Translated from German with the help of AI. The original is the authoritative version.
The world at the end of 2025 is no longer the one it was four, six, or ten years ago. The new state of affairs also challenges liberalism as a political idea. To make matters worse: in view of the political victories of the new right, liberalism finds itself pressed into a corner.
In the past, one could reliably place oneself on a left-right scheme, depending on how much economic freedom or equality one held to be desirable. If one could also place oneself on the scale of civil liberty versus security, one’s own political position could be pinpointed quite precisely.
For some time now this coordinate system no longer seems to work: in the political arena a fight rages over questions now called „culture war”. Where does one stand in this argument as a liberal? One need not even glance at organised party-political liberalism in Germany to notice that a clear answer is hard to give here. At least, the opinions on this question diverge considerably. What has shifted is not only the basis for short-lived entertainment on the internet: the questions that define the political landscape themselves seem to have changed.
The recommendations on how to deal with this new state of affairs diverge, as the liberal philosopher Sven Gerst recently sketched. Among them is Abundance Liberalism, which refuses to take sides in the culture war and has little time for either side of this debate. Its proponents call for addressing the really important political questions instead: how is the economy doing? Are there enough jobs? What about our hospitals and schools? How do we preserve the foundation of our existence, in both climate and foreign policy? Gerst does not mention him, but in German politics the most prominent representative of this position would be Konstantin Kuhle.
Or has the culture war become so central that no one can do politics without locating themselves on the scale it shifts? Can one no longer afford neutrality in the culture war today? That would be the position Sven Gerst calls Dark Liberalism. A confrontational liberalism that fights against the „woke” for cultural hegemony. According to Gerst, the Argentinian president Javier Milei or the Welt publisher Ulf Poschardt are examples of this position.
The diagnosis of many observers is therefore: the central political question of our time has shifted. The British historian Steve Davies sees it similarly in his forthcoming book The Great Realignment.
But is this development really as new as it appears? On closer look it recalls the diagnosis of a liberal thinker of the 20th century: Ralf Dahrendorf. With astonishingly similar words he analysed the political situation in the autumn of 1974, when after leaving the Commission of the European Community (EC) he held the famous BBC Reith Lectures, which appeared shortly afterward as The New Liberty.
A few years earlier the student movement had shaken Germany and, in a broader sense, the West. A new left set out to demand political renewal not only on economic themes. Just as prominent were cultural and ideational questions: intellectual stagnation and political one-sidedness in the universities (then as now a topic, only with a differently placed front and dominance), the failure to come to terms with the Nazi past, and the possibility of self-development in a Federal Republic perceived as stuffy. When it came to the economy, one heard more and more that growth was actually not so important.
But for Dahrendorf the young people at the universities were only part of a larger political trend that he also tied to the emergence of new movements and parties („protest parties like Democrats 66 in Holland”). Environmental protection, self-realisation, the question of the how instead of the how much: the old political divide between „haves” and „have-nots” was about to be replaced by a new conflict.
This change was significant for Dahrendorf, because his liberalism consisted of two aspects: the dignity and freedom of the individual, and the regulation of social conflicts that can only be worked out peacefully in a democratic society. But: how does one work out cultural conflicts? In economic conflicts compromises are possible. For the conflict between the student movement and its opponents, or for today’s culture war, this is hardly true.
After 1968 the intellectual counter-movement was not long in coming. At universities groups like the Bund Freiheit der Wissenschaft formed; in the feuilletons of the republic, skepticism and rejection met the student movement. The arguments of this time had such a lasting effect on the intellectual-historical development of the Federal Republic that one sometimes forgets how great the intellectual difference between the 1960s and 1970s was (and least of all on the left). Liberal and conservative historians and political scientists were until then keenly interested in society: social history was in fashion.
Only after the squabbles of the late 1960s did sociology become a discredited field that conservatives and many liberals more and more rejected as leftist. Helmut Schelsky, one of the leading founding fathers of postwar sociology, even called himself decidedly an „anti-sociologist” in his memoirs published in 1981. And another change came with the student movement: the liberal-conservative intellectual answer led its protagonists, under the impression of these events, increasingly to anchor the conviction that ideas and culture are the factors that shape politics. Karl Dietrich Bracher, author of the social- and structural-historical standard work Die Auflösung der Weimarer Republik (1955), held, by the time he wrote the foreword to the English translation of Zeit der Ideologien in November 1983, quite a different view. Bracher was now first and foremost interested in ideas because he held them to be enormously effective. The Bonn political scientist stated this explicitly with reference to the fundamental shifts of social and political values in the course of the 1970s, in which the book project itself had arisen (a project, by the way, that dealt primarily with earlier times and so projected the present somewhat back into the past).
Dahrendorf did not want to join in. The conservatives, stirred by the student movement, he could, when push came to shove, take even less seriously than the protagonists of 1967 and 68. But his diagnosis, that the political coordinate system and the economic reality had shifted and that liberalism therefore had to be rethought, stood firm. Unlike the culture warriors, he had increasingly left the university world and gone into politics. The events that shaped him in those years were political earthquakes like the decision of US President Richard Nixon in August 1971 to decouple the US dollar from the gold standard and to impose an additional 10 percent import tariff.
As EC trade commissioner, Dahrendorf had to pick up the pieces caused in Europe by the resulting exchange-rate fluctuations and higher trade barriers. It is no surprise that he gave economic power (whether in trade negotiations or in social conflicts) more attention than his colleagues who had stayed at their universities. The liberal politician and sociologist thus saw that the political discourse had shifted to other themes, while at the same time the political reality remained more complex.
But take note: Dahrendorf did not stay with this analysis. At the end of the 1970s he changed his diagnosis again. Not least the electoral victory of Margaret Thatcher in May 1979, which followed the so-called „Winter of Discontent”, when British trade unions had paralysed the country, pressed the liberal, who had since left Brussels and was now director of the London School of Economics and Political Science, to the conclusion that the political shift away from economic questions was not as far reaching as he had thought. It’s the Economy stupid — somehow it was again about economic growth and an economic conflict. For Dahrendorf this was rather tragic: he broke off a book project called The Contradictions of Modernity (later Modernity in Eclipse), whose central thesis, after much time and energy, had collapsed in light of the new political developments. In The Modern Social Conflict he wrote some years later that the book project had luckily never been published.
For today’s world this shows: neither the shift of political debates toward culture wars nor the intellectual attempts to make sense of these changes are entirely new. And more than that: the fact that the „culture war” (to use an unashamedly anachronistic word for that time) between the 68ers and the New Conservatives of the 1970s, after some time, was supplemented and even superseded by new debates, shows that we are not condemned to today’s debate forever. The culture war can be replaced by something else: one can either work toward this or try to prevent it, depending on which direction one wants to go politically (to avoid misunderstandings: the author of these lines holds the first option to be more attractive).
That does not mean the present impulse to think liberalism anew is misguided. On the contrary, it appears that this is how we can come out of an intellectual dead end that has built up especially over the past two decades. The persons most often cited in the liberal milieu of that period were, when in doubt, always thinkers like Karl Popper, Friedrich August von Hayek, or Isaiah Berlin. Even if they were each oriented a little differently, they shared a conviction central to their thinking: history is made by ideas. A conviction that for all three was a deliberate distancing from Marxist ideas.
Dahrendorf saw it differently. The son of a Social Democratic Reichstag deputy wrote the first of his two doctoral theses on Karl Marx. In the late 1950s he turned from social democracy to liberalism; a year of research at Stanford, at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, together with Fritz Stern and Milton Friedman, was a key experience. But Dahrendorf never wholly took leave of the conviction that economy and society shape politics in a decisive way, an idea that would never have occurred to Hayek, Popper, or Berlin.
In this Dahrendorf was by no means an outsider. Before the formative events of the late 1960s and 1970s, his sociological liberalism was part of the mainstream, as also represented by other liberal sociologists like Raymond Aron. And not by coincidence, sociology had since the early 20th century been a discipline shaped decisively by liberals like Max Weber.
That we ourselves live in a time when social changes have a considerable influence on political developments is obvious. But where are today’s liberal sociologists and sociological liberals? In their absence, a perspective is missing that one cannot gain by reading the other named liberals. Anyone who believes that ideas alone shape politics and devotes little time to the question of how shifts in the placement of social interests and conflicts work themselves out politically looks only at one side of the political coin. And he does so, interestingly, in a way similar to the woke and the new right: with an absolute focus on culture and ideas. In the process, intellectually and politically, something inevitably gets left behind.
That liberalism is a political current which has always developed in argument with its intellectual opponents and the context of its time is one of the few constants of the history of liberalism. One of the best testimonies to this is still Richard Bellamy’s by-now classic Liberalism and Modern Society. Bellamy analyses various national traditions of liberalism, from the British variant to the French, German, and Italian. John Stuart Mill, Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, Vilfredo Pareto: they all lived in a very particular political context which led them to other questions.
For Bellamy it was no coincidence that in the view of British liberals the sociological component was least present, while on the continent it played such a large role. The socio-economic changes of industrialisation in Great Britain took place over a comparatively longer period, so that the social changes and disruptions appeared more slowly, and therefore milder. In France and especially in Germany and Italy, economy and society changed much more rapidly. There was good reason that the liberals of these countries cared much more about the more obvious social upheavals. In a time when our societies again change at a sometimes dizzying speed, it seems fitting to give this tradition of liberalism more attention again.
