A new book, reviewed by The New York Times and The Washington Post, by University of Sydney Professor Alexandre Lefebvre investigates how liberalism profoundly shapes our values, beliefs, and daily lives. In Liberalism as a Way of Life, he argues that liberalism informs our moral, psychological, and aesthetic outlooks, and can be the basis for a good, fun, and rewarding way of living.

Alexandre Lefebvre argues that liberalism isn't just a political ideology having to do with individual rights, parliaments, and courts. Today it has become so much more. Its values have become the air we breathe and water we swim in, impacting every aspect of our lives from our moral values to our everyday choices.

“Let me put it this way,” he says. “If you ask a religious person where they get their values and moral sensibility from, they’ll have an answer right away: a church, faith, or religious text. No fuss, no muss.”

“But it’s tricky for those of us, like me, without religion—the 40 percent of us in Australia who select ‘no religion’. What can we point to?”

The answer he puts forward is liberalism. Liberalism is an ideology born in the 19th century and its core values, Lefebvre states, are “personal freedom, fairness, tolerance, reciprocity, self-reflection, and irony. In the way that Christianity, for example, has a recognisable package of moral commitments and excellences (such as love, fellowship, charity, and devotion), so does liberalism.”

Whoever left this on the train I've handed it in at the police station so it doesn't get stolen or destroyed by the weather, it's waiting for you to collect. :)

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