On the Crisis of Liberalism
Autumn 2025The first issue of ævum. A stocktaking of the current state of liberalism, from the perspective of liberal self-criticism.
- Why we are founding ævum, and why we need it
The age of liberalism is over, the call comes from the right, from the left, and even from the centre. Geopolitical shifts, technological transformations, and disappointed hopes get cited whenever someone celebrates or mourns the requiem of the old order.
- Between Scylla and Charybdis
It may seem unusual to preface an essay with a justification not for the essay itself but for the founding of a magazine. The reason I am looking forward to this project, and consider this moment of founding exactly right, has to do with a significant blind spot of liberalism that seems largely unaddressed by friends and enemies alike.
- Against Slop Liberalism
Liberalism has not lost the talent for talking about itself, only the talent for thinking. Hardly any political camp calls so often for renewal. The former intellectual self-assurance of the liberal camp has, in the first quarter of the 21st century, given way to a melancholic weariness.
- On State and Market Alone?
When the first pioneers in the 1960s and 70s built the forerunners of the internet, they did so admirably. Dozens of researchers and battalions of doctoral students built small parts, some of which could only be integrated into the network years later. In painstaking, detailed research the first servers and networks were developed, and along the way thousands of problems were solved creatively and pragmatically.
- Germany Needs Its Mont Pèlerin Moment
It is by now a sad fact that no text on contemporary liberalism can do without the obligatory, and somehow pitiful, diagnosis of crisis. But don't worry, I'll keep it short. We all know where the problems lie and have run through them in every conceivable format a thousand times: the rise of populism as a decidedly illiberal ideological antagonist, the hollowing-out of liberal democracy from the inside, the return of geopolitics and zero-sum games in international relations, and the slide of our own ordering vision from the dynamic open society into the bureaucratic-static institutional sclerosis that today paralyses the Western world.
- The Conquest of Minds
Marxism is not made by the idea that the material productive forces play a role in the development of our societies. What is characteristic of it is rather the conviction that the productive forces alone are decisive. Against that background it is at least surprising that Antonio Gramsci counts as a Marxist.
- Time for a New Liberalism, Again?
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.
- On the Renewal of Liberalism
The Walter Lippmann Colloquium in 1938 and the precursor meeting of the Mont Pèlerin Society (MPS) in 1947 were critical engagements with the complete failure of liberalism as it was seen in the 1930s. In both cases, people came together full of doubt, wanting to look self-critically at whether liberalism still had a future.
- Turning to Nature
Two crises converge at the moment: the crisis of liberalism and the crisis of ecology. They reinforce each other, and are too often played off against each other. One should not despair: the answer to both crises lies precisely in working on them together.