In his 2023 book “Liberalism Against Itself,” Moyn describes the upshot of this development as a “vilification of progress for fear that it always serves as pretext for terror.” In a world of state-sanctioned cruelty — show trials, killing fields, death squads — intellectuals like the influential political theorist Judith Shklar increasingly defined liberalism as a form of protection: a bulwark against violence, not an engine for freedom.
Where Moyn laments this shrinking horizon of expectations, the British journalist Adrian Wooldridge celebrates it. A columnist for Bloomberg and before that The Economist, Wooldridge approvingly cites Shklar’s “liberalism of fear” in his recent book “The Revolutionary Center: The Lost Genius of Liberalism.” “The most important job of the liberal therefore is not to maximize happiness,” Wooldridge maintains. “It is to prevent bad people from inflicting harm on citizens.”
Wooldridge cites both Moyn and Rosenblatt while coming to very different conclusions. He, too, uses the language of values. But as his seemingly paradoxical title suggests, he toggles between forcefully arguing in favor of “nonnegotiable liberal principles” — his list includes meritocracy, “universal rules” and, yes, “individualism” — and finding all kinds of reasons to mitigate against them. He warns against zealots on the right and the left, but is much more responsive to pressure from the right. “Liberalism needs to rediscover its radical spirit,” he writes. “Yet at the same time it needs to rediscover the spirit of moderation.”
Though Shalt Not Be a Jerk
No wonder liberals have been confused; the history of liberalism is so voluminous and dynamic that what it tells us often seems to be in the eye of the beholder. The philosopher Alexandre Lefebvre makes a similar point in “Liberalism as a Way of Life” (2024). Throughout history, liberals have constantly sought ways to “remain free and generous” in response to their changing times. Citing Rosenblatt’s book as an inspiration for his own, he jokes that a more accurate title for hers would have been something like “The Continuing Adventures of the Ideal of Liberality in the Face of Unprecedented Setbacks and Opportunities.”
Lefebvre, like these other thinkers, intends his book as both an illumination and an intervention. “Liberals,” he writes, “could do a much better job of promoting the creed.” They can get so caught up in current (and admittedly crucial) political debates over institutional checks and balances that, like their Cold War forebears, they retreat to a defensive crouch. They “fixate on the opponents of liberalism, and how horrible populists, nativists and authoritarians are,” Lefebvre says. “Only rarely are the strengths and virtues of liberalism talked up.”
