From One Crisis of Liberalism to Another

Are crises of liberalism always the same, or are they always different? Or, if it is a little of both, what is to be learned by stepping back to compare the contemporary prosecution of liberals, and their strategies of self-defense, with the configurations of prior rounds? To answer this question, this essay looks at our own time in comparison to the most recent era when political theorists clashed over whether to ditch liberalism—that of the later Cold War and shortly after. Ultimately, it is the differences among crises that stand out and help inform proposals about how to rescue liberalism from crisis one more time.