When I heard last year that Adam Gopnik was writing a “stirring defense of liberalism” titled A Thousand Small Sanities, I had many questions. How would he turn liberalism into a story about his kids gliding through gilded cities, or the passionate romances of famous historical figures? What would a typical sentence look like, between Gopnik’s penchant for wince-inducing half-jokes and his tendency to invert the terms of his sentences? “You don’t revolt your way to reform, you reform your way to revolt,” perhaps. I wish I had been wrong.

A THOUSAND SMALL SANITIES: THE MORAL ADVENTURE OF LIBERALISM by Adam Gopnik Basic Books, 272 pp., $28.00

A longtime essayist for The New Yorker and a best-selling memoirist, Gopnik likely needs no introduction. But for the purposes of reviewing a book that strenuously asserts that the term “bourgeois” is a slur devoid of meaning, it is worth recalling that Gopnik came of age in 1980s New York where, arriving starry-eyed from Montreal, he quickly penetrated the world of genteel bohemia and scaled the heights of elite journalism. Abandoning a graduate degree in art history, he wrote about the art world and New York cultural life, gradually expanding into numerous and sundry aesthetic subjects. After he moved to Paris in the 1990s and recounted his family’s charmed life there, first-person essays formed the basis of his brand. In addition to bemused, self-deprecating, and often unabashedly saccharine narrations of family life, Gopnik’s job at The New Yorker seemed to involve running around the city doing things that normal people imagine rich New Yorkers doing, like going to an artist’s study on Friday afternoons for a “year or so” to draw nude models, or spending six years in psychoanalysis.

All the while, Gopnik maintained his ambitions as a critic, producing an expansive archive of work touching not only on art, but on literature, history, philosophy, and religion. Intellectually no less than materially, Gopnik is a product of his time, a child of the end of history and the first wave of ecstatic globalization. As he noted in 2002, a number of American intellectuals in the final decade of the twentieth century made Isaiah Berlin, “the image of enlightened humanism,” their guiding star. One of the important features of Berlin’s thought was, as Gopnik put it, that “liberal humanism is superior precisely because it can encompass the humanity of even those who are most anti-liberal.” Berlin was famous for his empathetic readings of counter-Enlightenment thinkers, which warned of the always-present irrational side of human nature.

A loose consensus formed around Berlin’s argument that “positive liberty”—the attempt to define liberty for everyone—was at the origin of totalitarian dictatorship. Berlin’s devotees in the 1990s, especially Michael Ignatieff and Mark Lilla, put considerable, if not uncritical, stock in Berlin’s visions of inherent human violence and its potential to break loose at the first sign of an overly ambitious political project. The “Berlin consensus,” which Gopnik seems to have absorbed, held that a more limited “negative liberty”—allowing people to pursue their own definitions of liberty—could protect individuals from such projects. No matter the scale of crises or the structural impediments to reform, liberal incrementalism was the only answer, because everything else has proved to lead to mass murder. Reading Berlin was one way of turning no-alternative politics into intellectual heroism.

But this always sat oddly with Gopnik’s rhapsodic persona and at least part-time belief in human beings’ power to expand the reach of justice and equality. He was perhaps closer to money and glamour than other representatives of the Berlin consensus, and those forces acted as powerful stimulants. Even more important, Gopnik has never been able to keep his bottomless enthusiasm for bourgeois domesticity contained to his personal essays: With an almost clockwork consistency, he loses himself rifling through the lives of famous thinkers for evidence of the “bourgeois obsessions” he explored in Paris to the Moon, especially romantic marriages (Napoleon, Darwin, and Lincoln all loved their wives uxoriously) and shopping (“There are few more premonitory or touching documents than Voltaire’s shopping lists”).