NEW BOOK UPDATE

Pre-order The Crisis of Liberalism

Dear readers: I’m now in the final stages of correcting proofs for my upcoming book The Crisis of Liberalism: the Origin and Destiny of Freedom. Click on the picture of the cover below to pre-order. It will be coming out in early spring of next year.

The purpose of the book is to explain what has gone wrong with the western doctrine of freedom that we now call liberalism. The explanation is not straightforward, and I don’t expect it to convince most liberals — at least not right away. Liberalism, I contend, is an amalgam of paradoxes, the most striking of which is its debt to late-antique and mediaeval Christianity alongside its claims to secularism and neutrality. Liberalism’s insistence upon equality, universalism, free exercise of the human will, and even secularism have no other origin than Christian theology assumptions. Those assumptions are set forth and examined in detail in the book, and I trace their evolution from the Middle Ages down to the early modernity and the present. Another intriguing paradox is the tension between liberalism and institutional Christianity, which took shape in 19th century. This tension had not always existed, as is obvious, for example, in the ‘political theology’ of John Locke, despite his failure to extend general toleration of Christianity to Roman Catholicism. And the tension has been relaxed in more recent days in, for example, the American civil rights movement, the struggle against the South African Apartheid, and the overthrow of Soviet Communism by the Polish trade union Solidarity. All those developments were led by Christians and the transformations that they ushered in had explicit theological justifications. On a stranger note, liberalism when not animated by Christian ideas, tends to resemble a religion, the so-called Religion of Humanity — one with most, if not all, the same moral commitments as Christianity, but bereft of theology.

Liberalism accordingly risks oblivion simply because it is increasingly difficult to believe in it unless you already accept the principles on which it is founded. And if you don’t accept those principles, liberalism will not make sense, nor will it seem a worthwhile set of political commitments. For a believing Christian, the problem will boil down to an excessive emphasis on the exercise of free will, consummately expounded by liberal philosopher John Rawls. But contrary to what Rawls would have us believe, free choice alone cannot be the basis for a moral and orderly community — a misinterpretation which theology alone can correct. A final problem is that a doctrine of ever-expanding freedom, such as liberalism has lately become, is ill-suited to the present needs of most Western societies which are now under the hammer-blows of atomising technological change, inter-generational strife, and social decomposition.

Can anything be done about these challenges?

Read the book and find out!