Samuel Moyn, Herlinde Pauer-Studer, Alexander Somek & Fabio Wolkenstein: LIBERALISM AGAINST ITSELF

Samuel Moyn, Herlinde Pauer-Studer, Alexander Somek, Fabio
Wolkenstein





LIBERALISM AGAINST ITSELF
The Cold War Roots of Liberalism´s Present
Crisis





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—among them Isaiah
Berlin, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Karl Popper, Judith Shklar, and
Lionel Trilling—transformed liberalism but left a disastrous
legacy for our time. In his new book “Liberalism Against Itself”
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—a path to undoing the damage of
the Cold War and to ensuring the survival of liberalism.


Herlinde Pauer-Studer, Alexander Somek and Fabio Wolkenstein will
discuss with Samuel Moyn his findings and thoughts.


 


Samuel Moyn 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


Herlinde Pauer-Studer is Professor emeritus,
Department of Philosophy, University of Vienna


Alexander Somek is Professor of Legal Philosophy
at the Faculty of Law, University of Vienna


Fabio Wolkenstein is Associate Professor at the
Institute for Political Science, University of Vienna