative and positive liberty. For the Alan Ryan of 1965, the merits of Berlin’s position ‘seem unanswerable’. An essay from 1999 reports later serious reservations. ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ is no longer an account of liberty but ‘more nearly a broadside against everything Berlin deplored and a gesture in favour of all the things he wished to defend’. The Alan Ryan of 2012 dispenses quickly with Berlin’s most famous argument. Ryan now accepts only one concept of liberty, the positive statement implied in the core question ‘am I free?’ After exploring the alternative offered by Thomas Hobbes, Ryan returns to the ordinary meaning of liberty.

As often, the older Ryan draws on classical examples. The Spartans fought the Persians against overwhelming odds because to be a Spartan was to be a citizen who submitted to the laws of the city. Those who lived under Xerxes were subjects, with no choice about how to live. This distinction was worth defending to the death at Thermopylae. Yet the Spartan version of freedom is not that celebrated by liberal thinkers such as Mill. To be a citizen is to choose a community and its norms, but Spartans did not enjoy the individual rights that underpin representative institutions in democratic states. Such rights depend on a political philosophy that Ryan sees as essentially a modern creed, an ‘offshoot of Protestant Christianity’.

By the early nineteenth century, thinkers grappled with the idea of individual conscience and the right of the state to impose religious obligations. This was not an issue for the ancients, argues Ryan, because ‘ritual practice’ rather than personal belief was all that mattered in religion. But societies compelled to deal with an emphasis on personal morality and competing views of faith required ways to separate the demands of church and state. The focus shifted to the rights of the individual, and toleration became the basis of liberalism, now the dominant organising principle of democratic politics.

To secure tolerance as the basis of political life is a formidable human achievement, requiring a sophisticated social consensus about how we treat others. As Ryan says of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971), only liberalism has invented constitutions that ‘appeal to persons of very different religious or metaphysical convictions without relying on the truth of any of them’. Such rules rely on an invisible foundation of shared understandings about freedom, rights, immunities, and possessions, all issues canvassed in these essays. Our rights are not intrinsic, but rather a political settlement captured in law, and always therefore at risk.

How to understand rights, and their place within liberalism, is a particular concern for Ryan. This emerges strongly in his account of Rawls. Ryan is sympathetic to the Rawlsian project, yet notes the singular focus on rights that distinguishes American thinking about liberalism. Because, for Rawls, ‘questions of civil liberties take priority over questions of welfare’, any redistribution of wealth must be framed around the rights of those affected. This can be a difficult standard to apply in nations without the individualist ethic and institutions of the United States, and here Ryan returns to his emphasis on context. Political arrangements are underpinned by material and social circumstances, and the relative importance of contending concepts around freedom, rights, and property vary as a consequence.

The late John Rawls cannot rejoin the dialogue, consider Ryan’s criticisms, or reformulate his argument as he would in a living conversation. The concepts Rawls offered are now part of the tradition, a starting point for further debate, but never the last word. There is a sense, too, of closing argument in The Making of Modern Liberalism, a lifetime of reflection now curated around themes and key thinkers. It is a formidable body of work, testament both to its inquisitive author and the scholarly institutions that have supported long and productive years of scholarship. It is the contribution of someone who takes liberalism to heart – opening his own work for careful scrutiny, and inviting the debate to continue.