Liberalism and the Good Life
Autumn 2026 · currentDo liberals need an idea of the good life? The charge against the supposedly “neutral liberals” is a continuity in the history of ideas, one that has made its way from Carl Schmitt into the postliberal theory of the present. Through the Australian philosopher Alexandre Lefebvre, the question of the need for a liberal way of life is back within liberal debate itself.
Liberalism lives on liberals and their liberal convictions. Yet what may sound abstractly plausible (or not) confronts liberalism with concrete problems: How can a good liberal life be determined, and how can a liberal culture be created — bottom up or top down?
Can the liberals’ “Cultural Turn” succeed without itself becoming part of the “illiberal backlash”? Is there a human need for meaning or transcendence, and must the liberal be able to serve it?
- Free Virtues
People look for orientation. They can find it in those who offer them a vision of the good life. In politics, in Germany and beyond, those were for the last few decades above all the Greens and the left. With the New Right and the postliberals, offers now come from the right as well. Illiberal visions of the good life are even enforced by the state, in Xi's China and Orbán's Hungary, for instance. That the competition has taken up the good life so successfully has alarmed liberals.
- The Community and the Soul of the Individual
Welcome to the year 1819. You are sitting on the benches of the Royal Athenaeum in Paris, where Benjamin Constant is lecturing on the conceptions of liberty of antiquity and of the moderns. We have travelled here because this is the beginning of the debate between classical and modern liberty, a debate rekindled in recent years in the wake of the return of postliberalism. We are in precisely the period in which terms such as „individualism" and „liberalism" first arose, and in which, according to the postliberals, the world set off intellectually down the wrong path. But first things first.
- The Good Life We Mean
That liberalism gets blamed for all sorts of things is nothing new. But when of all things the timid reform politics of social democrats and conservatives is stylised into a liberal catch-all, one should at least pause. For the writer Nils Schniederjann, precisely this technocratic-seeming „deliverism" of the grand coalition has become the occasion for an essay analysing liberalism's wrong turn. He describes vividly the exhaustion of a liberal politics that increasingly hides behind practical constraints, expert panels, and administrative reason instead of addressing questions of the good life.
- Liberal Spiritual Exercises
Adrian Vermeule, a determined critic of liberal thought, once wrote that liberalism has a „sacral character" and that liberals in Western democracies regularly reassure themselves of their values in more or less ritualised form.
- Liberalism Needs an Aesthetic of Its Own
Politics is performance. In our academically domesticated circles we may indulge the illusion that politics is the intellectual sparring of ideas. But that is not true. Politics deals with questions of power and rule. Liberals have always won this fight by making their ideas hegemonic. In this way even political opponents were eventually forced to implement liberal programmes. Hayek's theory of social change is right, to be sure: ideas arise in a small circle of scholars. But most people's access to a political idea is not intellectual engagement; it comes through diffuse feelings of belonging, through a sense that a certain politics makes one's own life better; through vibes.
- Secure Liberalism!
Liberals have a dismissive-avoidant attachment style. At least that is what you learn if you let an ideal-typical liberal find out his attachment style online, in a psychological relationship attachment-type test with the LLM of his choice. Where does the liberal fear of commitment come from?
- Liberalism & the Way of Life
Liberalism puts the freedom of the individual at its centre: there can be no liberal way of life. For the essence of freedom remains the free choice of a way of life. Yet this only seems self-evident on the surface.
- Scapegoating Liberalism?
To call postliberalism a midcult at the very moment of its intellectual success would probably be presumptuous — after all, even diagnosing “peak postliberalism” speaks for its intellectual success. With a little mockery, though, one could aptly observe that postliberalism already looks discredited at the interim high of its success.
- Different Ways of Conceiving a Free Life
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.
- The Virtues of Capitalism Make Us More Democratic
Two economists go looking for virtues in markets. What is there to be found besides greed? More than expected – and some of it democracy could use too.