Huge portion of liberals and liberal authors do not emphasize philosophy, which leads to disaster
Clickbaitey title, but that helps tranction eh?
Im not gonna make this into a sneaky subversion piece, so lets get straight to the point. I used to be a big fan of Nozick, Locke, Mises and Hayek, because I thought they were the peak of the liberal tradition, until I took a philosophy class in uni, realized that I - and thus they - lack extremely in various philosophical fundamentals, and decided to get into Tara Smith, Ayn Rand, Jiří Kinkor and Eric Mack:D
The first authors that I mentioned have one huge common problem, which is that they largely ignore meta-questions of liberal philosophical tradition, and either focus on post-arguments (in the sense of criticizing something based on implicitly and vaguely established groundwork) or they simply focus on economics and analyze everything through the economic lense. None of these authors care too much about a metaphysics/ontology, meta-ethics and ethics, epistemology, esthetics etc.
Most popularly recommended liberal/libertarian authors are in fact economists or heavily economics-leaning.
I understand the thinkers that I mentioned are held dearly by tons of people in the liberty movement, so criticizing them is always a minefield, but none of them offer a complex and robust defense, and primarily a clarification, of the liberal tradition as a whole. Clarification and complexity is necessary so that the gaps (meta-ethics, epistemology etc), which many authors simply ignore or fail to fill, are not subjectively solved by reader, which usually leads to confusions, fragmentation and possibly even destruction.
Example: All of you are familiar with the schism surrounding the definition of "liberalism", but such schism exists in regards to other terms as well, such as morality, relativism, subjectivism, altruism, objectivity, rationality, gender, capitalism, democracy, self-interest etc.
To me its extremely dangerous, that some liberals for instance derive rights from religious mysticism, or some odd superficial mechanism or evasion. It cannot be the case that such crucial important parts of the philosophy are left up to relativist interpretations, as that simply leads to fragmentation.
Example: How many of you have wondered where do rights come from? Are you really satisfied with the idea that they simply come from the state of nature, no-questions-asked?
2nd Example: Some of you may have heard the something along the lines of "I think this is LEGALLY their right, but MORALLY wrong", without the person actually explaining according to what standard is it morally wrong or why does the differentation exist in the first place.
If you dont have a proper axiomatic groundwork for liberal philosophy, you cannot ever hope to create a liberty culture which will defend and argue for a proper liberal polity. You cannot rely on the outside influences of bankrupt philosophy to fill in the gaps, because those are the very things that cause those and that which liberals fight against.
At this point you guys should know what is up, at least somewhat, if youve been in the movement for a while. The world is not monophilosophically aligned and needs to be simply shown the facts and thats it. The world is philosophically broken, and Im willing to go as far as to say that you NEED the right philosophy to survive.