One cause of its success was the consensus that liberalism, at bottom, always seemed to win. Its opponents on the right and the left shared this consensus too, whether they otherwise branded it – like Donoso Cortés and Carl Schmitt, but also like a Mikhail Bakunin – as a cowardly and ultimately impossible attempt to reconcile irreconcilable opposites, or – like Marxism-Leninism – took it for a model to be superseded.
To call postliberalism a midcult at the very moment of its intellectual success would probably be presumptuous — after all, even diagnosing “peak postliberalism” speaks for its intellectual success. With a little mockery, though, one could aptly observe that postliberalism already looks discredited at the interim high of its success.
Liberalism puts the freedom of the individual at its centre: there can be no liberal way of life. For the essence of freedom remains the free choice of a way of life. Yet this only seems self-evident on the surface.
Liberals have a dismissive-avoidant attachment style. At least that is what you learn if you let an ideal-typical liberal find out his attachment style online, in a psychological relationship attachment-type test with the LLM of his choice. Where does the liberal fear of commitment come from?
Politics is performance. In our academically domesticated circles we may indulge the illusion that politics is the intellectual sparring of ideas. But that is not true. Politics deals with questions of power and rule. Liberals have always won this fight by making their ideas hegemonic. In this way even political opponents were eventually forced to implement liberal programmes. Hayek's theory of social change is right, to be sure: ideas arise in a small circle of scholars. But most people's access to a political idea is not intellectual engagement; it comes through diffuse feelings of belonging, through a sense that a certain politics makes one's own life better; through vibes.
Adrian Vermeule, a determined critic of liberal thought, once wrote that liberalism has a „sacral character" and that liberals in Western democracies regularly reassure themselves of their values in more or less ritualised form.
That liberalism gets blamed for all sorts of things is nothing new. But when of all things the timid reform politics of social democrats and conservatives is stylised into a liberal catch-all, one should at least pause. For the writer Nils Schniederjann, precisely this technocratic-seeming „deliverism" of the grand coalition has become the occasion for an essay analysing liberalism's wrong turn. He describes vividly the exhaustion of a liberal politics that increasingly hides behind practical constraints, expert panels, and administrative reason instead of addressing questions of the good life.
Welcome to the year 1819. You are sitting on the benches of the Royal Athenaeum in Paris, where Benjamin Constant is lecturing on the conceptions of liberty of antiquity and of the moderns. We have travelled here because this is the beginning of the debate between classical and modern liberty, a debate rekindled in recent years in the wake of the return of postliberalism. We are in precisely the period in which terms such as „individualism" and „liberalism" first arose, and in which, according to the postliberals, the world set off intellectually down the wrong path. But first things first.
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Germany, like Kingsnorth, Göpel, and Ehrlich, fears the future. We are afraid, see only risks, want to prevent as much harm as we can. Progress seems philosophically discredited and not even utopian anymore. In fact, the opposite is true: today's posture of prevention is morally indefensible; progress is possible, valuable, and worth striving for.
Parts of Silicon Valley want to live on Mars; real-time data streams and AI are the pulse of Shenzhen, China's smart city. In Germany, by contrast, the story of progress mostly ends in front of a device that, like no other, has become the coffin nail of our stagnation: the printer.
Modern humans have existed for roughly 200,000 years. Yet only for the last 250 years or so, during a vanishingly small slice of our history — about 0.125 percent (!) — have we experienced something one can call, without exaggeration, historically extraordinary: sustained progress.
For a long time, progress counted as unreservedly good: as something we should all perceive as an imperative. Today, however, books become bestsellers that call for "green shrinkage" (Ulrike Herrmann, Das Ende des Kapitalismus) or "liberation from abundance" (Niko Paech, Befreiung vom Überfluss). These stand paradigmatically for the degrowth paradigm that has emerged over the past decades, according to which what was previously called progress is not good but bad.
When things accelerate on their own, accelerationism is perhaps no more than a commentary on the slipping-away. A flight forward overtaken by the present.
The slogan that carried Rob Jetten to victory in the 2025 elections holds an unmistakable echo — and almost a literal translation — within it: the optimism of Barack Obama's "yes we can" from his first presidential campaign. And it was not the only thing Jetten borrowed from Obama. He set himself against division, reached out to voters who disagreed with him, and wanted to bring positive energy back into the country and its governance.
In the living room of one of the authors hangs a print of the motif "Paris-Bruxelles" by the Belgian comic artist François Schuiten. The drawing shows a retrofuturist vision of Paris, in which the Eiffel Tower and the Bâtiments Haussmanniens disappear among viaducts carrying express trains, gliders whir through the air, and modern Art Deco towers rise into the sky. The idea of a future that triggers nostalgia: futuristic, aesthetic, sustainable, European, progressive.
One could easily speak of a Gramsci Midcult these days. Metapolitics is the buzzword with which all sorts of political factions ride into battle, promising to win cultural ground – of whatever kind. The vulgar Gramscian responds to the cultural blind spots of the establishment with a political blind spot of his own: he loves cultural abstraction in order to blank out political concreteness.
"What are you drinking?", I ask my girlfriend. She is shaking powder and water in a shaker. As the powder slowly dissolves, the liquid turns a toxic pink. "That's the new longevity mix by Bryan Johnson." Ah, the new longevity mix by Bryan Johnson, I think.
I don't like being boxed in by labels, but I introduce myself very simply: "I'm a philosopher." Often when I say this to somebody who's outside of academia, or outside of philosophy, they act like it's the weirdest thing in the world.
We have lost our grounding. When Katy Perry flew to space with Blue Origin in 2025, the CO2 level in the atmosphere stood at about 425 ppm. In 2008, when "I Kissed a Girl" first hit the radio, it was still about 385 ppm. In pre-industrial times, by contrast, 280 ppm.
How, and with whom, does the FDP become the voice of freedom and progress again? And whom should one listen to along the way?
Few books still actually shape discourses. But Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's Abundance is one of them. Hardly any work has set off as much hype in liberal circles in recent years. Everyone seems to have "read" it (or at least picked up the talking points somewhere), talks about it…and most importantly: everyone loves it. In progressive circles especially, the book has become part of the established folklore, reaching far beyond the niche of those pro-growth liberals who were ranting against NIMBYs, subscribing to Works in Progress, and hanging a framed Hockey Stick of Human History in their bedroom long before Ezra Klein.
The battle over concepts and their meaning is fought every day, online, on the ground, and in academic debate. We liberals often sleep through it; far too good-natured, we rejoice at anyone who gives us and our forebears even a little attention. Of course, when we read what they write, we complain about inaccuracies behind which surely no intent could possibly lurk.
„The Dark Knight", the second part of Christopher Nolan's legendary Batman trilogy, tells not only the story of the Joker but also that of Harvey Dent. The sunny-boy district attorney with maximum idealism wants to free corrupt Gotham City from the grip of crime and corruption.
Anyone speaking about the Gretchen question of liberalism usually implies the distinction proclaimed by Isaiah Berlin between „positive" and „negative" freedom, between a negative freedom from and a positive freedom to. On the scale that opens up between these two signs, one can place Hayek and Rawls, Dahrendorf or Shklar quite precisely, and at the same time reassure oneself of one's own position.
The year 2026 has begun with a coup: the abduction of Nicolás Maduro by US special forces unfolded along a playbook published only a few weeks earlier in the new National Security Strategy, which declared Latin America a sphere of influence and the highest priority of American foreign policy.
It is a short speech that Peter Thiel gives at the 2016 Republican National Convention. Shortly after he begins, he allows himself a casual joke about Hillary Clinton, only to be interrupted by the cheers of the audience. Thiel smiles briefly, a little awkwardly, as if it still embarrassed him to harvest applause this way.
Even among liberals there are those who see in the New Right comrades in the fight against the left-wing zeitgeist. They overlook that the supposed partners are in truth false friends.
„Only through a repair of time can we move toward a repair of the nation."
Elon Musk is hard to ignore and even harder to understand. Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff therefore do not even try to understand him in „Muskism", at least not as a person. Musk, the thesis goes, is less a person than a symptom. They read him as the embodiment of an ideology with its own logic, one that reaches far beyond a single South African-American billionaire with space ambitions.
With Trump's re-election, niche ideas from libertarian Silicon Valley circles suddenly stand in the media spotlight. Much has been written about the exotic ideas of monarchism and libertarianism that were carried, through Peter Thiel and Curtis Yarvin, via J.D. Vance, David Sacks, and Elon Musk, into the heart of the US government.
It has become rather quiet around Patrick Deneen. The arguably most prominent thinker of postliberalism has said remarkably little in recent months. For July a new book is announced, this time not about liberalism but about Homer's Odyssey and the question of what this myth reveals about the state of the American soul.
I first noticed that a rift runs through the German liberal scene in the mid-2010s. Liberal debates were then held on Facebook, where one looked for like-minded people, resonance, but also for substantive argument.
The reserved, even skeptical attitude liberal circles regularly hold toward majoritarian rule rests on a pre-political and narrowly drawn understanding of freedom. What gets missed: representative, majoritarian-democratic forms of rule are probably the only ones that can reconcile the actual conditions of modern social life with the idea of the widest possible self-determination.
There are political theories that arise at universities, accompanied by footnotes, research grants, and the faint smell of 1970s carpeting. And there are political theories that arise at half past two in the morning on the internet, between comment sections, blog posts, and the firm conviction that the world works badly above all because its institutions are structurally mis-programmed.
Liberalism was at its most successful precisely where, following an old saying, it taught people to fish. The latest ideas in the liberal camp, however, forget this historical lesson and hand out fish. Instead of offering rules for joint decision-making, decisionism is in vogue.
»Der Liberalismus ist tot. Und es waren die Liberalen, die ihn umbrachten.«
The German freedom movement sits in a job interview. Question: „What is your greatest weakness?" Answer: „After the past decades I am perhaps a little too spoiled by success. Also [tries in vain to smile modestly]: I admit, my personality is very demanding and many-sided."
When Polity Press sent me two books on postliberalism for review at the start of the year, I was at first a little surprised. Time had somehow caught up with me: had Adrian Pabst not just in 2020 proclaimed the „post-liberal moment"?
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