The Crisis of Liberalism

The Cold War struggle against Soviet communism is over, but a new conflict — one within liberal democracy itself — has taken its place.

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, which threaten it from within.

Malign actors attack liberalism from outside. But they do damage only by exploiting what is essentially a liberal civil war — a conflict of antithetical freedoms and individualities. 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.

In The Crisis of Liberalism, Michael R.J. Bonner proposes that a renewed understanding of freedom, and its philosophical and theological foundations, can point the way out of the present mess.