The Antiliberal Idea
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Description
While definitions cannot be true or false, word choice can be more or less illuminating. Indicating what it is not, illiberalism might conceivably refer to any non-liberal, for example feudal, pattern of thought or behaviour. Reminding us of what it is against (and up against), by contrast, antiliberalism has more pungent connotations. It draws attention helpfully to the essentially derivative, adversarial, and aggrieved nature of the illiberal mindset that preoccupies us today and that, indeed, has played a thunderous role in European politics starting in the nineteenth century with the Counter-Revolution in France and the Slavophile resistance to Westernization in Russia. Liberalism itself refers to a sprawling and historically evolving set of normative priorities, problem-solving practices, and institutional alternatives. Antiliberal proselytizers and politicians, as a consequence, adopt shifting intellectual guises and rhetorical airs depending on the version of political, economic, and cultural liberalism that they view as malignantly dominant and ripe for toppling at any given time and place. But the antiliberal mentality also displays certain timeless features that permit us to treat its various colourful instantiations as belonging roughly to a single movement or school of thought. Antiliberals of every stripe, for example, have “disdained the liberal habits of tolerance, dissent, debate, [and] openness”. Before attempting to sketch out the permanent structure of antiliberal thought, we should acknowledge that hostility to liberalism is either politically anodyne or politically calamitous depending on contingent historical circumstances. It just so happens that today, in 2021, the antiliberal sensibility has emerged as a newly aggressive force in global politics, putting at risk the stability of liberal democratic regimes and the international institutions built by the West after World War II. This leap into deadly political prominence cannot be traced to any internal evolution of antiliberal thinking, however. It is due solely to a shift in the political winds. Domestic political weakness in the two most celebrated exemplars of liberal politics and economics, the US and the European Union, has arguably been the most decisive factor in the soiling of liberalism’s global reputation. Be this as it may, the first two decades of the twentieth century have provided fertile ground for the rise of anti-establishment leaders and parties able to attract mass support by openly celebrating xenophobic and authoritarian nativism Social, economic, demographic, and technological factors have also conspired to prevent liberal forces from mounting an effective and coherent response. But while the political success of the new antiliberals is recent and dismaying, the stock slogans they repetitiously cite are anything but new.
Source Publication
Routledge Handbook of Illiberalism
Source Editors/Authors
András Sajó, Renáta Uitz, Stephen Holmes
Publication Date
2022
Recommended Citation
Holmes, Stephen, "The Antiliberal Idea" (2022). Faculty Chapters. 786.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/786
