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Contemporary liberalism is in a bad way. But most advanced thinkers misdiagnose the problem. Few can see that liberalism, like any other ideology, suffers from tensions and contradictions that threaten it from within.
While malign actors attack liberalism from the outside, the real conflict, full of antithetical freedoms and individualities, has turned into a kind of liberal civil war. Liberals today struggle to maintain cohesiveness within the party and to effectively communicate their value proposition to voters. A large part of the problem is that the origin of liberalism and the main assumptions about human freedom that nourished it have been obscured or forgotten over time.
In The Crisis of Liberalism, Michael R.J. Bonner proposes that a renewed understanding of freedom — its philosophical and theological foundations — can point the way out of the present mess and give voters and liberal adherents overall a stronger understanding of what they’re fighting for.
The Crisis of Liberalism is an astonishing intellectual tour de force and, some might suggest, also an act of mega-chutzpah, as the author takes on what generations of political theorists had assumed was a settled question.
An elegant and lucid account of the Christian origins of liberalism, its baneful revolt against those origins, and its possible recovery.
A much welcome and illuminating intervention in a long-running debate about our present disarray. Rather than rehearsing familiar arguments about institutions, norms, or polarisation, Michael R. J. Bonner probes liberalism’s forgotten moral and theological foundations, and the consequences of losing sight of them.
Michael Bonner has written a top-notch diagnosis of what ails liberalism, the sustaining ethos for most democracies in the 19th and 20th centuries which is now supplying so much cannon fodder for populists today. With great erudition, he reminds us that what has been lost can also be refound. This is an insightful, big-picture read — but it’s also a much-needed call to action. Let’s hope he directs his analytical gaze next at the only other mainstream current of political thought arguably even more bent out of shape than liberalism by the past decade: conservatism.
CHRIS ALEXANDER, politician and diplomat
- Preamble
- Introduction
- A Whole New World?
- What is Liberalism?
- Ancient Freedom
- The Law of Liberty
- Universal Equality
- Free Will
- Supremacy of the Individual
- The Separation of the Religious and the Secular
- The Theory of Progress in History
- The Paradoxes of Liberalism
- The Crisis of Liberalism
- A Way Out?
- The End of Liberalism?