Thirteenth Global Studies Conference

Abstract

Recent political events have shown liberalism losing the battle against contemporary tyrannies as many people have elected authoritarian and populist leaders in preference to liberal ones. Besides the rise of populism, other threats to liberalism appear in the scenario: identity politics, nationalisms, group thinking or some new forms of tribalism, as well as arrogant forms of secularism and intolerance. This paper considers these shifts and many contemporary scholars and public intellectuals who coincide on the diagnosis that liberalism is in crisis (Fukuyama, Lilla, George, Gray, Ignatieff, Deneen, Harari, Vargas Llosa) and suggest the necessity of revisiting the liberal tradition. The global revolution of liberalism is currently underway because of the confluence of three forces, that is, failure, competition, and opportunity: failure, understood as the crisis of the ethos and pathos of liberalism; competition, because of illiberal ideologies that attempt to fill the void left by the liberal tradition; and opportunity, because probably in recent years there was no intellectual and political atmosphere that called out so strongly for the renewal of liberal thought.