Michael: The story we're told is that liberalism defeated totalitarianism and won the Cold War. The uncomfortable truth might be that in the process, liberalism gutted itself, abandoning its own soul. The victory was, in a sense, a catastrophic defeat for the idea itself. Kevin: Whoa, hold on. A catastrophic defeat? That sounds incredibly harsh. Liberalism gave us individual rights, freedom of speech, democracy... it was the good guy in that fight. How can a victory be a catastrophe? Michael: That is the explosive argument at the heart of a book that’s been making serious waves, Liberalism Against Itself, by Samuel Moyn. Kevin: Moyn... he's that Yale law and history professor, right? I've heard this book is pretty provocative. It's been praised as an "intellectual tour de force" but also called dense and challenging by some readers. It definitely seems to have a polarizing effect. Michael: Exactly. And it's no surprise, because the book grew out of his prestigious Carlyle Lectures at Oxford. It's a direct challenge to how we think about the supposed heroes of 20th-century thought. Moyn argues that the very intellectuals we celebrate for defending freedom—figures like Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, and Judith Shklar—are the ones who accidentally laid the groundwork for our current political crises. Kevin: Okay, so if they weren't the heroes we thought they were, what did they do wrong? What was this "soul" that liberalism supposedly lost?

Michael: To understand what was lost, we have to understand what liberalism was before the Cold War. It wasn't just about being left alone by the government. It was this incredibly ambitious, forward-looking project rooted in the Enlightenment. It was built on three big ideas: perfectionism, progressivism, and emancipation. Kevin: Let's break those down. Perfectionism sounds a little... intense. Michael: It just means the belief that we, as humans and as a society, can genuinely improve. That we can become more moral, more creative, more fulfilled. Then there's progressivism—the confidence that history isn't just random chaos, but that we can actually shape it and bend it towards a freer and better future. Kevin: And emancipation? Michael: That's the goal of it all. Freeing people not just from oppression, but freeing them to create, to experiment, to build new and better ways of living together. It was a philosophy of action and aspiration. Kevin: So, it was more like a revolutionary movement, full of this boundless optimism, rather than just a quiet set of rules for how to run a country. Michael: Precisely. But then, as Moyn documents, the horrors of the first half of the 20th century happened. World War II, the Holocaust, the Gulag. A new generation of thinkers, many of them refugees who had seen the absolute worst of humanity, looked at all that grand, utopian optimism and saw the seeds of terror. They saw how dreams of a perfect future were used to justify unimaginable cruelty in the present. Kevin: And they got scared. Michael: They got terrified. And they made a choice. They decided to trade that soaring ambition for a grim, sober safety. They redefined freedom. It was no longer about the power to create a better world. It became about the simple, anxious need to be protected from a cruel one. This is the "betrayal" Moyn talks about. As he powerfully states, "Disfiguring liberalism in the face of that threat was a choice, not a necessity." Kevin: That’s a chilling thought. It’s like a person who survives a terrible car crash and then spends the rest of their life refusing to ever drive above 20 miles per hour. They're 'safe,' but they're not really going anywhere. They’ve given up on the journey. Michael: That's a perfect analogy. And Moyn argues that this fearful, minimalist liberalism—this 20-mph version—is what we're still stuck with. It's what paved the way for neoliberalism, which deeply distrusts the state's ability to do anything good, and neoconservatism, which is perpetually obsessed with external enemies. It created a fortress, but forgot what it was supposed to be protecting.

Kevin: That analogy of the person afraid to drive... it feels so personal and psychological. It makes me wonder, who were the people who actually built this fortress? Who were the intellectual architects of this new, anxious liberalism? Michael: Well, your analogy brings us perfectly to the first architect Moyn discusses: Judith Shklar. Her story is heartbreaking. She was a Jewish refugee from Riga, Latvia, who fled the Nazis and then the Soviets. She experienced the absolute worst of the 20th century firsthand. And from that trauma, she developed a concept that defines this entire era. She called it "the liberalism of fear." Kevin: The liberalism of fear. That's a powerful phrase. What did she mean by that? Michael: Shklar argued that after witnessing such immense cruelty, the primary, and perhaps only, goal of a decent society should be to prevent the worst from happening. The summum malum, the greatest evil, is cruelty and the fear it creates. So, for her, liberalism shouldn't be about chasing some utopian 'greatest good.' It should be about the much more modest, but essential, task of putting cruelty first and building institutions that protect us from it. Kevin: I mean, that sounds... reasonable. Especially given what she went through. Who could argue against putting cruelty first? Michael: No one. But Moyn's point is about what gets lost in the process. When your entire philosophy is organized around preventing the worst, you lose the capacity to imagine and strive for the best. All those grand Enlightenment dreams of progress, equality, and collective self-creation? They start to look naive, or worse, dangerous. They're too risky. Better to just focus on the minimalist goal of not being tortured or killed. Kevin: Okay, I see. That's the emotional core. But what's the intellectual argument? How did they justify giving up on the very idea of progress? Michael: Great question. For that, we have to turn to another giant of the era, Karl Popper. If Shklar provided the emotional heart of Cold War liberalism, Popper provided its philosophical muscle. And his story is also one of flight from tyranny. He was an Austrian philosopher who fled his home in Vienna right after the Anschluss, when Nazi Germany annexed Austria. Kevin: So he also saw the rise of totalitarianism up close. Michael: Intimately. And he saw how both the fascists on the right and the communists on the left made the exact same claim: that history was on their side. That they were the inevitable next stage of human development, and that anyone who stood in their way was just an obstacle to progress who needed to be swept aside. Kevin: Right, the classic "you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs" argument, but with millions of lives. Michael: Exactly. And Popper decided to attack the very foundation of that argument. In his hugely influential books, like The Open Society and Its Enemies, he went after the entire concept of historical progress, which he called "historicism." He argued that any belief in a grand, predictable historical narrative—any philosophy of history—is inherently proto-totalitarian. To believe you know where history is going is to give yourself permission to commit any crime to get there. Kevin: So what was his conclusion? Michael: It was a philosophical bombshell. He flatly declared, "history has no meaning." There is no grand story, no arc bending towards justice, no inevitable progress. For liberals who had inherited a 19th-century faith in progress, this was devastating. It meant giving up on the idea that we were collectively moving towards a freer, more just future. Kevin: Wow. That is a full stop on ambition. If history has no meaning, then what's the point of politics? It's basically saying, "Don't dream big, your dreams might become nightmares." It sounds incredibly bleak. Michael: You've hit the nail on the head. That's Moyn's entire point. By demolishing the idea of progress, Cold War liberals left themselves with only one mission: to defend the existing liberal order. To garrison the self, as another thinker, Lionel Trilling, would put it. They won the ideological battle against communism, but in the process, they lost the ability to dream of anything better.

Kevin: So, if I'm getting this right, the liberalism we see today—the one that often feels defensive, that seems unable to offer a big, inspiring vision for the future, and is constantly focused on external threats—isn't a bug, it's a feature. It was designed that way, out of fear, during the Cold War. Michael: Precisely. And Moyn argues that this is why it keeps failing us. It can't offer real solutions to massive problems like economic inequality, social injustice, or climate change because it was built to be cautious, minimalist, and skeptical of collective action. It's an ideology of managers and risk-assessors, not visionaries and builders. Kevin: That's a really powerful, and honestly, quite depressing thought. It explains so much about the feeling of stagnation in our politics. It makes you wonder what a liberalism that wasn't born from fear, that wasn't so... wounded, would even look like. Michael: And that's the fundamental question Moyn leaves us with. He argues that simply defending this Cold War version of liberalism is a dead end. The only way forward is a radical reinvention. He says our best chance is to reach back to before the Cold War, to recover that older, more ambitious, and more hopeful spirit of emancipation. As he puts it in the book's closing lines... Kevin: What does he say? Michael: "The endless revival of its Cold War version has been a means of avoiding the only hope for liberalism, which is to reinvent it beyond the terms we have known." Kevin: It’s a call to be brave again, philosophically. I like that. It really makes you think. For anyone listening who feels like our political imagination has shrunk, or who wonders why our leaders seem to only offer small fixes instead of big visions, this book offers a compelling and deeply researched explanation. We'd love to hear your thoughts. Does this critique of liberalism resonate with you? Find us on our social media channels and let us know. Michael: This is Aibrary, signing off.