Liberal: spoken in a certain tone, heard more and more often
lately, it summons up permissiveness, materialism, rootlessness,
skepticism, relativism run rampant. How has liberalism, the grand
democratic ideal, come to be a dirty word? This book shows us what
antiliberalism means in the modern world-where it comes from, whom
it serves, and why it speaks with such a forceful, if
ever-changing, voice. In the past, in a battle pitting one
offspring of eighteenth-century rationalism against another,
Marxism has been liberalism's best known and most vociferous
opponent. But with the fall of Communism, the voices of ethnic
particularism, communitarianism, and religious fundamentalism-a
tradition Stephen Holmes traces to Joseph de Maistre-have become
louder in rejection of the Enlightenment, failing to distinguish
between the descendants of Karl Marx and Adam Smith. Holmes uses
the tools of the political theorist and the intellectual historian
to expose the philosophical underpinnings of antiliberalism in its
nonmarxist guise. Examining the works of some of liberalism's
severest critics-including Maistre, Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and
Alasdair MacIntyre-Holmes provides, in effect, a reader's guide to
antiliberal culture, in all its colorful and often seductive,
however nefarious, variety. As much a mindset as a theory, as much
a sensibility as an argument, antiliberalism appears here in its
diverse efforts to pit "spiritual truths" and "communal bonds"
against a perceived cultural decay and moral disintegration. This
corrosion of the social fabric-rather than the separation of
powers, competitive elections, a free press, religious tolerance,
public budgets, and judicial controls on the police-is what the
antiliberal forces see as the core of liberal politics. Against
this picture, Holmes outlines the classical liberal arguments most
often misrepresented by the enemies of liberalism and most
essential to the future of democracy. Constructive as well as
critical, this book helps us see what liberalism is and must be,
and why it must and always will engender deep misgivings along with
passionate commitment.
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