Great post. Does the book attempt to gauge the relative level of severity of the crisis that liberalism currently finds itself in vs. the crisis it was in during the turn of the 20th century? My hunch is today's fear of resentment/pessimism is not nearly as serious as the fears of revolution and poverty faced in the wake of 1848. Much of the resentment we see today is based on the perceived economic and moral failings of liberalism, but in my opinion these critiques are not nearly as severe as the older critiques of Marx or Nietzsche. Curious if you or the book would argue that today's crisis is truly commensurate or just a weak rehashing of older critiques.
Thank you for your appreciation. Your question is very good. I don't think that the book really gives a comparative assessment of the gravity of the contemporary crisis of liberalism against the one of a century ago. And I must admit that I've never thought about this question (at least in this way) myself. I would definitively agree that the immediate threat is less serious than it was in the 1930s or in the 1840s. I think a mistake of many contemporary liberals is to exagerrate the threat of despotism in the hope of convincing people to give up their support for populists. I think that will never work (as I've written about this in one or two posts published here). That's why the nature of the fear that liberalism should account for nowadays is not the same as the fear of totalitarianism or the fear of revolution/reaction.
A liberalism defined by Rawls, Nozick, Friedman and Shklar seems to exclude most people who would be called "liberals" in US political parlance, and everyone who would prefer a term like "progressive", "social democratic" or "socialist". Roughly speaking the division here is between the stream of liberalism derived from Locke and that derived from JS Mill.
Most of the followers of Nozick and Friedman (propertarians and market liberals) whose views may in turn be derived from Locke, have capitulated to Trump. Good riddance, IMO, as long as we in the left-liberal tradition can outnumber them.
Great post. Does the book attempt to gauge the relative level of severity of the crisis that liberalism currently finds itself in vs. the crisis it was in during the turn of the 20th century? My hunch is today's fear of resentment/pessimism is not nearly as serious as the fears of revolution and poverty faced in the wake of 1848. Much of the resentment we see today is based on the perceived economic and moral failings of liberalism, but in my opinion these critiques are not nearly as severe as the older critiques of Marx or Nietzsche. Curious if you or the book would argue that today's crisis is truly commensurate or just a weak rehashing of older critiques.
Thank you for your appreciation. Your question is very good. I don't think that the book really gives a comparative assessment of the gravity of the contemporary crisis of liberalism against the one of a century ago. And I must admit that I've never thought about this question (at least in this way) myself. I would definitively agree that the immediate threat is less serious than it was in the 1930s or in the 1840s. I think a mistake of many contemporary liberals is to exagerrate the threat of despotism in the hope of convincing people to give up their support for populists. I think that will never work (as I've written about this in one or two posts published here). That's why the nature of the fear that liberalism should account for nowadays is not the same as the fear of totalitarianism or the fear of revolution/reaction.
A liberalism defined by Rawls, Nozick, Friedman and Shklar seems to exclude most people who would be called "liberals" in US political parlance, and everyone who would prefer a term like "progressive", "social democratic" or "socialist". Roughly speaking the division here is between the stream of liberalism derived from Locke and that derived from JS Mill.
Most of the followers of Nozick and Friedman (propertarians and market liberals) whose views may in turn be derived from Locke, have capitulated to Trump. Good riddance, IMO, as long as we in the left-liberal tradition can outnumber them.