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.
What is true:
Yes, liberalism is out of ideas. It is unable to put its own unease into words. Even the leading figures of liberalism sense that something is off, that something has been moving in the wrong direction for some time now. But what this something is, or rather, what underlies this something, remains unclear and out of reach. The liberal, who is never short of an intellectual explanation, is suddenly speechless when asked to give a structural analysis of his own crisis. More and more, it seems as if our concepts no longer fit the time they were meant to describe. Our vocabulary is exhausted, our narrative weakened, and we ourselves, in our liberal identity, retreat into the last remaining comfort zones: the texts of the great names of past centuries.
With a circle-the-wagons mentality on one hand and a dance to the postliberal tune on the other, the internal battles over the meaning of liberalism have been reignited. For some, the answer to the crisis of liberalism is yet more, ideally purer or truer, liberalism. Other liberals bet on adjusting to the zeitgeist in a Realpolitik mode, hoping that small concessions on the platform will somehow save their worldview.
What unites many liberal crisis analyses and proposed answers is the refusal to step outside the frame of one’s own crisis. But precisely at the moment when liberalism and postliberalism, liberalism and populism, liberalism and authoritarianism collide more sharply than ever — politically, ideologically, socially — it is a tragic mistake to put one’s head in the sand and let world history pass us by. The supposed eternity of liberalism is no longer intact; the age of ævum has begun. ævum is a project that refuses to grasp liberalism, fatalistically and metaphysically, as eternal; rather, it works out its maxims anew, and, ever changing, anchors itself in the zeitgeist of the moment.
In this magazine, then, the point is to recognise the moment of crisis. To understand this moment as opportunity, we have to take up the reform of liberalism as our task: as a continuous reorientation that can never be complete. In the place of stale ideas, we want to put new ones, or at least try. We want to make ævum a place where the most interesting liberal voices of today become audible, and where the still-silent German liberalism begins to find its voice. Four themes a year, with weekly new articles.
We think that liberals over the past decades have too rarely thought by writing, and bear a share of the responsibility for the ideological emptiness and self-paralysis of liberalism. Instead of merely complaining about this crisis, we want to use it as an opportunity to think through our own ideology radically, expose conceptual gaps, and practise unsparing self-criticism. Liberals always emphasise that social conflict is essential to freedom, and this claim should hold also, or especially, for liberalism itself.
At the same time, we take seriously the forces that profit from the crisis of liberalism: those who put authority before freedom, identity before autonomy, order before plurality. We must not read these movements only as a threat but also as a symptom: as the expression of a vacuum that liberalism has left by running out of ideas. The postliberal revolt, the rediscovery of religious longing, the nationalist regression, today’s identity overload — all live precisely off this liberal intellectual exhaustion.
This magazine takes a stand for a liberalism that lives because it changes, and that endures only by re-grounding itself again and again. The right moment to make good on that claim has now come. Only then can liberalism continue, in the ævum between zeitgeist and eternity.
thinking by writing:
Sven Gerst, Nikolai Ott, Alexander Schwitteck, Marius Drozdzewski
