NEW BOOK!

An update on my upcoming book and a conference talk

Here’s a short update to tell you about my upcoming book. It’s called The Crisis of Liberalism: the Origin and Destiny of Freedom. It will be coming out early next year from Dundurn Press, here in Canada. Advertising, pre-ordering, and so forth is about to begin, and I’ll be sharing the cover art soon.

The book is part of the The Hon. Henry N.R. Jackman Series on Canada and the World, and it builds on some of my earlier essays on liberalism, many of which have appeared in The Hub and City Journal. The basic idea is that there is a discourse of freedom in the West and it is derived from the assumptions of Western Christian theology. Liberalism has borrowed those assumptions without acknowledgement, and is unable to guarantee them because they originate outside liberalism. Everyone, it seems, from Hobbes and Locke onward (to name only two) has assumed that everyone already takes Christian assumptions for granted, but this seems no longer to be the case.

So what is the future of liberalism if those assumptions are disavowed, forgotten, or no longer understood? It’s one thing to try to insist that all human persons are equal and have free will, and so on, but what happens if we are no longer able to explain why such propositions are true ? What would it mean for freedom and democracy if we could no longer believe in free will (as many now don’t)? Conversely, what would it mean for society if we could only believe in autonomous individuals (as many now do)? I ponder such questions, and what they may mean, over the course of a brief tour of classical and mediaeval theories of freedom down to the Cold War and on to the present moment. Stay posted for more details soon!

I’ll also be giving a short talk on the substance of The Crisis of Liberalism at a conference on 15 April at Massey College in Toronto. The conference is called ‘Liberal Democracy in the Rearview Mirror?’, and will be hosted by Section1 and the Canadian International Council. Here is a link to register if you wish.