What the Cold War Did to Liberalism (w/ Samuel Moyn)

Know Your Enemy

In his provocative new book, Liberalism Against Itself, historian Samuel Moyn revisits the work of five key Cold War thinkers—Judith Shklar, Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, Gertrude Himmelfarb, and Lionel Trilling—to explain the deformation of liberalism in the middle of the twentieth century, a time when, in his telling, liberals abandoned their commitment to progress, the Enlightenment, and grand dreams of emancipation and instead embraced fatalism, pessimism, and a narrow conception of freedom. For Moyn, the liberalism that emerged from the Cold War is, lamentably, still with us—a culprit in the rise of Donald Trump, and a barrier to offering a compelling alternative to him.

Sources:

Samuel Moyn, Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times (2023)

Judith Shklar, After Utopia: The Decline of Political Faith (1957)

Lionel Trilling, The Middle of the Journey (1947)

Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination (1950)

Matthew Sitman, "How to Read Reinhold Niebuhr, After 9-11," Society, Spring 2012

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