Beyond Weimar: The Long Crisis of Liberalism, the Political Economy of the Interwar Conjuncture and the Foundations of Neo-liberalism

<Online Only>This chapter examines authoritarian liberalism as a more general phenomenon ‘beyond Weimar’. It looks outside Weimar Germany and takes a longer historical perspective, revealing deeper tensions in liberalism itself, specifically its inability to respond to the issue of socio-economic inequality in a mass democracy. The major Weimar constitutional theorists—Hans Kelsen, Carl Schmitt, and Hermann Heller—had no answer to the social question as a matter of constitutional self-defence. The chapter then discusses the political economy of the various crises across Europe—in Italy, France, and Austria—revealing a similar quandary. As Karl Polanyi argued, in these contexts, the turn to authoritarian liberalism fatally weakened political democracy and left it disarmed when faced with the fascist countermovement. Later in the interwar period, proposals for neo-liberalism would be introduced, symbolized by the organization of the Walter Lippman Colloquium in 1938.</Online Only>

Confronting Nationalism and the Recurring Crisis of Liberal Democracies: Mosse’s Contribution to the Public Debate

George L. Mosse was one of the greatest historian of fascism. However, his works clearly reveal that he was a true 20th century intellectual. This article aims at highlighting Mosse's thought on how to defend individual freedom and liberal democracies from the assaults of irrationalism, myths and intolerance in the second half of 20th century. In the midst of a western world dealing with the spreading of illiberal movements, Mosse's research offers tools for understanding the appeal of antidemocratic politics. Worried about the power of the States during the fifties, Mosse underlined the necessity of transforming the political action of democracies into a drama. The only way to prevent mass politics from being captured during the times of crisis by nationalism and by the demand for new forms of more direct democracy (including the desire for a leader) was both to adopt and to make tolerant the new politics diffused by nationalist mass movements. In Mosse's opinion, the antidote to the spread of exclusionary nationalism and the crisis of liberalism were the concept of Bildung and, following the first nationalists and Zionists, the humanisation of nationalism, by transforming the greatest ideological force of the 20th century, just as happened to socialist and Christian ideologies, into a liberal force.

Donald Trump: Anatomy of a human pseudo-event and the crisis of modern liberalism

This article applies Daniel Boorstin’s notion of the pseudo-event to the ascendency of President Donald Trump. Boorstin defines the pseudo-event as an event staged to call attention to itself, a phenomenon made possible by the graphic revolution. As early as 1961, Boorstin recognized this phenomenon in the areas of travel, news and politics. Concerning the latter, the hero, a person once recognized for his achievements, has been replaced by the celebrity, a person known for his well-knownness. While Davy Crockett was a precursor of the American celebrity politician, P. T. Barnum and Edward Bernays were practitioners of the pseudo-event par excellence. Donald Trump, however, exemplifies the human pseudo-event in a most tragic way because his persona is emblematic of what some observers now perceive as the fly-in-the-ointment of American liberal democracy – the unrestrained autonomous self, something to which our original political commitments ensure us can be liberated from nature, time and place. In our quest to realize ‘liberty’ for ourselves, older and more localized ethical restraints had to be cast aside. Ironically, the crisis of liberalism resides in its great success.

“The bourgeois nature in difficulties”: The Crisis of Liberalism in Robert Browning's Aristophanes’ Apology

Nathan K. Hensley's recent study, Forms of Empire (2016), posits that liberalism, as the nineteenth century progressed, came up against the “wayward meanings” generated by its own contradictions, particularly the “curious intimacy between legality and harm” that characterized a doctrine of individual freedom inextricably rooted in violent imperial expansion. For Hensley, “the dogged persistence of killing in an age of liberty disrupted the conceptual assumptions of progressive idealism”; while “the very inseparability of law and violence, never more painfully evident than in episodes of colonial war and legal emergency, collapsed the logical principles of non-contradiction and identity that remain our common sense.”

The “New” Crisis of the Liberal Order: Populism, Socioeconomic Imbalances, and the Response of Contemporary Ordoliberalism

In the face of the “new” crisis of liberalism, our paper follows the spirit of Walter Lippmann’s The Good Society and argues for a renewal of (ordo)‌liberal thinking. Similar to Lippmann, we argue that our current liberal economic order is unfit to deal with fundamental social asymmetries. The benefits of economic integration are distributed unevenly with urban economic and political elites as main beneficiaries and supporters of the current order, while neglecting less-skilled, rural workers. In this paper, we argue for a contemporary ordoliberalism that takes up this distributional challenge. In spite of recurrent criticism of its value-laden nature, we argue that the normativity of ordoliberalism is actually an asset in the current debate on populism.