The Crisis of Liberalism

<b>The Cold War struggle against Soviet communism is over, but a new conflict - one within liberal democracy itself - has taken its place.</b><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 that threaten it from within.<br/><br/> While malign actors attack liberalism from the outside, the real conflict, full of antithetical freedoms and individualities, has turned into a kind of liberal civil war. Liberals today struggle to maintain cohesiveness within the party and to effectively communicate their value proposition to voters. 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 over time.<br/><br/> In <I>The Crisis of Liberalism</I>, Michael R.J. Bonner proposes that a renewed understanding of freedom - its philosophical and theological foundations - can point the way out of the present mess and give voters and liberal adherents overall a stronger understanding of what they're fighting for.