In: The Liberal Script at the Beginning of the 21st Century. Conceptions, Components, Tensions (Oxford University Press)

Liberalism has come under pressure in recent years. Especially, authoritarian populists of various couleur have either subtly undermined or openly attacked key liberal values, even declaring-like Hungarian president Viktor Orbán—“illiberal democracy“ as the new political ideal. For some Arab theocrats, as well as Russian President Putin, liberalism even is the declared enemy. Liberalism is also the target of contestation in scholarly discourse. Critical voices from the Global South point, for example, to its complicity with centuries-old structures of domination. In this view, liberalism is closely associated with colonialism and racist stratification in world society (Chakrabarty 2000; Pitts 2005). Not least, a current critique of liberalism equates it with neoliberalism and points to a coalition between neoliberals and new conservatives that dismantled structures of solidarity (Slobodian 2018). Not to forget those voices that declare the end of liberal democracy since it has proven to be inferior to the effectiveness of an autocratic Chinese model (Bell 2015). The various criticisms target different facets of liberalism. For some, liberalism has become a scapegoat for“ postmodern“ values, equating them often with a“ leftist“ and cosmopolitan project detached from the experience of “normal” people. Others point to the weakness of the liberal model by slowing down necessary decisions by offering too many opportunities for participation. Liberalism is also considered as the ideology that made domination over the wretched of the earth possible (Fanon 1963).

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