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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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 called out the „post-liberal moment"?
The age of liberalism is over, the call comes from the right, from the left, and even from the centre. Geopolitical shifts, technological transformations, and disappointed hopes get cited whenever someone celebrates or mourns the requiem of the old order.
It may seem unusual to preface an essay with a justification not for the essay itself but for the founding of a magazine. The reason I am looking forward to this project, and consider this moment of founding exactly right, has to do with a significant blind spot of liberalism that seems largely unaddressed by friends and enemies alike.
Liberalism has not lost the talent for talking about itself, only the talent for thinking. Hardly any political camp calls so often for renewal. The former intellectual self-assurance of the liberal camp has, in the first quarter of the 21st century, given way to a melancholic weariness.
When the first pioneers in the 1960s and 70s built the forerunners of the internet, they did so admirably. Dozens of researchers and battalions of doctoral students built small parts, some of which could only be integrated into the network years later. In painstaking, detailed research the first servers and networks were developed, and along the way thousands of problems were solved creatively and pragmatically.
It is by now a sad fact that no text on contemporary liberalism can do without the obligatory, and somehow pitiful, diagnosis of crisis. But don't worry, I'll keep it short. We all know where the problems lie and have run through them in every conceivable format a thousand times: the rise of populism as a decidedly illiberal ideological antagonist, the hollowing-out of liberal democracy from the inside, the return of geopolitics and zero-sum games in international relations, and the slide of our own ordering vision from the dynamic open society into the bureaucratic-static institutional sclerosis that today paralyses the Western world.
Marxism is not made by the idea that the material productive forces play a role in the development of our societies. What is characteristic of it is rather the conviction that the productive forces alone are decisive. Against that background it is at least surprising that Antonio Gramsci counts as a Marxist.
The world at the end of 2025 is no longer the one it was four, six, or ten years ago. The new state of affairs also challenges liberalism as a political idea. To make matters worse: in view of the political victories of the new right, liberalism finds itself pressed into a corner.
The Walter Lippmann Colloquium in 1938 and the precursor meeting of the Mont Pèlerin Society (MPS) in 1947 were critical engagements with the complete failure of liberalism as it was seen in the 1930s. In both cases, people came together full of doubt, wanting to look self-critically at whether liberalism still had a future.
Two crises converge at the moment: the crisis of liberalism and the crisis of ecology. They reinforce each other, and are too often played off against each other. One should not despair: the answer to both crises lies precisely in working on them together.
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