Translated from German with the help of AI. The original is the authoritative version.
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.
It was not only Albert Camus who saw in that fate of modern man, who like Sisyphus seemed condemned to roll a boulder up the mountain anew every day, an absurd but fulfilling potential. Where Camus writes that the Kampf gegen den Gipfel ein Menschenherz auszufüllen vermag, Francis Fukuyama, decades later, hoped that the „endlose Lösung technischer Probleme, Umweltbelange und die Befriedigung anspruchsvoller Verbraucherbedürfnisse” would pacify man at the end of history. A skeptical hope, dressed in metaphysical garments but really, après la lettre, the liberal programme after the Second World War summed up: Sisyphus had to live so that Zarathustra would never wake again.
If one were to write a liberal history between the long 19th century and the fall of the Iron Curtain, Camus’s anti-hero and Nietzsche’s Übermensch would be the fitting protagonists.
If Karl Marx in the Communist Manifesto still attested to bourgeois liberalism that it had „in der Geschichte eine höchst revolutionäre Rolle gespielt”, one hundred years later this liberalism wanted to know nothing of it anymore. And yet the origin of liberalism in fact lay in that revolutionary fight against the feudal order, in that Zarathustra-like insight that only in resistance to the Ancien Régime could the creative potential to which the Enlightenment had committed itself unfold. With civilisation-writers, globe-circlers, and political revolutionaries on the same side, early liberalism understood itself as an attack on estate hierarchies, metaphysical certainties, and political immutability all at once. It was, very much in Zarathustra’s sense, the sermon on the mount of a new age without old certainties. But that long century, following the brittle guiding star of freedom, was to shake bourgeois liberalism to its core.
Already the first victims of the liberal revolutions, then the rise of the revolutionary workers’ movement, and at the latest the First World War had alienated liberalism from the spirit of Zarathustra. The creative pathos of many entrepreneurs and landowners, liberals had to realise more and more often, could not prevent their fear of democratic socialism from translating into reactionary potential. Samuel Moyn’s intellectual history of Cold War Liberalism is, like Fukuyama’s End of History, more a diagnosis après la lettre. What Moyn suspected in Popper or Berlin — the abandonment of liberalism’s utopian promise out of fear of a barbarian regress — had already been brewing after the First World War.
Max Weber’s ethics of responsibility, Sigmund Freud’s sublimation of drives, and Hans Kelsen’s irrevocable binding of freedom to law all aimed equally at steering the runaway freedom impulse back into ordered tracks. As early as the late 19th century, the liberal sorcerer’s apprentices had tried to undo the spirits they had once summoned. A liberal Leviathan with bureaucracies and standing armies was to arise, to overcome the anarchic civil-war danger. The rule of law was extended to defend the freedom of property against the revolutionary impulses of the Jacobins. And a tentative welfare state was made possible to calm the agitated masses again. Trust in the liberal force of Zarathustra exhausted itself the moment the laborious, disenchanted business of liberal governing began, and one noticed that a bourgeois Sisyphus could be tamed more easily than a heroic Übermensch.
But even the statification of liberalism would only protect it for a while. The revolutionary overpowering of the state in Russia and Germany, which under quite different signs had devoted itself to the fight against liberal modernity, had stirred up an existential fear of the masses among liberals. Not only the state but the political order together with its culture had now to be cleansed of the creative spirit, of the danger of the runaway Übermensch.
The thin blanket of civilisation could only be upheld by that last man whose triumph Fukuyama would proclaim in 1989. Isaiah Berlin’s „value pluralism” (the necessity of plural coexistence), Karl Popper’s „piecemeal engineering” (the gradual opening up of progress), or Judith Shklar’s „liberalism of fear” (the prevention of the greatest evil) all aimed to relativise the political claims of the individual. To put their political dreams in the shadow of millions of dreams that had to be balanced and weighed in order to keep the fragile liberal order alive. In the best case, political wishes were to sublimate themselves in private striving, where bourgeois existence had henceforth to express itself as a Sisyphus-like striving for prosperity, consumption, and family stability. Under the condition of two Central European conflagrations and the continuing violence in other parts of the world, this programme of liberal stability could succeed in the West in various political forms.
When we speak in this issue about Dark Liberalism — an ideology that feeds on a largely diffuse programme — it is important to recall this history of liberalism. In a Schmittian sense, „reactionary futurism” turns against the enemy that liberalism after the Second World War had so multi-layeredly domesticated: the last man. Liberals created the state, the bureaucracy, the constitutional courts, and the international organisations that certain liberals today criticise in sharp tones. The world against which they fight is, paradoxical as it seems, theirs. And their counter-programme is precisely that Zarathustra against which liberalism once sought to immunise itself. It is the return of the liberal conflict between order and the unleashing of drives, with all its habitual, intellectual, and political implications.
The dark-libertarian rediscovery of Schmitt, Nietzsche, and Gramsci is therefore less to be understood as a coherent programme than as the projection of a common enemy. Schmitt had formulated best the critique of the weakness of parliamentarism and of constitutional jurisdiction; Nietzsche had most fittingly described the sad limits of bourgeois existence in modernity; and Gramsci had conceptualised the regaining of an anti-liberal hegemony. But they were all reacting to the neutralising efforts of liberalism, to its gradually grown defence mechanisms. Parliamentarism and the constitutional courts institutionalised protection against the danger of an unrestrained executive and led to that „langsame Bohren dicker Bretter”. Bourgeois culture and its explicit and implicit control mechanisms hemmed in the individual but stabilised a liberal order. Liberalism as a hegemonic project, one could say, had realised itself at the cost of political liberalism. Political liberalism too now had to settle for trimming its political claims, or at least come to terms with the fact that, in the complex institutional fabric, large reforms can only be carried out step by step.
This liberalism of order brought forth its own contradictions, which today can be mobilised by reactionary futurists. The institutionalisation of liberalism overloaded the institutions it had created with tasks that, while braking revolutionary change, also robbed the democratised state of its capacity to act. And even when liberals more often criticised these political deficits, they had in principle to stand by their institutions, even when these only conditionally embodied a liberal agenda. The internationalisation of liberalism, with its universal juridification, has also recently led to legitimacy problems at the national level, which in the case of Dark Liberalism issue in a revival of national liberalism. When one no longer understands freedom as a question of order but as a question of the unfolding of drives, this position also becomes understandable. While in the search for a liberal order universalism could still serve as guiding motif, in the Zarathustra-like striving for individuality a new particularism can take hold, one that imagines itself in a clash of cultures. Whoever understands himself as a superior genius reads Spengler and Huntington rather than Sen or Nussbaum.
Reactionary futurism has therefore to be read as an internal reaction to the blind spots of liberalism, which, freely after Fukuyama, cemented the „große Langeweile” as the ideal political order.
If liberalism in this time developed above all as a virtue teacher of a philosophy of bourgeois life, as a „guardian of institutions”, or gardener of free markets, Dark Liberalism has freed itself from this habitual ballast and now sees itself in the civilisational trench. The consequence of the supposed weakness of liberals, which made „the left-liberal infiltration of institutions” possible, is that every institution is viewed with skepticism and every discussion taken as a fight over meaning. The unfolding of drives, however vulgar it may be, is no longer grasped as weakness but as strength to be lived out, no matter how. In this nihilistic view of freedom, which has only mockery for the adaptability of the last man, every action, however harmful to the community, still seems to serve a liberal purpose.
The question of how reactionary futurism wants to uphold a liberal order in the long run remains unanswered. The rediscovery of the „wisdom of the masses”, of vulgarity, and of Zarathustra’s creative force brings dangers with it against which liberalism, not without reason, tried to immunise itself for almost 200 years. The blanket of civilisation is thinner than one thinks. But just as traditional liberalism entered into a tactical alliance with all democratic forces in order to stabilise its ideology, the liberal new-interpreters of Schmitt and Nietzsche too may seek alliances with those forces that profit from the decay of the liberal order. Such an alliance, united through Zarathustra’s cult of the leader, has recently become a frighteningly real possibility. This should not lead to resignation. Rather, it may be time to rebalance the contradiction between Zarathustra and Sisyphus. All this begins with the observation that Sisyphus is less happy than we have so far thought.
