Dark Liberalism?
Spring 2026On the dark truths that liberals must take seriously.
- The Fight for Freedom
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.
- Lead Us Not Into the Temptation of Rage
„The Dark Knight", the second part of Christopher Nolan's legendary Batman trilogy, tells not only the story of the Joker but also that of Harvey Dent. The sunny-boy district attorney with maximum idealism wants to free corrupt Gotham City from the grip of crime and corruption.
- Sisyphus Against Zarathustra
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.
- Dark Truths for Liberals
The year 2026 has begun with a coup: the abduction of Nicolás Maduro by US special forces unfolded along a playbook published only a few weeks earlier in the new National Security Strategy, which declared Latin America a sphere of influence and the highest priority of American foreign policy.
- The Double-Edged Prometheus
It is a short speech that Peter Thiel gives at the 2016 Republican National Convention. Shortly after he begins, he allows himself a casual joke about Hillary Clinton, only to be interrupted by the cheers of the audience. Thiel smiles briefly, a little awkwardly, as if it still embarrassed him to harvest applause this way.
- Liberalism and Its False Friends
Even among liberals there are those who see in the New Right comrades in the fight against the left-wing zeitgeist. They overlook that the supposed partners are in truth false friends.
- Postliberal Times
„Only through a repair of time can we move toward a repair of the nation."
- Musk: The Man as Metaphor
Elon Musk is hard to ignore and even harder to understand. Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff therefore do not even try to understand him in „Muskism", at least not as a person. Musk, the thesis goes, is less a person than a symptom. They read him as the embodiment of an ideology with its own logic, one that reaches far beyond a single South African-American billionaire with space ambitions.
- Freedom or Feudalism?
With Trump's re-election, niche ideas from libertarian Silicon Valley circles suddenly stand in the media spotlight. Much has been written about the exotic ideas of monarchism and libertarianism that were carried, through Peter Thiel and Curtis Yarvin, via J.D. Vance, David Sacks, and Elon Musk, into the heart of the US government.
- Why the End-of-Liberalism Thesis Is Wrong
It has become rather quiet around Patrick Deneen. The arguably most prominent thinker of postliberalism has said remarkably little in recent months. For July a new book is announced, this time not about liberalism but about Homer's Odyssey and the question of what this myth reveals about the state of the American soul.
- Whose Freedom?
I first noticed that a rift runs through the German liberal scene in the mid-2010s. Liberal debates were then held on Facebook, where one looked for like-minded people, resonance, but also for substantive argument.
- The Freedom of the Many
The reserved, even skeptical attitude liberal circles regularly hold toward majoritarian rule rests on a pre-political and narrowly drawn understanding of freedom. What gets missed: representative, majoritarian-democratic forms of rule are probably the only ones that can reconcile the actual conditions of modern social life with the idea of the widest possible self-determination.
- Neoreaction Is Dead, But Yarvin Lives
There are political theories that arise at universities, accompanied by footnotes, research grants, and the faint smell of 1970s carpeting. And there are political theories that arise at half past two in the morning on the internet, between comment sections, blog posts, and the firm conviction that the world works badly above all because its institutions are structurally mis-programmed.
- When Liberalism Forgot How to Fish
Liberalism was at its most successful precisely where, following an old saying, it taught people to fish. The latest ideas in the liberal camp, however, forget this historical lesson and hand out fish. Instead of offering rules for joint decision-making, decisionism is in vogue.
- Dark Liberalism
»Der Liberalismus ist tot. Und es waren die Liberalen, die ihn umbrachten.«
- To the Barricades, Against Power
The German freedom movement sits in a job interview. Question: „What is your greatest weakness?" Answer: „After the past decades I am perhaps a little too spoiled by success. Also [tries in vain to smile modestly]: I admit, my personality is very demanding and many-sided."
- Peak Postliberalism
When Polity Press sent me two books on postliberalism for review at the start of the year, I was at first a little surprised. Time had somehow caught up with me: had Adrian Pabst not just in 2020 called out the „post-liberal moment"?