Der Liberalismus gegen sich selbst

In the mid-20th century, many liberals looked grimly at the modern world with its devastating wars, murderous totalitarian regimes, and the threat of nuclear war. They concluded that the ideals of the Enlightenment were part of the problem, not part of the solution. American historian Samuel Moyn demonstrates in this captivating book, which has sparked an intense debate in the Anglo-Saxon world, how leading intellectuals transformed liberalism during the Cold War era, leaving us a catastrophic legacy. Moyn intricately and polemically traces how Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Karl Popper, Judith Shklar, and Lionel Trilling abandoned the moral core of the Enlightenment in favor of a philosophy focused solely on the preservation of individual freedom. By exposing this stance, as well as the recent nostalgia for Cold War liberalism in defense of the West as morally hollow and indeed dangerous, Moyn simultaneously paves the way for a new emancipatory and egalitarian liberal philosophy. The damage of that era must be repaired, and the survival of liberalism must be secured.