So why do we read so often today that liberalism is in crisis, failing or already dead? Scholars and pundits of various ideological persuasions are busy signing death certificates and offering obituaries for liberalism, often without clearly defining what they mean by that term. Some claim that liberalism has failed to live up to its own promises. Others argue that it has become irrelevant precisely because it has succeeded in building a free society on allegedly dangerous foundations, such as individual autonomy, neutrality with regard to the good life, and free markets. These critics might differ among themselves, but they all seem to agree that liberalism can no longer solve our deep social, cultural, political and economic problems, and that it has become ‘unsustainable’.
Not coincidentally, all of these critics are living, writing and publishing in liberal countries. And they are demonstrating one of liberalism’s most successful features simply by participating in the quintessentially liberal enterprise of dialogue and disagreement under constitutional protections (with liberal limitations). These are, in fact, the only states in which actual competition for power and dissent is not just allowed but fostered. No one living in a totalitarian society has had the luxury of declaring liberalism, let alone totalitarianism, dead. Nevertheless, the pessimism of liberalism’s critics appears sensible, given the current depressing political climate, dominated by fears of the re-emergence of nationalistic populism reflected in Brexit and the rhetoric of, and policies pursued by, leaders such as Donald Trump in the United States, Vladimir Putin in Russia and Viktor Orbán in Hungary. [...]
The intellectual attraction of liberalism’s jeopardy must be great indeed because liberalism has been declared dead so often. We conducted a Google Books Ngram analysis, which graphs the number of books containing a certain word or phrase as a percentage of all books in Google’s collection, numbering more than 30 million volumes at present. (We do not claim that the Ngram analysis presents a complete or completely accurate representation of publication frequency. We did not test alternative search terms, such as ‘liberalism is dead’ or ‘liberalism is dying’. Moreover, Google’s Ngram analysis does not capture many journal articles.) According to this analysis, liberalism first died in the late 1870s (although, according to Hirschman, it was already declared to be dying as early as the 1830s), then died some more at the turn of the 20th century, and has been dying almost continuously since 1920. [...]
The problem for anyone declaring the death of liberalism is that it has not one but several pillars and dimensions: legal, political, economic and moral (or religious). The weakening or disappearance of one or two liberal pillars or tenets would not be enough to declare liberalism as a whole dead. For example, one might express skepticism toward key liberal principles such as the commitments to individual agency and individual choice, while maintaining a commitment to freedom of expression. In the same vein, one might be skeptical toward unregulated markets or trade, but embrace other essential features of liberalism such as nondiscrimination under law, security of property rights and freedom of contract. Neither does liberalism require open borders, but it opposes limits on immigration based solely on what the potential immigrants look like, where they come from, what language they speak or their religious preferences.
