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.
Quinn Slobodian cites Mises in such a distorted way that he comes off as a racist, even though in the passage cited he says the opposite? Amlinger/Nachtwey call people libertarian who themselves hold no pronounced political-theoretical views, and then pair this with „authoritarian” on top? All easy to clear up if we only practise a little more intellectual history. And besides, we are liberal, not libertarian.
We have to wake up from this slumber of the good-natured if we do not want to be ground up between left and right in the years to come. Instead of accepting that any random right-winger calls himself libertarian and that left-wing sociologists and historians then declare exactly that to be the core of our project, we have to fight for the concepts that matter to us.
Just because someone calls himself libertarian, perhaps to avoid having to call himself far-right, does not mean we have to accept it. The same goes for those who may once have held liberal convictions, but whose convictions have long moved into the background, been reduced to exceptions, or disappeared entirely. Anyone whose use of concepts goes unchallenged ends up standing for them.
And to whoever says „libertarian” is not important to me: the same goes for concepts with strategic weight. In the public debate, every fundamentally liberal proposal gets called libertarian.
It is not only the concept „libertarian” that is threatened by right-wing takeover attempts. Those building the new Milei Institute, who come from the old AfD environment, call themselves not only libertarian but also liberal.
Beyond all these battles over meaning, however, we must not forget: in political theory, the argument is not only about strategic questions but aims at truth, at a genuinely better world. We therefore have to be just as concerned to take a critical look at the problems and dangerous outgrowths of that supposedly „authoritarian libertarianism”, which possibly could exist and obviously does in part. Not simply accepting the claims of those who give liberal ideas no future, but looking for ourselves at what an intellectually charitable reading of liberal authors yields.
Even in a charitable history of liberalism or libertarianism, ugly stains must appear. We have to face them and ask which elements of our thinking lead to them (ideologically) or attract people of that kind (sociologically). For the ideas of libertarianism, John Tomasi and Matt Zwolinski have shown what such a critical project might look like.
Even on the question of the right concepts, we have to pick up the books ourselves and critically examine right-wing readings ourselves. To weigh for ourselves whether Peter Thiel should really be called libertarian; whether Frauke Petry is not simply a more or less right-wing, more or less market-oriented, more or less conservative figure. Making these judgements ourselves is central to the survival of liberal ideas, because if we do not, these ideas we care about will, in a few years, only be perceived as the outdated precursors of far-right ideas. If only out of our deep rejection of new-right convictions, we have to try to prevent this.
An objection follows the exclusion of certain views from the liberal family hot on its heels: anyone who wants to bring change in society needs allies and cannot afford an exclusion mania. That is true. But this is also true: we can only count on allies who do not stab us in the back at the decisive moment. In weighing a big-tent liberalism that wants to include everyone against the fight for concepts, this is central.
Which differences we can overlook, and which should mark unbridgeable rifts, depends on what the central questions of our time are. If one accepts Steve Davies’s analysis, then individualist cosmopolitanism versus rigid national identities is the central trade-off. Cosmopolitan liberals cannot then form an alliance with those who stand on the side of the nation, of inherited identities, and against the global order. Here too the fight over concepts has to begin. There is reason to draw the line of the liberal (that holistic liberal who tries to answer all questions of living together in a liberal way, not only some selected economic ones) exactly there.
And yet, perhaps for this very reason, cosmopolitan liberalism is losing at the moment worldwide against anti-liberal opponents. We therefore have to face the question why authoritarians are politically more successful than liberals. Are those right who call for a Dark Liberalism that, in the fight against authoritarians, copies their will to power? Examining our own vulnerable spots and structural weaknesses cannot hurt in any case. It would be naive to say: rather than learn even a single lesson from authoritarian success, we prefer to stand before the smoking ruins of liberalism and walk away with our hands washed in innocence.
On the other side, as in the debate around militant democracy, this posture at a certain point turns from a defence of liberalism into transcending it. And it always runs the risk of taking up too uncritically the new right’s external view of liberalism: that it is weak but at the same time hegemonic; aggressive in the inner culture war but passive in the competition with external cultural influences; as a liberal democracy too weak to push through necessary political decisions, yet always unfairly hard in dealing with its critics. Anyone who simply accepts this external view makes it too easy for the critics of liberalism, and overlooks treasures in the history of liberal ideas still waiting to be lifted. We should therefore turn to the question what lessons we should draw from our current loss of ground to the right, what criticism of liberalism should be taken seriously and what discarded.
We have to learn, then, on one hand: recognise possible dangers that may lie in the history of liberal ideas, but also accept strategically important lessons from the competition. On the other hand, we also have to fight, practically and politically, over the meaning of our concepts. These are the challenges we want to take on with the second issue of ævum, to discuss them, and so start a debate in our own camp that we have, for far too long, left to others.
