What's the Matter with Liberalism?

What’s the Matter with Liberalism? by Ronald Beiner confronts the triumphalist mood that swept the West after the collapse of socialism in Central and Eastern Europe. While liberal democracies congratulated themselves on their victory, Beiner—drawing on Václav Havel’s warnings—asks whether consumer-driven societies conceal their own “latent tendencies” toward emptiness. Instead of taking liberalism’s superiority as self-evident, he probes its limitations, arguing that a political philosophy...