Freedom does not already exist inside individuals ready to burst out once the constraints have been removed; it has to be nurtured within the bounds of human nature and those givens. This is what the Sixties revolution did not understand. Or rather the Sixties consisted of two movements closely entangled. There was the rights revolution for women and minorities that represented a leap forward in freedom and equality. But there was also a more "emancipatory" impulse to reject obligation and tradition that fuelled a surge in various social pathologies, from crime to the breakdown of the family, that we are only now recovering from.

Compared with traditional societies modern societies have a low moral and political consensus and, to many modern liberals, therein lies our freedom. Conventional liberalism does not like the idea of the common good because — in all but basic things like peace and physical security — it does not know how we can arrive at it in diverse, societies with many conflicting interests and ideas of the "good". It fears that like the "general will" it will end up being imposed by those who think they do know what it is.

Liberalism does have a big point here. But, of course, modern liberalism is not just a technique for reconciling conflicts: it also smuggles in a very clear view of the good society. It has a bias towards universalism and individualism, it places a relatively low value on stability and continuity, indeed it is ambivalent about the idea of community, which is something to be celebrated in the abstract but escaped from through geographical or social mobility in practice. The idea of the good life turns out to be something that looks very like the life of today's metropolitan upper professional — say Nick Clegg. But this is not how everyone wants to live. Modern liberalism does not have sufficient space for the more communitarian virtues of belonging, security and solidarity. It speaks to only one part of human nature, which is not necessarily an obstacle to its success — after all the Christianity of the Sermon on the Mount hardly goes with the grain of human instincts either.

Any workable political philosophy requires the taming of some human traits through morality and institutions, and every philosophy stresses some things at the expense of others. But as Isaiah Berlin argued, people actually want many of the same things: security, recognition, love, meaningful work, sufficient wealth and freedom to live a good life in the many ways that can be conceived.
The free-floating, self-realising individual of modern liberal philosophy does not help us think coherently about how we live, especially for the least successful in our "two-thirds" societies with their affluent majorities.

Actually existing people are rooted in communities and families, often experience change as loss and have a hierarchy of moral obligations. Too often the language of contemporary liberalism ignores the real affinities of place and people. Those affinities are not obstacles to be overcome on the road to the good society; they are one of its foundation stones. People will always favour their own families and communities; it is the job of a realistic liberalism, a post-liberal politics, to reconcile such particularist feelings with fluid, open societies in which people expect high degrees of individual autonomy. Modern liberalism's failure to achieve that reconciliation has left a large Nigel Farage-shaped hole in our politics.