Collapse of Global Liberalism
* Book: Philip Pilkington. The Collapse of Global Liberalism.
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Review
Heather Penatzer:
"Pilkington defines liberalism as “the Enlightenment ideology par excellence that sought to level and ‘rationalize’ social and political relationships.” He devotes the first half of the book to a theoretical critique, treating liberal ideology as a system of ideas that intermediates all relationships, whether political, social, economic, or moral. As an Enlightenment ideology, he argues, liberalism requires the rationalization of the “good life”: Everything related to the human experience must be measurable, mutable, contractual, subject to maximization, reducible to an equivalency, and above all, individualist in ontology. To deliver liberalism’s ideal of individual freedom, Pilkington argues, liberalism in its purest form seeks the liquidation of all hierarchical relationships. He distinguishes between a “soft liberalism” that accepts natural limits on its expansion and a “hard liberalism” that sees its leveling mission as the engine of universal moral progress.
A reader may wonder why Pilkington dismisses the prospects of maintaining “soft liberalism,” suggesting it is incoherent in the abstract while being prone in practice to ideological purification into the hard variety. His answer is that soft liberalism lacks novelty. What is so liberal about liberalism, he asks, if our legal, traditional, and cultural practices are in large part derivative of a classical tradition? This mode of criticism mirrors one of the problems he identifies in liberalism: that it prioritizes abstract processes over practical outcomes. If soft liberalism is a fusion of “good hierarchies” in law and nature that imposes constraints on personalistic regimes, why should we care about this inconsistency at the theoretical level? While liberalism without universalism may not be ideologically clean, it seems better in practice than the known alternatives. Pilkington himself does not offer any grand theory to replace it."
(https://www.compactmag.com/article/after-the-liberal-international-order/?ref=compact-newsletter)