The journalist and New York Times-bestselling author Adam Gopnik offers a stirring defence of liberalism against the dogmatisms of our time. Taking us from Montaigne to Mill, and from Middlemarch to the civil rights movement, he shows us why liberalism is one of the great moral adventures in human history – and why, in an age of autocracy, our lives may depend on its continuation.

A Thousand Small Sanities is a manifesto rooted in the lives of the people who invented and extended the liberal tradition. Adam Gopnik argues that liberalism is not a form of centrism, nor simply another word for free markets, nor merely a term denoting a set of rights. It is something far more ambitious: the search for radical change by humane measures.

Adam Gopnik has written for The New Yorker since 1986. He is a three-time winner of the National Magazine Award for Essays and for Criticism, and the George Polk Award for magazine reporting. From 1995 to 2000 he lived in Paris; he now lives in New York with his wife and their two children.

Elif Shafak is an award-winning novelist and journalist and is the most widely read female writer in Turkey. Her work has been published in 50 languages. She is known as a women’s rights, minority rights and LGBT rights advocate as well as an inspirational public intellectual and speaker. Shafak is a TED Global speaker, a member of Weforum Global Agenda Council on Creative Economy in Davos and a founding member of ECFR (European Council on Foreign Relations). She was awarded the title of Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres in 2010 by the French government. She was the Weidenfeld Visiting Professor in Comparative European Literature at Oxford in 2018 and is an honorary fellow at St. Anne’s College in Oxford.