An Illiberal Life

REVIEW ESSAY
Not Thinking Like a Liberal
by Raymond Geuss
Harvard University Press, 2022, 206 pages

Raymond Geuss, Cambridge philosopher, is a prominent critic of liberalism and neoliberalism, and of the tradition of anglophone analytic political philosophy that he sees as their ideological prop. His scholarship, since the 1970s, can be read as an attempt to model another form of thinking, an approach inspired by classical antiquity, Nietzsche, and the Frankfurt school. Against what he sees as the pallid abstractions of Anglo-American political philosophy, Geuss presents himself as a champion of a more skeptical, historically informed way of thinking about politics. In his new book, Not Thinking Like a Liberal, Geuss gives an account of the autobiographical origins of this mode of thought and, more ambitiously, though also more vaguely, gestures toward an alternative to liberalism.¹

Not Thinking Like a Liberal traces Geuss’s education, first at an unusual Catholic boarding school in the 1950s, and then at Columbia University with figures such as Sidney Morgenbesser. As a memoir, the book is not particularly compelling. It contains little in the way of events, psychology, or gossip. Geuss underplays, for example, the con­flict with Morgenbesser that eventually led to their break and, in a notable silence, avoids discussion of Robert Nozick, who was also Morgenbesser’s student (as an undergraduate) during that era. Nozick became one of the most prominent philosophers in the tradition Geuss despises and is a frequent target of his polemic in other writings.

Not Thinking is rather a paean to Geuss’s influences. This mode of exposition allows him to express his political and philosophical commit­ments without having to argue for them, presenting them instead as aspects of his character acquired through engagement with his teachers. Geuss sees it as his good fortune that these influences equipped him to avoid the almost irresistibly stultifying influence of liberalism on Ameri­cans’ minds. He was able to escape this stupefaction, he writes, thanks to the peculiar combination of Catholic and Marxist influences among the refugee clergymen who staffed his school.

The Catholicism that shaped Geuss was an idiosyncratic, even heterodox one. The instructors at his school, who had fled Communist Hungary, rejected Thomism, and behind it, Aristotelianism, which appeared to them as static, ahistorical visions of the world and humanity. The philosophical lights that shone most brightly for them were existentialism, informed by Heidegger, and Marxism, informed by Hegel. About the former, Geuss has relatively little to say, but the Marxist tradition, looking back to Hegel and forward to the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, has been a critical part of his intellectual orientation and of his scholarly life. (His first book, The Idea of a Critical Theory, originally published in 1981, is a stimulating examination particularly of Habermas and Adorno.) Geuss states at the conclu­sion of Not Thinking that “in the fifty years since I finished my doctoral dissertation in 1975,” little has altered “the basic way of viewing the world which I had acquired at my boarding school and at university.”²

The world, in Geuss’s eyes, has not changed much either since the middle of the 1970s, the moment when neoliberalism began its ascent over Fordism in the political economy of the West. This was also the moment when Nozick and John Rawls, chief targets of Geuss’s critical ire throughout his career, fixed at the heart of Anglo-American political philosophy a form of reasoning divorced from historical data, focused on constructing apparently context-free models of ideal societies out of rational premises and thought experiments. Geuss seems to believe that this way of thinking, which predominated in many philosophy depart­ments in the English-speaking world during his academic career, was and remains a dominant force in our political and collective mental life. He charges that the historically unspecific forms of thinking characteristic of the work of Nozick and Rawls, by legitimating the liberal state (with concessions to social welfare in Rawls’s case), have served as justifications of neoliberal economic globalization. These theories, based on imaginary polities, have bred similar notions about “the market” and limited our imaginations to the point of making alternatives to the current order unthinkable. Both the state in this line of anglophone political theory, and the market in neoliberal economic thought, are placeless, timeless abstractions based on thinkers’ often suspiciously elaborate speculations about what supposedly rational agents might do or desire.

Fighting the Last War

Whatever the merits of Geuss’s critiques of Nozick and Rawls, or of their style of philosophy, Geuss appears, now toward the end of his career, to have wasted, and to be wasting, a certain portion of his intel­lectual energy fighting such foes, endowing them with unreal importance. In an embarrassing 2015 review of a book by the comedian Russell Brand, for example, Geuss hails the latter as an insightful political thinker who disrupts the neoliberal status quo. To the defense of our economic system, Geuss summons (under the cringe-inducing pseudonyms of Lady T., Pisher Bob, and Preacher John) the spirits of Thatcher, Nozick, and Rawls, whose straw-man arguments he demolishes.³ Contemporary capitalism, Geuss insists against these interlocutors, serves only the short-term interests of a globalized financial elite, as it makes life for ordinary people more precarious and imperils our planetary future through climate change. This is true enough, but hardly a novel insight to be won through struggle with figures who, besides being dead, no longer represent anything like the intellectual and politi­cal common sense of advanced industrial nations. One can hardly account for neoliberalism’s survival, in the face of its increasingly evident failures, by appealing to such politicians and thinkers who repre­sent, to be sure, a historically important aspect of the emergence of our current order, but not the main features of the ideology at work in our most important institutions today.

Geuss tends to write as if his philosophical opponents were still (to the extent that they ever were) a critical source of legitimation for the neoliberal order. But, particularly since the economic crisis of 2008, the more recent crisis of Covid, and the accumulating, slow violence of declining social mobility and growing inequality, neoliberalism of the Thatcherite sort has long lost whatever grip it held on the imaginations of Western intellectuals. One way to understand the appeal, to Western elites and intellectuals, of the relatively new “woke” political discourse on race, gender, etc., is to see it as a means of filling this void left by the waning of our collective faith in neoliberalism—a sort of spiritual sup­plement giving new life to contemporary capitalism. In this sense, it is akin to the cultural conservatism and “family values” rhetoric of the last generation of the American Right, which, like the “woke” Left, failed to see our economic system as the engine producing the ills it attributed to its enemies in the culture wars, and gave the veneer of moral seriousness to the political projects of an essentially neoliberal capitalist party.

As a symptom of neoliberalism’s slackening hold on our political culture, the Catholic and Marxist intellectual traditions in which Geuss was educated (which must have seemed utterly alien and un-American in the 1950s) are gaining new interest in both the United States and the United Kingdom. Our world is catching up with Geuss’s peculiar childhood, a fact that Geuss on occasion recognizes, but seems unable to integrate into his understanding of our new moment. Few political philosophers today—and even fewer thinkers outside this field, let alone ordinary people—would cite Nozick or Rawls in defense of the current order (although there is a certain interest in exploring how Rawls’s ideas can be taken in a socialist direction; I am not sure anyone has had the hermeneutic bravura to attempt such a feat with the work of Nozick). One is much more likely to hear Rawls, in particular, mentioned dis­paragingly as a representative of the kind of political thinking that has been shown inadequate by recent developments and must be replaced—which raises the question, replaced with what?

Neoliberalism persists as our intellectual and political default in spite of a growing disbelief in its premises and dissatisfaction with the outcomes of its policies. This is because of the absence of a sufficiently popular and credible alternative—or a perhaps reasonable fear of the alternatives that are currently on offer. When supposedly radical move­ments of the Right or Left manage to get into power, or push through such antiestablishment measures as Brexit, they appear unable to decide what to do with their victories, and remain timidly within the matrix of policy options set half a century ago. Marxism and political Catholicism, although newly prominent in the culture war arena of Twitter accounts and small magazines, seem for the moment no more successful at break­ing out of this matrix than the non-liberals of the nationalist Right have been.

Breaking with the consensus developed during the economic crisis of the 1970s would require the articulation of an alternative that could avoid being subsumed into the virtuality of “culture war” pseudo-politics and appeal to the intellectuals and masses of the West. These latter remain attached to at least certain elements of the liberal tradition, although perhaps decreasingly so, as a growing number of thinkers, including Geuss, argue that liberalism must be rejected no less than neoliberalism. Rather than a historically specific, temporary, and curable deviation from the mainstream of liberalism, neoliberalism appears to such critics as liberalism’s terminal manifestation. That is to say, neo­liberalism’s disaster is the disaster of liberalism itself as a “political, social and economic model.”

Liberalism and History

Geuss opens Not Thinking with two key claims about liberalism’s faults and one exciting promise for an alternative point of view. The first claim is that liberalism—understood as the “combination of a capitalist economic system with a liberal form of parliamentary democracy”—is collapsing. It seemed to be successful for two and a half centuries, coming to dominate the anglophone world and to a lesser extent the West (largely because of the hegemony of the United Kingdom and then the United States), but has now clearly failed.

Geuss further argues that this disaster reveals—and to some extent is the result of—a long-standing intellectual contradiction within liberalism between its universalist premises and a sense that these were the expression (and perhaps the cynically self-interested expression) of the interests and habits of mind of a particular set of nations, i.e., “Britain and the United States.”⁴ Liberalism, he argues, has never been able to make sense of this tension between claims about human nature as such and a nagging need to account for the specificities of history that have made it the regime of a particular part of the world.

Liberalism’s universalism—its willingness to make claims about human nature, supposedly valid for all times and places—is for Geuss a problem that liberalism shares with the Thomism his teachers rejected. Both appear to him as narrow, dogmatic, and unable to understand history. They offer no means of making sense of how societies change over time—or, indeed, how societies and social phenomena, such as concepts, institutions, and identities, are in an unending process of contestation, self-contradiction, and transformation. Instead, they posit pseudo-objective illusory stabilities: “natural law” and “essences” in the case of Thomism; “human rights” and “the individual” for liberalism. Or rather, liberalism is only a kind of modern natural law thinking whose adherents, out of ignorance or cunning, appear unaware of what they are really arguing.

The charge that liberals lack a historical sense invites a number of responses. One might, to begin with, wonder whether a sense of history—something that has emerged only recently in its modern, Western sense—is such a desirable thing. (This would be, as it were, a historicist skepticism about the absolute value of historical consciousness.) The virtues of Geuss’s own supposed attentiveness to history are by no means apparent. Throughout his work, Geuss invokes “history” as a force that, to the extent we are aware of its power, reveals the contingency, mutability, and nonidentity of any number of features of our world. He offers the example of how phenomena like Christianity, Marxism, or liberalism itself, seen in historical perspective, are not self-same expressions of changeless essences, but are constellations of di­verse, unstable points that give only the semblance of continuity. Geuss attributes much power to this “genealogical” approach to history, articulated by Nietzsche (one of Geuss’s most important references) and Foucault (about whom Geuss is less than wholly enthusiastic; Foucault appears too much a defender of the Enlightenment), to shatter the “carapace of mystification” that covers our everyday thinking.⁵ When he actually appeals to history in concrete instances, however, the results do not so much puncture the ideological armor of our culture as polish its left-liberal academic variant.

In an essay written shortly after the Charlie Hebdo terror attack, for example, Geuss chides liberals for defending the abstract, universal principle of free speech without regard to “history” and “power.” This ostensible conflict between liberal norms (expressed in ahistorical terms as the horizon of human nature, or as what all people everywhere should and would want if they were properly informed) and the purportedly more concrete, nuanced, and difficult realities posed by “history” has become a hallmark of left-liberal academic discourse in recent years. If one can write, or read, “wokism” without wincing, one can say that this opposition is a core premise of that increasingly hegemonic but still indeterminate new ideology. Geuss, without directly citing the phrase “punching down”—then widely used in left-liberal circles to describe the problem with supporting Charlie Hebdo—chides readers that making fun of the powerful is not the same as making fun of “victims of power.” Had Charlie Hebdo (which was, after all, a radical left maga­zine) only made fun of “typical representatives of the currently influen­tial ideology of neoliberalism,” that would have been commendable. But because it made fun of “poor Muslims against whom war has been waged for countless years,” the magazine was instead contributing to the marginalization of a disempowered group.⁶ Geuss, arguing against soli­darity with the assassinated staff of Charlie Hebdo, who were imagined by many as martyrs to the liberal cause of free speech, mobilizes recent “history” in support of his view: attacks on mosques in the United Kingdom, CIA detention centers in Romania, and the war in Iraq.

This invocation of history produces no surprises or disruptions of cliché, however. It is a reflex of the reigning opinion in Western academia. Nor does it cultivate attention to “history” in a “genealogical” mode to imagine that the “poor Muslims” (all of them?) supposedly targeted by Charlie Hebdo’s cartoon mocking Muhammad form a homogeneous worldwide group with a common level of power vis-à-vis the West. Certainly, the terrorists murdering Charlie Hebdo’s staff were not powerless; their victims were. Nor do conflicts in “Afghani­stan, Pakistan, and Yemen,” in which the United States and other Western powers have been embroiled in alliance with some Muslim agents against other Muslims, testify to a global campaign “against Muslims.” (Does Geuss imagine, for example, that the West’s intervention to save Bosnia from Serbian genocide was part of this anti-Muslim cru­sade?) Not to belabor this example, but it is important to observe that, in practice, Geuss’s historically informed suspicion of general, abstract norms often falls into modes of assertion that are hardly more sophisticated than the ahistorical expressions of a deeply ideological “common sense” against which he sought to awaken readers.

Beyond the limitations of Geuss’s own cultural leftist appeals to history, a reader sympathetic to conservatism (understood as less than total enthusiasm toward demands for change polemically conceived as progressive) might also wonder what a historical sense really offers to the Right. Since Burke and de Maistre, conservatives have often cast themselves as defenders of specific nationally or geographically bounded historical traditions against the supposedly rootless, ahistorical norms derived from an abstract idea of human nature that animated the French Revolution and much of modern liberal democratic politics. A “sense of history” can refer to one’s awareness of the precariousness of one’s tradition in the face of dazzling and dangerous abstraction—and of the absurdity of radical declarations to emancipate oneself from such history to make something entirely new. But there have also been societies whose “conservativism” has emerged instead through the refusal of any such sense of history. Mircea Eliade makes this point in The Sacred and the Profane (1957), observing that premodern chroniclers, priests, and other members of the proto-intellectual classes used their interpretive prowess not to emphasize the novelty of new events, but to assimilate them into categories understood to be so ancient as to be practically timeless. Whatever the dubiousness of some of Eliade’s specific claims, his insight is a useful one: unwelcome changes in one’s society can be resisted by denouncing them as part of “modernity,” an alien intrusion on traditional lifeworlds, or more subtly and indeed more traditionally, by reducing them to familiar concepts, refusing them the novelty on which their proponents insist.

Putting the point more broadly, for those on the left and liberal center as well as the right, it is not obvious that uncovering the “historical” forces at work in any given phenomenon, or having a theoretical commitment to the power of “history” to dissolve such concepts as human nature into a contingent flux of becoming, should have politically desirable results. There may be, from whatever political vantage, good reason to interpret the past and present in unhistorical terms. In the traditional societies described by Eliade, a refusal of history was made through an insistence on archetypal forms. In liberal societies, this hermeneutic taming of the otherwise unassimilable other­ness of the past and unmanageable diversity of the present is expressed in the discourse of human rights, premised (whether or not today’s liberals understand this) on a conception of the transhistorical unity of human nature. If we understand both of these modes as interpretive strategies carried out in view (consciously or not) of an end, the question then becomes whether that end is desirable and well-served, rather than whether the strategy is, in its own right, as theoretically satisfying as the historicist alternative.

The refusal of historical thinking represented by a certain strand of anglophone political philosophy going back to, say, Hobbes—in which the imaginary construction of abstract polities based on reasoning about what any human being would do or should rationally desire—has been a useful solution to many specific historical problems. (In Hobbes’s case, the problem was how to maintain political stability in a society riven by conflicts about theological and historical claims.) Liberals are not un­aware that their transhistorical normative claims have served as histor­ically specific responses to particular societies’ problems. Geuss treats this apparent irony as an irreparable fissure within liberalism, drawing on his mentor Robert Denoon Cumming’s Human Nature and History: A Study of the Development of Liberal Thought (1969). Now rather forgotten, this book seemed to Geuss to reveal that liberalism is organized around “two incompatible views.” According to the first, the qualities and rights of an “unchanging human nature” have been discov­ered by liberalism and can now be applied “anywhere at any time.” The other view, however, saw liberalism as a “historically contingent” response to a “particular political situation” in early modern European history, which may not be relevant to other times and places.⁷ It is certainly true that, in the past two centuries, liberals, whether they confronted the illiberal pasts of their own nations or those of non-European peoples, particularly of colonial subject populations, could not but develop historical accounts of how liberalism had arisen in western Europe, and what its future would be throughout the world. Geuss tends to dismiss offhandedly the thinking of liberals who applied themselves to such accounts, for example J. S. Mill, declaring that the tradition he represented was intellectually vacuous.

Leaving aside the particular merits and demerits of Mill, or any other particular liberal who has confronted the apparent contradiction be­tween universalist claims and historical contexts, this tension only exists if one believes that the former are true, rather than merely useful—only, that is, to the extent liberals are not pragmatists or hypocrites. More­over, the contradictions that the liberal tradition encounters are none other than those encountered by the tradition of critical theory that Geuss often summons to testify against liberalism. The project of critical theory—to uncover the historical origins of our collective false beliefs and unfreedom, and the possibilities for undoing them—originates, as Geuss observes elsewhere (in Who Needs a World View?), in the late eighteenth-century liberalism of Kant.⁸ For Kant, as Foucault noted in his late lectures on the Enlightenment, the articulation of the architecture of human cognition and the rights and duties universally adhering to our personhood—a universalist and ahistorical project of the sort Geuss rejects—was inseparable from the project of disclosing the specificities of our own era in order to liberate humanity, to the extent currently possible, from what he described as our self-imposed imma­turity. It was necessary to assess “where” we are in history (measured against the benchmark of an imagined future state in which human rights are everywhere respected) in order to know how to act in our particular moment to advance human freedom. This point, that the universalist and historicist dimensions of Kant’s thought are inseparable, was also made cogently by Habermas, who, like Foucault, framed his own intellectual trajectory as an attempt to synthesize these two tendencies. Geuss, skeptical of Habermas and Foucault’s projects, seems to be left with a critical theory devoid of the productive tensions out of which visions of our collective emancipation could be generated.

An Alternative to Liberalism

Nevertheless, having argued that liberalism is sustainable neither in practice nor in theory, Geuss does claim that there is an alternative to it, which he will adumbrate by means of his autobiography. This alternative, he reassures us, is not an “authoritarian” one. Although he does not say much about why we might—or should—fear authoritarianism, Geuss recognizes that perhaps the most significant obstacle to the emergence of a successful alternative to liberalism is our fear of overly powerful governments intervening in our intimate lives (a fear nourished by our memories of the alternatives to liberalism that came to power in Europe during the previous century). Some illiberals might argue that this is an unreasonable fear (the term “tyrannophobia,” coined by Eric Posner and Adrian Vermeule, does not seem to have caught on); others that liberalism, at least in its current dispensation, already subjects citizens to such humiliating violations.⁹ From a different perspective, thinkers in the vein of Durkheim, drawing on the French republican tradition that saw the inculcation of “mores” and “virtue” as central tasks of the state, might note that all modern states are authoritarian insofar as they aim at the creation of a certain kind of citizen with a specific moral disposition, developed not least through institutions of public education and civic rituals. Liberal regimes would be differentiated from others, in such a perspective, on the basis of their aim (the production of citizens who experience themselves as autonomous) rather than their methods.

Taking for granted, however, that we do dislike something we call “authoritarianism” and can avoid it, Geuss argues that the Catholic and Marxist education he received exemplifies a nonauthoritarian path. Claims that a Marxist philosophical orientation does not necessarily lead to the sort of regimes that claimed Marx’s mantle in the twentieth century do not need to be rehearsed again; they convince those who can be convinced. Geuss—an atheist—makes claims perhaps less familiar to secular readers when he also avers that Catholicism is not an authoritarian worldview. His case rests on two distinctions. The first specifies the nonauthoritarian character of the Catholicism—a minoritarian and con­tingent form—practiced by the teachers at his boarding school, which, as he notes, differed considerably from even the religion of his pre–Vatican II hometown church in southern Indiana, where priests stressed obedience and conformity. His school priests taught a religion that aimed at developing the unique character and moral faculties of each student, with great respect for the diversity of life-paths. It put little emphasis on such conservative concerns as sexual morality and focused instead on sins relating to failures of social justice.

In a second distinction, Geuss argues that Catholicism in general, unlike Protestantism, does not require its members to submit their intellects to the authority (Geuss provides a long philological detour on the history of this concept) of either the Bible or the Church. The former is to be read with a critical sense of the difficulties of interpretation, a sensitivity to the complicated history of the texts, and an under­standing that their meaning, rich and nuanced, is something brought to light through a community of the faithful—not, as Protestants supposedly have it, through the immediate self-evidence of a “literal” document. The latter, ecclesiastical authority—and here Geuss is at some pains to explain that papal infallibility is not what it sounds like—is rather a kind of helpful suggestion from one who is in a position to know.

Thus hedged about with nuance (and with what one cannot help but regard as some special pleading), Catholic social teaching and some aspects of Catholic anthropology (torn from their Thomistic context and reworked through early twentieth-century continental philosophy) can appear to Geuss as intellectual resources in the fight for a non­authoritarian alternative to liberalism. It is worth insisting, however, that even the idiosyncratic Catholicism of Geuss’s school days, shaped by existentialism and Marxism, did not sufficiently attract Geuss to make a Catholic out of him. Its failure in this respect parallels that of his graduate school mentor Sidney Morgenbesser, who, as Geuss reports it (not in this book, tellingly, but in its earlier iteration as an essay), had been a figure in Reconstructionist Judaism, a movement whose adherents sought, essentially, to transform the Jewish faith into a kind of secular humanist enterprise in which the resources of the spiritual tradi­tion could be interpreted self-consciously as myths. This was to make Judaism just a particular ethnic expression of the generic ethos of West­ern liberal elites (to the extent Conservative and Reform Judaism had not already done so). Morgenbesser abandoned his association with the movement, apparently, after attempting to give a sermon and sud­denly being inspired to ask the congregation, “Do you believe any of this?”¹⁰ Realizing that they, and he, did not, he went home.

Geuss observes that Morgenbesser had “a very keen appreciation for something which it was difficult for most versions of liberalism to accommodate, and that was the existence of groups who felt themselves to have their own essential identities.”¹¹ He stops just short of deriving from the apparent untenability of Morgenbesser’s engagement with Reconstructionist Judaism that such communities must be based in belief in something outside the community—some claims about how the world is and should be—and a not a mere (much less openly acknowledged!) desire to persist in being as a community by means of myth and ritual. However much of a failure, Morgenbesser’s experience at least testifies to the Columbia professor’s sense of himself as someone called, by virtue of his belonging to a community, to participate both in the maintenance and the reshaping of its collective beliefs. Such a sense of oneself as being so interpellated—and thus summoned to the difficult problem of squaring one’s own need for truth (and to profess only what one believes to be true) and one’s membership, and even leadership, in a community that persists by virtue of its members’ professing things that may not be true—is, notably, not something Geuss himself displays. It is, however, an important matter for at least one strand of political philosophy that, largely, has reconciled itself to liberalism but without endorsing the doctrinaire, ahistorical sort of liberal self-understanding that Geuss finds in the work of Nozick and Rawls. This is the tradition that identifies itself with the work of Leo Strauss and, beyond him, with a series of thinkers who, although invested in illiberal forms of living and belief, supported liberalism as a political regime.

Pierre Manent, one of the leading representatives of the Straussian tradition in France, argues at the conclusion of his Tocqueville et la nature de la démocratie (1982), that it is precisely intellectuals of this kind of who are the most valuable “friends” of the liberal regimes of the modern West.¹² Such individuals, rooted in substantive commitments by their identities—in Tocqueville’s case, to the traditions of aristocracy and Catholicism—have a profound appreciation, described by Geuss as an illiberal turn of mind, for the specificity of groups. But they see in liberalism’s ostensible (and perhaps only ostensible) emphasis on the state’s neutrality toward groups, values, and alternative forms of life their best defense against conflict and intolerance. I have argued pre­viously in this journal that even Carl Schmitt, the Nazi jurist famous for his Weimar-era critiques of liberal neutrality, after 1945 turned to endorse it (for perhaps entirely self-serving reasons) and became an ironic “friend” of liberalism in something of Manent’s sense.

Liberalism is not as unthinking at it appears. Its apparent inability to comprehend history is, in many cases, a reasonable appreciation of the dangers and insufficiencies of historical thinking. Liberalism instead offers its own myths posed in the form of supposedly rational deductions about human nature. Similarly, liberalism’s characteristic neutral stances toward values are not the result of an inability to comprehend the importance of moral claims, but often a studied, even cynical, strategy for mitigating otherwise insuperable conflicts within a fractious society. Critics of liberalism who see through its intellectual incoherence, and whose own views are informed by illiberal traditions they take to be deeper and wiser than liberal vacuities, might also recognize liberalism as having a practical value and defend it, with varying degrees of transparency, on that basis.

Of course, if Geuss is right that not merely neoliberalism but liberalism itself has led us into the current economic stagnation, social malaise, and environmental crisis—and cannot possibly be reoriented in such a way as to lead us out—then it would make no sense for illiberal-minded intellectuals within liberal societies to take the position recom­mended by Manent. No “friends” of liberal democracy, rooted in illiberal subcultures and concealing some measure of their dissension from reigning pieties, could buttress such a collapsing order. The question then, for liberals and their “friends,” is whether liberalism still has the capacity to be reoriented by its “friends” in new directions after the failure of neoliberalism, and the capacity to rescue us from the consequences of that disaster.

This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume VI, Number 3 (Fall 2022): 196–208.

Notes