Has liberalism destroyed itself?

According to Vladimir Putin, liberalism is an ‘obsolete’ doctrine, a worn-out political philosophy no longer fit for purpose. In this well-timed, rather urgent book, Francis Fukuyama attacks that view and puts a vigorous case for the defence. Despite its faults, liberalism is a force for good, he says, and it remains the only political philosophy capable of taking on the authoritarians of Moscow and Beijing. But the despots are not the central focus of his argument. The biggest threats to the liberal society, he writes, come from within.

In Fukuyama’s crisp retelling, the liberal ideal emerged in the aftermath of Europe’s wars of religion. The notion that people could only exist as part of a rigid group had led to division, antagonism and slaughter. The new liberal philosophy aimed to break with that instinctive tribalism by arguing that people had certain innate rights, which they held independently of any group identity. The job of government was to create institutions that were beyond political control and which protected these new liberated citizens by guaranteeing their rights.

Fukuyama is alive to the hypocrisy of liberalism. The Declaration of Independence may have contained the liberal credo ‘All men are created equal’, but at the time all men were certainly not equal, especially in the US where slavery was still practised. Women were also excluded from the liberal idyll.

Despite these injustices, Fukuyama argues, the achievements of the liberal society have been enormous. As he records: ‘Between 1800 and the present, output per person in the liberal world grew nearly 3,000 per cent.’ Free people create free markets and so long as the economic benefits of the liberal society are widely felt, the market economy will thrive.

The trouble comes when the acquisitive economic impulse gets out of control, at which point liberalism begins its slide towards what Fukuyama terms neoliberalism.