Dark Liberalism

Translated from German with the help of AI. The original is the authoritative version.

»Der Liberalismus ist tot. Und es waren die Liberalen, die ihn umbrachten.«

This analysis will sooner or later be taught in Frankfurt undergraduate seminars in exactly this form. Assuming, that is, that nothing fundamental changes soon in the liberal intellectual tradition.

Let us be honest: had one of those Suhrkamp sociologists been commissioned to write an anthropology of present-day liberalism, the result would have been a tragedy in several acts. One would have read the predictably smug-suspicious description of the dejected faces at the election-night parties of organised political liberalism, plus a superfluously detailed analysis of the not-so-deep stay-the-course slogans of its decision-makers. And that would have been the most exciting part.

The rest would have been above all a record of intellectual lack of imagination, discursive helplessness, and shocking general mediocrity. The author would have had to report on the same panels at the same „Future of Liberalism” conferences with the same greying figures from the past and their same empty phrases about fake news, more empathetic communication, and female empowerment. Yawn! And he would have had to ascribe to this whole circus some kind of deeper meaning beyond ritualised self-preoccupation.

I do not envy him. I know all of that from my own experience. I have let it happen to me for too long. In the end the book would serve as an object of study in the history of ideas. And not, as with all the publications on the New Right, as a warning against a rising worldview bursting with life.

I have no patience for that.

I want the Suhrkamp sociologists to write about liberalism again with great Unease™. They should admonish, foam a little at the mouth, and even sometimes misunderstand it Slobodian-esque again. That shows that one is taken seriously.

By now, after all, it is our former critics who are inviting us to colloquia on the theory of liberalism. The neoliberal enemy has been slain and now seems harmless, they may think. So one can again, with a touch of pity, „extract” something from Hayek and the rest. Oh, f*ck off!

But back to the book I wish someone would write about liberalism: in big bold letters across the cover it has to say „Dark Liberalism”. And the chapter titles must read:

1. Caesura & Rupture

2. Power & Meta(-politics)

3. Friend & Foe

4. Tragedy & Unreason

5. Myth & Aesthetics

And in the bibliography names suddenly appear that one had not seen there before: Niccolò Machiavelli, Friedrich Nietzsche, Carl Schmitt, Antonio Gramsci, John Gray, and Leo Strauss instead of John Rawls, Immanuel Kant, Jürgen Habermas, or Steven Pinker. Oh, and of course unashamedly also Ayn Rand or Murray Rothbard. That does sound dark.

Our sociologist sends the publisher a brief chapter outline. It might look like this:

Chapter 1: Caesura & Rupture

Since its Sturm-und-Drang phase, the Enlightenment, liberalism has been gradually hollowed out normatively and ideologically. Politically this process culminated in the neoliberal-technocratic turn of the 1990s, intellectually in the increasing Rawlsianisation of political philosophy. Dark Liberalism breaks explicitly with this development. The responsibility for the troubles is sought „internally”. A caesura in thinking and a rupture in the movement occur. Sacred cows like the optimistic faith in progress and the primacy of reason are slaughtered; patron saints, above all Rawls, are driven out of the canon, and forbidden thinkers from Carl Schmitt to Antonio Gramsci are introduced anew, creatively and on their own terms. Above all, the radical side of one’s own intellectual tradition is uncovered again. It also shows, however, that many want to win like Milei but not to be like Milei (sic!). In the theory journal ævum almost all contributions distance themselves from the dark temptation. Except for one provocation piece.

Chapter 2: Power & Meta(-politics)

Despite the substantial share of theory-building that the Dark Liberalism project devotes itself to, it must not be misunderstood as a purely intellectual revitalisation project. The aim of Dark Liberalism is power, above all in the political and pre-political space. One „frees” oneself from the supposed „liberal life-lie” that the better argument prevails simply by being right. The currency of the political is neither good/evil nor right/wrong, but success or failure. What is decisive, then, is whether freedoms can be conquered and then defended. That is the claim of Dark Liberalism.

That requires, besides the occupation of centres of power by liberal cadre politics, also a deep and radical repoliticisation of previously pacified spheres. With that one again breaks (!) explicitly with the legacy of Rawlsian political liberalism and bids final farewell to the distinction between public and non-public, which in the culture wars of the postmodern present was anyway scarcely tenable. Instead one bets on the mobilisation of a „heroic individual” who, deliberately and provocatively, has political effect through the moralisation of his lifestyle, consumer behaviour, and use of language. On institutions alone one can (and will) no longer rely.

This also shows that Dark Liberalism is entirely a product of its time. It reacts to the experiences of recent years, in which liberalism was pushed back, and in part rolled back, almost without a fight in political, cultural, and public spaces by illiberal populists, postliberal intellectuals, or a postmarxist university consensus. This readjustment shifts the liberal relation to power. Classical skepticism toward power yields to a deliberate claim to power. The „heroic individual” appears no longer only as a bearer of rights. He stylises himself into a load-bearing pillar in the culture war. Such a liberalism deliberately plays with fire… and with Ayn Rand.

Chapter 3: Friend & Foe

The arguably most radical break of Dark Liberalism with its own intellectual tradition takes place in the ontology of the political. One takes leave of a purely functional understanding of society as a system of cooperation with mutual advantage in Rawls’s sense. Instead, the unavoidable conflictual nature of the political is stressed. Unlike in classical liberalism, however, this antagonism between friend and foe is no longer demonised but consciously accepted.

For only the confrontation with the illiberal opens up for liberalism (so the reading goes) an identity-shaping moment again. It forces it to shed the dusty, porous shapelessness of its own hegemonic period and to put on contemporary garments with sufficient contour and sharpness. Liberalism, as a collecting movement, had conceptually dissolved itself too much and in the process lost its philosophical avant-garde. A clear identification of the enemy thus becomes the precondition of political self-assurance.

At the same time, it would be a misunderstanding to read Dark Liberalism as a naive adaptation of Carl Schmitt. First, this sharpening is by no means a mere import from the outside: Murray Rothbard, arguably the first Dark Liberal, had already formulated a “libertarianism of class struggle”. On one side society and the „creators” (read: the productive taxpayers); on the other, you guessed right, the state and the „parasites” (politicians, bureaucrats, subsidy recipients, and so on). Second, Dark Liberalism is playfully provocative; but it does not blindly jump into the abyss. While Schmitt aims at the real possibility of physical annihilation, Dark Liberalism operates along the lines of conflict of a hyperpolitical postmodernity. Everything is somehow simulative-performative, not existential-material. Spectacle, not blood-lust, rules. In this reality of an ever-advancing media public, the symbolic exchanges are about attention and interpretive authority, not about physical annihilation.

In this way, Dark Liberalism becomes an existentialist identity project that revives the dormant freedom fighter as a political subject through resistance to his enemies. A liberalism emerges that constitutes itself primarily through confrontation with the state, sh*tcitizens, postliberalism, and the rest.

Chapter 4: Tragedy & Unreason

If classical liberalism is the child of the Enlightenment and modernity, then Dark Liberalism is the illegitimate child of postmodernity, populism, and identity politics. One breaks with the assumption that the human being is a rationally endowed actor who, through education and prosperity, ripens into a peaceful world citizen. Instead, this wishful belief is replaced by an anthropology of cynicism: the human being appears as a tragic figure who, while nominally committed to reason, remains in his existence shaped by deeply affective, drive-driven elements. Unlike Enlightenment liberalism, Dark Liberalism almost wallows in this dark picture of human beings.

One plays with the crooked timber of humanity, instead of trying to bend it straight. Human drives like status hunger, tribalism, and the joy of confrontation are no longer morally condemned, but politically instrumentalised. Particularly provocative is the rehabilitation of affect. While liberal thinkers traditionally looked at emotions with suspicion, Dark Liberalism deliberately reaches for anger, defiance, and rage. One has no more patience for the gradual, organic change of a self-paralysed, thoroughly social-democratised society. In this revolutionary spirit, one feels an almost artistic pleasure in destroying encrusted structures.

To this belongs the radical turn away from the naive techno-optimism and exuberant openness to the future of the previous liberalism, which confused progress with fate. The „happy-clappy, everything-will-eventually-be-fine” liberalism is restyled into a warning of an illiberal apocalypse. And everything turns into a question of fate.

In theory-building, one also breaks with over-theorisation. Turning to political psychology, one recognises that the real political order cannot rest on the laborious rational constructions of a Luhmann, a Habermas, or a Rawls. They lose themselves in pseudo-debates and theoretical scaffolds. Dark Liberalism bets instead on an epistemology of common sense: it trusts the fast, intuitive heuristics of the little guy.™ Instead of trying to steer society through hyper-intellectual discourses, one returns to those pre-rational judgements that recognise instinctively what freedom is and means. Instead of a universal theory of liberalism, one presents a universal access to liberalism.

Chapter 5: Myth & Aesthetics

Across these substantive ruptures, Dark Liberalism pushes the transformation of liberalism from an economised, technocratic administrative doctrine into an independent aesthetic and form of life. It no longer wants only to convince; it wants to do statecraft and soulcraft at once. For this, it bets on three components: (1) the re-mythologisation of freedom; (2) an aesthetic of rebellion and counter-culture; and (3) the enchantment of the masses.

In that sense Dark Liberalism must be read as another attempt to satisfy the transcendental need of the human being in secular modernity. Instead of pragmatism and rulebook, one seeks sacred pathos. Internally, one quarrels (without reaching too clear a conclusion) over how far the „dark arts” of the noble lie, Straussian esoteric writing, elites, and heroes are suitable for a new architecture and charging of the idea. At the least, one does not want simply „just” a new narrative.

More consensus arises in the shaping of a distinctive aesthetic. In any case one wants to stage oneself as an intellectual, provocative avant-garde aiming to shift the debates and discourses of liberal societies (and so, basically, itself). In that sense it is once again a revolt against one’s own history. And precisely for that reason it may not be surprising that the appearance often looks like teenage defiance. After all, one is taking on one’s own creators. This proximity to youth culture also fits. With its aesthetic of rebellion and revolution, one wants to reclaim spaces from the edges and, through the authenticity of an in-family revolt, push aside the technocratic-stuffy one of one’s own parent generation. For that one necessarily needs a healthy dose of vulgarity. Nonconformism, after all, is expressed neither through statesman-like adapted corporate slang nor through the pseudo-conciliatory deliberation of a reflective equilibrium. ¡Afuera!

In the end, one returns to a seemingly old debate: should a new liberalism be perfectionist or non-perfectionist? Sounds familiar. But here too Dark Liberalism breaks characteristically with its own intellectual history. The question of metaphysical anchoring does not become a discourse on truth. Rather, one has instrumental motives: here, metaphysics serves as a tool to anchor liberalism deeply in majority society again through aesthetic overwhelm. One does not offer a theory that wants to be understood, but a form that has to be admired and adopted.

So much for the chapter overview. That sounds like an (admittedly wild) project, not a pseudo-analytical funeral hymn in philosophical motion, doesn’t it?

Of course, all these approaches and fragments need further elaboration. But that, after all, is what the actual little book is for. And ideally it will not be written from the perspective of external description by a Suhrkamp sociologist. Maybe it will be written by a Dark Liberal himself, fully and entirely as a manifesto. That would be something. My contact details could surely be found for that purpose.