Do Liberals Want a Beautiful World?

Last month, the Public Culture Project at Harvard University hosted a conversation inspired by two essays in our winter issue on the “left and the good life”: Jon Baskin’s letter “On the Liberal Imagination” and Becca Rothfeld’s “Listless Liberalism,” a joint review of Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson and On Liberalism: In Defense of Freedom by Cass Sunstein, Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard Law School. Sunstein then wrote a spirited riposte to Becca on Substack. The conversation was moderated by James Wood, New Yorker book critic and Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism in Harvard’s English department. Their remarks have been condensed and edited for clarity. Note: this dialogue is quite long—if it gets cut off in the email version, click here to read it in full on our Substack.