What do Liberals Fear?

My comments on Kahan’s new history of liberalism have a relatively narrow focus: the book’s organizing concept, fear, rather than its insightful accounts of different authors and movements. I suppose that makes me a “lumper,” in the familiar dichotomy between lumpers and splitters that Kahan cites in his introductory chapter. But I’m afraid that even historians have to lump it sometimes. For you need to know just what idea you’re splitting up, even if your goal is to trace its different manifestations. You need to identify the genus correctly if you want to record the lives of its most interesting species.