Narrator: What if the version of liberalism we defend today—the one that champions individual freedom against state overreach and stands as a bulwark against tyranny—is not the tradition’s highest form, but its greatest betrayal? What if, in its fight against the totalitarian monsters of the 20th century, liberalism became a shadow of its former self, sacrificing its bold, progressive, and emancipatory soul for a future of anxious survival? This is the provocative argument at the heart of Samuel Moyn’s intellectual history, Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times. Moyn contends that the liberalism forged in the crucible of the Cold War was a catastrophe, a conscious choice to abandon the Enlightenment’s promise of human perfection and collective progress, leaving the tradition in ruins and paving the way for the crises we face today.

Narrator: The central thesis of the book is that Cold War liberalism was not a necessary adaptation but a catastrophic betrayal of its own principles. Moyn argues that when faced with the threat of totalitarianism in the 1940s and 50s, liberals made a choice. They could have doubled down on the emancipatory, progressive ideals of the 19th and early 20th centuries, but instead, they chose to disfigure their own tradition. As Moyn puts it, this choice left liberalism "unrecognizable and in ruins."

This new, anxious version of liberalism redefined its core tenets. Freedom was no longer about the expansive project of human self-creation; it became a minimalist freedom from state excess. The idea of progress was abandoned, viewed as a naive and dangerous path toward utopian terror. Hope for a better future was replaced by a grim determination to hold the line and preserve the West as a refuge. This intellectual retreat, Moyn argues, was not an inevitability forced by history, but a deliberate decision with devastating consequences. It created a liberalism that was pessimistic, constrained, and ultimately unable to offer a compelling vision for the future, setting the stage for its own decline and the rise of its successors: neoliberalism and neoconservatism.

Narrator: The intellectual architect of this transformation was, in many ways, its first and most insightful critic: Judith Shklar. In her 1957 book After Utopia, Shklar diagnosed a profound exhaustion of political optimism. She argued that the horrors of total war, the Holocaust, and the rise of totalitarianism had created what she would later call the "liberalism of fear."

This new liberalism placed the avoidance of cruelty and the fear of state power at its absolute center. The state was no longer seen as a potential agent of collective emancipation but as the greatest risk to individual safety. Shklar observed that her contemporaries, in their terror of repeating the mistakes that led to fascism and Stalinism, had abandoned the Enlightenment’s radical belief in humanity's capacity to improve itself and its society. This "end of radicalism" meant relinquishing the idea that humans could collectively shape their own destiny. Instead, liberalism became, in Shklar’s cutting analysis, "only another expression of social fatalism," offering a secular way to despair rather than a path to progress. This fear-driven, minimalist approach became the default setting for Cold War liberals, a defensive crouch from which the tradition has never fully recovered.

Narrator: If the "liberalism of fear" provided the emotional tone, the philosopher Karl Popper provided the intellectual demolition crew. His work was pivotal in convincing liberals to abandon one of their most powerful ideas: that history is a story of progress and expanding freedom. Before the Cold War, liberals, like their Marxist rivals, often saw history as an unfolding drama of emancipation. But Popper, in works like The Open Society and Its Enemies, argued that this "historicism"—the belief in inevitable historical laws—was the philosophical root of totalitarianism.

Popper’s critique, though based on what some scholars saw as a limited reading of figures like Hegel and Marx, was extraordinarily successful. Traumatized by ideologies that justified mass murder in the name of a glorious future, liberals eagerly jettisoned their own traditions of historical optimism. They ceded the entire philosophy of history to Marxism. The consequences were profound. As the historian François Furet later lamented, once Marxism disappeared, the very "idea of another society" became almost impossible to conceive. Liberalism was left, in Furet's words, "condemned to live in the world as it is," without a compelling story of where society could or should go next. It had a critique of its enemies, but no narrative for its friends.

Narrator: With the grand projects of progress and emancipation off the table, Cold War liberalism turned inward. It found a new foundation not in social transformation, but in personal and moral constraint. Two figures were key to this shift: Gertrude Himmelfarb and Lionel Trilling. Himmelfarb, a young Jewish historian, revived the 19th-century Catholic thinker Lord Acton, championing his "liberal Christianity." She presented Acton as a figure who grounded liberalism in an "absolute and universal moral code," a set of eternal principles that stood outside of history and forbade the justification of immoral means for future ends.

At the same time, the literary critic Lionel Trilling canonized Sigmund Freud for a new generation of liberals. Trilling had once been a communist fellow traveler who dismissed Freud’s pessimism. But disillusioned by Stalinism, he came to see Freud's work as a necessary antidote to liberalism's naive optimism. He argued that liberalism was always "surprised" by evil because it failed to account for the dark, aggressive, and irrational passions within the human psyche. The solution was a "garrisoned self"—a personality defined by psychic self-constraint and vigilant self-management. Together, these thinkers helped create a liberalism premised on durable limits, where the main political project was no longer changing the world, but policing the self.

Narrator: This new, constrained liberalism also had a stark geographical and racial boundary. Thinkers like Hannah Arendt, while a unique and often critical voice, were "fellow travelers" in the Cold War project. She contributed to the anticanon against the French Revolution and historicism, and her work on totalitarianism became a cornerstone of Cold War thought. However, her work also reveals what the historian Tyler Stovall calls "white freedom"—a vision of liberty that was implicitly Eurocentric and racially restricted.

This contradiction is most vivid in the "Jewish exception" made by many Cold War liberals regarding Zionism. Figures like Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, and Jacob Talmon, who were otherwise deeply skeptical of nationalism, collective emancipation, and political violence, made a special case for the state of Israel. Berlin, for instance, saw Zionism as a necessary "normalization" project to cure the "deformity" of Jewish life in the diaspora. He celebrated a statist, nationalist, and even violent form of self-assertion for Jews that he and other Cold War liberals condemned in postcolonial movements across Asia and Africa. This "geographical morality" exposed the hypocrisy at the heart of their supposedly universal principles, revealing a liberalism that reserved its full emancipatory potential for some, while denying it to others.

Narrator: The epilogue of Liberalism Against Itself argues that this Cold War framework is precisely why liberalism continues to fail today. The 1960s offered a brief window of opportunity for reinvention, with figures like John Rawls defending egalitarianism and the Great Society aiming for ambitious social reform. But this impulse was destroyed by the Vietnam War and a conservative backlash. In the decades that followed, Cold War liberalism didn't evolve; it simply collapsed into its component parts: neoliberalism, which took its skepticism of the state to an extreme, and neoconservatism, which inherited its aggressive, threat-obsessed foreign policy.

Ever since, Moyn argues, liberals have been stuck in a loop, constantly reviving the Cold War playbook to face new enemies—from Islamist terrorism to Russian authoritarianism to domestic populism. This "survivalist" mentality, focused on defending a beleaguered citadel, has prevented liberalism from addressing its own internal failures, most notably its complicity in soaring economic inequality. The result is a tradition that has lost its credibility and has no inspiring answer to the defining challenges of our time.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from Samuel Moyn's book is that the crisis of liberalism is a self-inflicted wound. The version of liberalism that became dominant after World War II was not a triumphant culmination of the tradition, but a fearful and tragic retreat from its own highest ideals of emancipation, progress, and human flourishing. By choosing safety over hope, constraint over creation, and a narrow defense of the West over a universal project of freedom, Cold War liberals hollowed out their own ideology, leaving it brittle and uninspiring.

The book leaves us with a profound challenge. If the liberalism we have inherited is a ghost, a defensive remnant of a once-vibrant faith, then simply defending it is not enough. The real task is to ask what a liberalism freed from its Cold War anxieties might look like. What would it mean to once again believe in a future of collective progress and to see the state not just as a threat, but as a potential tool for creating a more just and equal world?