![]() Pabst, for what it’s worth, argues that “genuine post-liberalism draws on the best liberal traditions but corrects liberal errors and excesses”. Its exponents, as a result, often end up with a more profound critique of liberalism that they went looking for. It looks at the ways in which liberalism has failed, and asks how it birthed an illiberal strain on both the Left and the Right. Not all of today’s post-liberals started life on the Left, but their critique of liberalism often follows a similar path. But as they did, they were faced with a question: “Why had a liberal society produced a wave of political criticism which they perceived (in many cases quite accurately) as so illiberal and destructive? Having begun as defenders of liberalism, they too ended, to some degree as critics of it.” Peter Steinfels, a critic of the neoconservatives whose book on the movement provoked Kristol into writing his “Confessions” essay, explained that the neocons actually “set out to defend liberalism from the radicals’ attack”. We have to start remembering and start answering.” All these explained how the world operated, and we failed to answer effectively. Wright Mills, Herbert Marcuse, Noam Chomsky, and many, many others. “The students who sat in, threw out the deans, and fought with the police have, after all, been taught by American academics such as C. Writing in T he Atlantic at the time, he delivered a prophetic warning: By the end of the decade, he had fallen out not just with the activist Left but mainstream liberals too. A left-liberal at Berkeley, he became concerned in the mid-Sixties about threats to free speech and free expression on campus. ![]() Similarly, the sociologist Nathan Glazer’s neoconservatism took form after observing the intolerance of campus radicals. In fact, whether the post-liberals realise it or not, this group of writers, editors and thinkers from both the Left and the Right - Irving Kristol, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, James Burnham, Daniel Bell and Nathan Glazer, among others - are the closest thing they have to intellectual predecessors. And their thinking, unlikely though it may seem, bears uncanny similarities with post-liberalism today. ![]() In his recent book, Postliberal Politics, Adrian Pabst explicitly links the rejection of “free-market fundamentalism and the neoconservative foreign policy of permanent war” with the rise of post-liberalism.īut before “neoconservative” became a byword for the utopian, interventionist, nation-building foreign policy that was fatally discredited by the Iraq war, it described an entirely reasonable generation of American intellectuals who became disenchanted with the liberal domestic policies and the cultural changes of the Sixties. John Gray labelled neoconservatism a “ crackpot creed” and has accused neoconservatives of viewing history as a “the march towards a universal system of government”. In post-liberal circles, “neoconservatism” has always been something of a dirty word: the evil sidekick to free-market “neoliberalism” and a devastating ingredient in a political worldview that has wreaked havoc at home and abroad in recent decades.
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