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I’ve been following this conversation about liberalism that has developed over the past few years because, like many people, I was caught off guard by the rise of far right populism and extremist politics. Freedom House has documented an overall decline in democracy around the world for the past 18 years now and this trend is confirmed by other metrics such as those of the V-Dem project and the polity scores. Why is the world giving up on liberalism/liberal democracy? I wanted to know (still want to know) so I read Deneen’s book Why Liberalism Failed and various academic articles that spin off on all sorts of different aspects of the problem from the rise of social media to the question of post-truth and plain old propaganda. Many of these things were very helpful in understanding why this trend is happening and they are maybe more helpful than books like this that try to take the big picture view and talk about liberalism as a whole theoretical tradition. As much as I enjoy that stuff, I think it could reasonably be argued that once we zoom out that far, it’s actually less helpful to understanding what’s going on because it becomes just a philosophical debate. Most people are not thinking deeply about the tenants of liberalism or neoliberalism and all the different variations therein and then deciding to vote or not vote or vote for a populist demagogue accordingly. It really does all come down to things like social media, narratives, and propaganda.

That said, I appreciate this book for reminding us about this whole school of thought, or theoretical tradition that comes down to us from the Enlightenment --liberalism. It's such an old tradition that we've lived with so long it's like an old t-shirt that's been washed and stretched out so many times it barely resembles its original shape. The term has been so used and abused over the years until now it seems to encompass almost everything and almost nothing. Does it mean democracy or capitalism? Yes! Does it mean freedom or regulation? Yes! Freedom for individuals or freedom for markets? Yes! The book is helpful for explaining a bit about how liberalism evolved over the years. i.e. why "neoliberalism" a thing that seems so contrary to everything else in liberalism is a thing.

I appreciate Moyn’s overall argument in this book —that liberalism has gotten away from what it once meant. G. John Ikenberry made a similar argument in a 2018 article called “The end of the liberal international order?� Ikenberry called for a return to the embedded economy of the New Deal --the idea that the market should work for society and human needs should come first, not the other way around. (In other words: anti-neoliberalism). Moyn's book is less specific on the recommendations part but that’s okay with me because, like I said, its value lies in its explanation of how the concept of liberalism evolved during the second half of the 20th century.

The book got me curious to read Judith Shklar, since Moyn said she's kind of his guide for the book. Indeed, now that I've read Shklar's After Utopia I can see how this book by Moyn is kind of newer version of it. Shklar's book was written back in 1956. I wasn't familiar with things like "Christian fatalism," that she references, but I did understand what she meant by "the romantics" --anti-intellectualism, a preference for emotion-rather-than-reason, a rejection of standardization and "the mass society" etc. That's plenty familiar to us now, but back in the mid-1950s Shklar had yet to meet the first hippie. I bet she wasn't at all surprised by the 1960s counter-culture. We seem to be entering a similar era now: people are suspicious of science and any and all authority figures. Politicos use micro-targeted ads to appeal to the emotions of individuals rather than to reason and no one but no one is talking anymore about what's best for the community overall. People think politics is all about what benefits them personally rather than what would make society as a whole better off. So it's no wonder people are bemoaning the end of liberalism and wanting to understand why this is happening.

This class of people that Moyn calls "Cold War liberals" are people who, like Shklar, were writing about liberalism during the Cold War. Of the ones Moyn talks about I've read Karl Popper, Isaiah Berlin and Hannah Arendt. I liked and appreciated both Popper's and Berlin's arguments, Popper's 1945 book The Open Society and Berlin's famous essay from the 1950s on the two kinds of freedom (positive and negative). I think for their time, both were useful criticisms about the dangers of totalitarianism. Stalin’s purges of the 1930s and the Soviet version of the Great Terror were recent history and Mao’s Cultural Revolution that left millions dead was just around the corner. There was something extremely repressive in these regimes that *claimed* to be based upon Marx’s ideas but Shklar argues that criticisms that blame such engineered humanitarian disasters on the ideas/ideologies in whose name they were committed is a form of "intellectual determinism." She all but mocks those who, in the 1930s, drew a direct line from Rousseau to Hitler(!)... or even Jacobinism. But so what? Can the ideas of liberalism be perverted to nefarious ends by power hungry people? Sure, but that doesn’t make those ideas any less valid. Corrupt humans can corrupt any idea for nefarious ends but this is not the main argument of the book.

The main argument of both books is that something crucial in liberalism has been lost and we need to get it back. What is this thing? For Shklar, and I think for Moyn too, when they talk about the loss of liberalism, the thing they are lamenting is the loss of a sense of collective agency to create a better world. That's what Shklar means anyway when she talks about the end of political theory. Liberals no longer sit around dreaming about how to create the ideal society anymore. Moyn means something like increasing equality and liberty for an ever-wider number of people (i.e. progressive politics that favors socially progressive policies). Fair enough. I can buy both arguments.

What I said earlier about Moyn essentially re-writing Shklar's book was not exactly true. The two books are very different; it's just that you can see a lot of Shklar in Moyn but Shklar's book is a critique of theoretical approaches or states of mind (romanticism and Christian fatalism) whereas Moyn's book is more like critiques of specific liberals of the 20th century. It's not the same critique for everyone though. Take his critique of Hannah Arendt, for example. He doesn't accuse Arendt of blaming liberalism for totalitarianism. Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem and Origins of Totalitarianism will always remain classics because they show us how easily dictatorships can form in the modern world. There's nothing in them that blames liberalism for totalitarianism. Instead Moyn makes a post-colonial critique of her later works “On violence� and “On Revolution� in which she denounces the violent overthrow of colonialist powers in the third world by various independence movements. I haven't read those particular books by Arendt but I imagine this criticism is likely spot-on.

Overall I liked this book by Samuel Moyn and think it is worth your time. It's a great contribution to the on-going debate about whether liberalism is dead or not.