Liberalism Against Itself – Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times

In the aftermath of the Second World War, many prominent liberals looked

towards the future with eyes of disillusion and fear. In response they

jettisoned key progressive ideals of the Enlightenment, such as equality

and perfectibility, and formulated a defence of liberty in opposition to

communism and totalitarianism more generally. In his new book, Samuel Moyn

argues that the intellectual architects of Cold War liberalism truncated

the liberal tradition and thereby left a disastrous legacy, leaving

liberals unable to address the problems that face us today.