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Drawing of Black and white Liberian Senators sitting behind desks while one speaks and a crowd watches

Freedom and Its Limits

Edward Wilmot Blyden sorted through competing ideas about the meaning of freedom in 19th-Century Liberia.
by Shae Omonijo via Journal of the History of Ideas Blog on April 30, 2025
A magnifying glass and Francis Fukuyama's book "The End of History and the Last Man."

Francis Fukuyama Was Right About Liberal Democracy

For all of its faults and weaknesses, no serious competitor has emerged to capture people’s imagination or seriously challenge it.
by Michael A. Cohen via The New Republic on February 18, 2025
Senator J.D. Vance and Patrick Deneen at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.

Toward a Christian Postliberal Left

A truly Christian postliberalism would imagine and enact an alternative modernity with a different standard of progress.
by Eugene McCarraher via Commonweal on October 22, 2024
A World History Encloypedia graphic image/illustration of The Feudal Society in Medieval Europe.

American Feudalism

A liberalism that divides humanity into a master class and a slave class deserves an asterisk as “white liberalism.”
by Paul Crider via Liberal Currents on October 2, 2024
Bruce Springsteen on July 19, 1988 at his concert in East Berlin on the cycle track Weissensee.

Can the 1980s Explain 2024?

The yuppies embodied the winning side of America’s deepening economic divide. Bruce Springsteen spoke for those left behind.
by Nicholas Lemann via Washington Monthly on August 25, 2024
A painting of Napoleon Bonaparte standing in the center of the National Assembly.

Liberalism and Equality

Liberalism’s relationship to equality has, his­torically, been far from a warm embrace.
by Gregory Conti via American Affairs on August 20, 2024
Sheet music depicting a fugitive slave.

Against the Slave Power: the Fugitive Liberalism of Frederick Douglass

Douglass elaborated a political theory attuned to the differential character of law as it applied to slaves and other outlaws.
by Paul Crider via Liberal Currents on August 5, 2024
A rally and march in New York City demanding that every vote be counted in the general election, despite Trump’s premature claim of victory, on November 4, 2020.

Defend Liberalism? Let’s Fight for Democracy First

America never really was liberal, and that’s not the right fight anyway. The fight now is for democracy.
by Jefferson Cowie via The New Republic on June 21, 2024
Woman holding up a pocket-sized copy of the U.S. Constitution.

Conservatives Don’t Have a Monopoly on Originalism

The text and historical context of the Constitution provide liberals with ample opportunities to advance their own vision of America.
by Simon Lazarus via The New Republic on March 29, 2024
Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin during the Cold War.

The Book of Liberal Maladies

On Samuel Moyn's Cold War liberalism.
by John Ganz via Unpopular Front on January 18, 2024
Claudine Gay.

First They Came for Harvard

The right’s long and all-too-unanswered war on liberal institutions claims a big one.
by Rick Perlstein via The American Prospect on January 10, 2024
Closed fist with faces of Judith Shklar, Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, and Lionel Trilling

Cold War Liberalism Is Still With Us. Is That a Good Thing?

A scholarly roundtable on Samuel Moyn's new book.
by Jan-Werner Müller, Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, Nicolas Guilhot, Penny Marie von Eschen, Vaughn Rasberry via The Chronicle of Higher Education on October 2, 2023

Two Cheers for the Cold War Liberals

There are certainly good grounds to criticize Cold War liberalism. But Samuel Moyn's new book, like similar critiques, has a classic baby-bathwater problem.
by Joseph Stieb via War on the Rocks on September 15, 2023

Dangers and Enemies Everywhere

How Cold War liberalism abandoned the vocabulary of hope—and how we still live with the consequences.
by George Scialabba via Democracy Journal on September 14, 2023
Students hiding under desks during an air raid test

Is Liberalism a Politics of Fear?

A conversation about the Cold War’s profound and negative influence on the liberal worldview.
by Samuel Moyn, Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins via The Nation on September 11, 2023
John F. Kennedy shaking hands with Lyndon Johnson and Walter George

Samuel Moyn Can’t Stop Blaming Trumpism on Liberals

"Liberalism Against Itself" makes an incoherent attack on liberalism.
by Jonathan Chait via Intelligencer on September 7, 2023
Isaiah Berlin

Cold War Liberalism Returns

A left that is ambivalent about liberalism can still seek to engage it.
by Patrick Iber via Dissent on September 5, 2023
Lionel Trilling

Liberalism in Mourning

Lionel Trilling crystallizes the cynical Cold War liberalism that sacrificed idealism for self-restraint.
by Samuel Moyn via Boston Review on August 30, 2023
Cover of "Liberalism Against Itself"

Memo to Liberals: The Cold War is Over

In “Liberalism Against Itself,” Samuel Moyn stresses the need to resuscitate an earlier and more rousing wave of thinkers.
by Becca Rothfeld via Washington Post on August 11, 2023

The Liberal Discontents of Francis Fukuyama

“The End of History?” was an announcement of victory. But a quarter-century later, its author remains unsure if liberalism truly won.
by Daniel Bessner via The Nation on April 17, 2023
Francis Fukuyama

Last Man Standing

Francis Fukuyama pines for that old-time liberalism.
by Michael Brenes via The Baffler on June 27, 2022
Political cartoon of the U.S Capitol

The Liberals Who Weakened Trust in Government

How public interest groups inadvertently aided the right’s ascendency.
by Kim Phillips-Fein via The New Republic on August 2, 2021
Charles Mills

Charles Mills Thinks Liberalism Still Has a Chance

A wide-ranging conversation with the philosopher on the white supremacist roots of liberal thought, Biden’s victory, and Trumpism without Trump.
by Charles W. Mills, Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins via The Nation on January 28, 2021
John Rawls

How John Rawls Became the Liberal Philosopher of a Conservative Age

With "A Theory Of Justice," Rawls became the most influential political philosopher of his time — just as the liberal agenda he supported was retreating.
by Katrina Forrester, Daniel Finn via Jacobin on October 4, 2020
Wanto Co. grocery store with a sign that reads "I Am An American"

Discovering Judith Shklar’s Skeptical Liberalism of Fear

Judith Shklar fled Nazis and Stalinism before discovering in African-American history the dilemma of modern liberalism.
by Samantha Ashenden, Andreas Hess via Aeon on March 16, 2020

The Populist Specter

Is the groundswell of popular discontent in Europe and the Americas what’s really threatening democracy?
by Steven Hahn via The Nation on January 10, 2019
Covers of Lepore's "These Truths" and Loomis's "History of America in Ten Strikes."

The Limits of Liberal History

You can’t tell the story of America without the story of labor.
by Nathan J. Robinson via Current Affairs on October 28, 2018

Fighting Words

No, “liberal” and “progressive” aren’t synonyms. They have completely different histories—and the differences matter.
by Sean Wilentz via Democracy Journal on March 20, 2018
"Slave Ship" painting (1840) by J M W Turner. Courtesy the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Does Locke’s Entanglement With Slavery Undermine His Philosophy?

John Locke took part in administering the slave-owning colonies. Does that make him, and liberalism itself, hypocritical?
by Holly Brewer via Aeon on December 12, 2017

Idylls of the Liberal

The American dreams of Mark Lilla and Ta-Nehisi Coates.
by Asad Haider via Viewpoint Magazine on September 11, 2017
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