Liberalism is its own worst enemy
Political philosophy returns to its roots
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This week at Public Seminar, our authors reflect what happens when a political philosophy loses sight of the ideals that once defined it. Can we get that radicalism back?
Samuel Moyn chats with Julian Nicolai Hofmann about how Cold War liberalism abandoned optimism in favor of “an Augustinian theology of sin and a psychoanalytic version of pessimism.” Jonathan Cortez argues that universities should take the Texas attack on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives as an opportunity to demand more meaningful liberation. And in his speech accepting the 2024 Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding, Omri Boehm discusses the German Enlightenment and the revolutionary potential of friendship.
Liberalism Against Itself and the Return of the Cold War
Samuel Moyn with Julian Nicolai Hofmann
Cold War liberals … turned on what earlier liberals had regarded as their emancipatory inspirations, such as the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and Romanticism, in favor of John Locke and an austere vision of personal freedom against state interference. The results were a Cold War liberalism that warned against ambition and hope; placed diremption (Entzweiung), tragedy, and sin at the heart of the human condition; and treated the lure of emancipation as the largest threat to freedom.
Universalism in Dark Times
Omri Boehm
I think that Arendt was right about the demise of truths considered “self-evident,” perhaps with the only difference that, in our times, the fact that scarcely anyone believes the “best-known truths” is no longer much of secret. That hardly anyone accepts the proposition “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” is almost too obvious; about the truth of the claim “Die Würde des Menschen ist unantasbar” (“Human dignity is inviolable”) people are still willing to dissemble.
The Texas Attack on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Higher Education
Jonathan Cortez
We are now witnessing the unraveling of these compromises. If DEI efforts can be unraveled in such a swift manner and at such a fast pace (as SB17 has done), how progressive were they to begin with? Or, more productively: What are we left with, in the aftermath of SB17, to envision a more permanent approach?