Liberalism Against Itself – Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times

In the aftermath of the Second World War, many prominent liberals looked towards the future with eyes of disillusion and fear, despairing of a world which had come to be defined by devastating wars, totalitarianism, and a permanent nuclear threat. In response they jettisoned key progressive ideals of the Enlightenment, such as equality and perfectibility, and formulated a defence of liberty in opposition to communism and totalitarianism more generally. In his new book, published by Yale University Press, Samuel Moyn argues that the intellectual architects of Cold War liberalism— notably Isaiah Berlin, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Karl Popper, Judith Shklar, and Lionel Trilling— truncated the liberal tradition and thereby left a disastrous legacy, leaving liberals unable to address the problems that face us today. In its place, Moyn calls for a return to the emancipatory promise of 19th century liberalism.