One cause of its success was the consensus that liberalism, at bottom, always seemed to win. Its opponents on the right and the left shared this consensus too, whether they otherwise branded it – like Donoso Cortés and Carl Schmitt, but also like a Mikhail Bakunin – as a cowardly and ultimately impossible attempt to reconcile irreconcilable opposites, or – like Marxism-Leninism – took it for a model to be superseded.
By defining liberalism as the thing to be overcome, its enemies declared it the standard and themselves the deviation. So even before the collapse of the twentieth century’s totalitarianisms, liberals found it easy to tell the history of their movement as one of continued triumph under adverse conditions, through which the freedom fought over and won expands with every new generation.
Told this way, the history of liberalism appeared as one of linear progress. Historically, of course, this story was untenable, as the British historian Herbert Butterfield showed in his Whig Interpretation of History. This interpretation, according to Butterfield, consisted at bottom in projecting present conditions back into the past, and for that very reason it was marked by a rigid black-and-white thinking in favour of Protestants and liberals – in the British sense, the Whigs – and against Catholics and conservatives.
For Butterfield – himself a convinced liberal and Protestant – the liberal philosophy of history thus violated the central liberal principles of tolerance and mutual understanding: “The case against the whig historian lies in the fact that he brings the effort of understanding to a halt. […] It would not be untrue to say that […] much greater ingenuity and a much higher imaginative endeavour have been brought into play upon the whigs, progressives and even revolutionaries of the past, than have been exercised upon the elucidation of tories and conservatives and reactionaries.” All the more so as it also led to absurdities of the kind in which “the very men who opposed votes for women until the vote could be with-held no longer, are unable to see in the opponents of the Great Reform Bill anything but the corrupt defenders of profitable abuses.”
Butterfield’s demand to rely on concrete, painstaking historical case studies rather than on the ready-made Whig interpretation deserves full assent on the grounds of both historiography and epistemology. Yet the fact that nobody seems to believe the story of victory anymore is a problem for liberalism. Where it was once the superior foe to be overcome, it is now often defended only with the remark that it is, after all, better than its alternatives. This is precisely how liberalism loses the progress that shaped its content from its beginnings, when it was the “left” of the parliamentary spectrum. A liberalism that only defends itself, and no longer seems able to win, loses its content.
Against this liberal narrative of crisis, of all things, Aurélien Berlan mobilises an inverted variant of the Whig interpretation. For the French philosopher, who lives as a gardener in a commune and at the same time teaches at the Université Toulouse-Jean-Jaurès, liberalism has by no means failed. On the contrary, it keeps winning at the expense of human freedom. In his book Land und Freiheit. Kollektive Autonomie gegen den Wahn der Erlösung, published in German in 2026, Berlan tries to make this thesis plausible through an immanent critique of the liberal understanding of freedom, which he defines as the utopian promise of a double liberation of the individual, from conflict and from subsistence, and at the same time to set against it an alternative, anarchist understanding of freedom. Since the discourse on the crisis of liberalism concentrates above all on new state authoritarianisms, Berlan’s approach is particularly interesting because it challenges liberalism precisely on its central concept, the one that gives it its name.
Berlan’s critique of liberalism is above all a critique of industrial and consumer society. Accordingly, he treats phenomena that the general discourse counts as opponents of liberalism as its very expressions. “The neo-Marxists had drawn no lesson from the devastation that state capitalism had wrought in the USSR. The Keynesians, for their part, dreamed of the return of the state-regulated Fordist capitalism of the postwar boom years, without considering its ecological side effects. At bottom, in both cases, these were alter-capitalists, united with the liberals in the belief in the emancipatory power of ‘science’ and ‘technology’, on the condition that ‘good use’ be made of them,” he writes as early as the introduction, looking back at the anti-globalisation movement of the 2000s.
Accordingly, for him the differences between the political systems and fantasies of Western democracies, the People’s Republic of China, and Californian tech entrepreneurs are fundamentally a matter of degree: “Apart from the fact that authoritarian and fascistic movements are gaining ground in every part of the world […], the liberal concept of freedom is in a sorry state today. I am thinking not only of the handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, […], but first of all of Edward Snowden’s ‘revelations’ in 2013. These delivered the definitive proof that the fundamental principles of liberalism can be trampled underfoot in the middle of the liberal world.” After all, Berlan argues, the NSA affair – which is currently enjoying a not always conscious comeback in the debate about the AI company Palantir – showed that privacy, as a space protected from state access, has taken on a purely fictional character under present conditions. Yet it is precisely this space that, since Benjamin Constant, on whom Berlan concentrates most in his reconstruction, has been the core of the liberal understanding of freedom: “For the moderns, by contrast, freedom takes place in private life, which presupposes that the latter is protected by the constitution, that is, declared ‘inviolable’.”
Against this background, Berlan asks how this self-injury of liberalism could come about. His answer is at first as unoriginal as it is plausible: it is “the result of economic and technological surges of development that have shaken the structures of society, and with them the ways of life, to their foundations: the spread of the free market economy, the rise of the mass media, and finally the computerisation of all activities” – in other words, all of them developments that liberals themselves set in motion or at least welcomed. Liberalism thus finds itself in a glaring self-contradiction: “We can no longer call ourselves free today, at least not in the classical liberal sense, because in our everyday lives we have become dependent on institutions that have countless means at their disposal to control us.”
That this contradiction does not lead to the system being overcome, Berlan explains by the fact that the very developments which hollowed out privacy have at the same time created infinitely many new choices and completely depersonalised domination: “And so we still feel free, because the new ‘global surveillance’ is not carried out, as in the totalitarian regimes, by agents of flesh and blood who spy on us and follow our movements: electronic devices do it, entirely without voyeurism.” The device that watches you is thus the same one that makes almost infinitely many consumer decisions possible. In the digitalised industrial society, the unlimited possibilities are matched by just as many dependencies, which the consumer, however, fails to notice.
Berlan’s alternative does not consist in merely demanding a freedom from these dependencies. On the contrary, it finds freedom in physical labour: “[Various] struggles and movements of exile testify to the wish to live without masters, and not to the wish to be freed from ‘necessity’. In contrast to the modern delusion of lightening our living conditions to the point of weightlessness, what matters is access to the means of subsistence, with the aim of being able to provide for one’s own life, or rather to take it upon oneself.” In his picture of history, “subsistence […] is what precedes the market economy and stands in opposition to it,” though he is keen to stress that it does not stand “in contradiction to the market, but to the industrial supermarket of the globalised economy.” Such a regionalised economy of free small producers is, according to Berlan, “the only tried and proven alternative to capitalism […]. The other approaches, in particular those that, following Marx, call themselves socialist or communist, were and remain purely theoretical projects.”
This vision, of course, runs diametrically counter to the way of life in today’s modern industrial societies, be they Western-style democracies, the Chinese model and other “Asian tigers,” or the societies of the former Eastern Bloc during the Cold War. For that very reason, however, it offers, in many respects, attractive starting points for reflecting on one’s own way of life, even for those who have no wish to leave industrial society. Of particular interest here is Berlan’s regionalism, which – just like many who otherwise have nothing to do with anarchism – wants to embed political decisions in the immediate lifeworld again, and for that very reason refuses to give a clear definition of the good life: “The striving for freedom may be universal, but a free way of life is not, for it takes different forms. Although its principles are the same everywhere, they are realised in very different ways.” For whether such a recommunalisation in the name of individual and collective self-determination might not be conceivable within a liberal democracy as well, is in the end an open question.
