{"id":46100,"date":"2025-04-29T22:16:09","date_gmt":"2025-04-29T22:16:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/historiografija.hr\/?p=46100"},"modified":"2025-04-29T22:16:29","modified_gmt":"2025-04-29T22:16:29","slug":"samuel-moyn-liberalism-against-itself-cold-war-intellectuals-and-the-making-of-our-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/historiografija.hr\/?p=46100","title":{"rendered":"Samuel Moyn, \u201eLiberalism against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times\u201c"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Cold War roots of liberalism\u2019s present crisis<\/strong> 
 
\u201c[A] daring new book.\u201d\u2014Becca Rothfeld, <\/strong>Washington Post<\/strong><\/em>
 
\u201cA fascinating and combative intellectual history.\u201d\u2014Gideon Rachman, <\/strong>Financial Times<\/strong><\/em>
 
By the middle of the twentieth century, many liberals looked glumly at the world modernity had brought about, with its devastating wars, rising totalitarianism, and permanent nuclear terror. They concluded that, far from offering a solution to these problems, the ideals of the Enlightenment, including emancipation and equality, had instead created them. The historian of political thought Samuel Moyn argues that the liberal intellectuals of the Cold War era\u2014among them Isaiah Berlin, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Karl Popper, Judith Shklar, and Lionel Trilling\u2014transformed liberalism but left a disastrous legacy for our time.
 
In his iconoclastic style, Moyn outlines how Cold War liberals redefined the ideals of their movement and renounced the moral core of the Enlightenment for a more dangerous philosophy: preserving individual liberty at all costs. In denouncing this stance, as well as the recent nostalgia for Cold War liberalism as a means to counter illiberal values, Moyn presents a timely call for a new emancipatory and egalitarian liberal philosophy\u2014a path to undoing the damage of the Cold War and to ensuring the survival of liberalism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Samuel Moyn<\/strong> is Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University and author of many books on the history of ideas and politics in the twentieth century. He lives in New Haven, CT.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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