But in the book's conclusion, as mentioned above, there is a bigger missed opportunity to examine the failings of contemporary liberalism. Fawcett touches on the post 9/11 debate about the balance of liberty and security but ignores the much more important gap that has opened up between the secular, liberal baby boomer worldview and the political and psychological intuitions of the ordinary citizen.

The liberal baby boomers tend to be universalistic, suspicious of most kinds of group or national attachment, and individualistic, committed to autonomy and self-realisation. Such liberals care about harm to people and about justice but, as the American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has pointed out, they don't "get" what most other people also get — loyalty, authority and the sacred.

The liberal baby boomer worldview is increasingly dominant in all three political parties and much of the media (with the notable exception of the Daily Mail, which is involved in a Kulturkampf against it). Modern liberalism, far from being a content-less set of techniques for reconciling different points of view, imposes the worldview of the mobile, graduate, upper professional elite on the rest of society. And the rest of society often doesn't like it — hence the rise of populism across Europe. To take just one current example: modern liberalism in its embrace of large-scale immigration, its enthusiasm for judge-made human rights law and for "non-discrimination" between EU citizens, ends up minimising the distinction between national citizens and outsiders.

What one might call the communitarian/evolutionary psychology critique of liberalism remains liberal (elsewhere I have called it post-liberal) but assumes people are moral particularists not universalists, and they care about the citizen/non-citizen distinction. That means agreeing that all humans are equal but they are not all equal to us; our obligations and allegiances ripple out from family and friends to stranger-fellow-citizens and only then to all humanity. Charity begins at home, even if it doesn't end there. That's why we spend 25 times more on the NHS than development aid.

This critique also places enormous value on a "social glue" that modern liberalism takes for granted or disdains as antediluvian, associated with ethnic exclusivity. But the glue is in fact a product of modern societies. It has been moulded over centuries, in part by liberal politics, to create a sense of interconnection and mutual regard between citizen-strangers that now also happily co-exists with racial and gender equality.

A well-functioning, open national story, one of the most important vehicles for social glue, is not some projection of the tribe onto modern societies but rather a priceless unifying asset in more diverse, individualistic societies. It is the erosion of national citizenship in the name of universal values — through the human rights movement or "ever closer union" in the EU — that is reigniting "Golden Dawn" tribalism. And it is the lack of social glue in many low-trust, authoritarian, poor countries that makes it so hard to create the public goods and public co-operation that we once took for granted in Europe: welfare states, redistribution of resources, low corruption. 

If modern liberalism is too disdainful about myths of lost intimacy, and too thoughtless about social glue, it is also wildly idealistic about choice and freedom. We are not "blank sheets" who choose our values at a political supermarket. Liberals tend to only value what is chosen and thus underestimate the intractable "given-ness" of so much of human life: age and gender, the era and society one is born into, even to some extent (according to modern science) one's intelligence and temperament.