The Crisis of Liberalism

<strong>The Cold War struggle against Soviet communism is over, but a new conflict — one within liberal democracy itself — has taken its place.</strong><br/><br/>Contemporary liberalism is in a bad way. But most advanced thinkers misdiagnose the problem. Few can see that liberalism, like any other ideology, suffers from tensions and contradictions, which threaten it from within.<br/><br/> Malign actors attack liberalism from outside. But they do damage only by exploiting what is essentially a liberal civil war — a conflict of antithetical freedoms and individualities. A large part of the problem is that the origin of liberalism and the main assumptions about human freedom that nourished it have been obscured or forgotten.<br/><br/>In <em>The Crisis of Liberalism</em>, Michael R.J. Bonner proposes that a renewed understanding of freedom, and its philosophical and theological foundations, can point the way out of the present mess.