The Crisis of Liberalism and the Emergence of Federal Populism

Abstract

Abstract The bankruptcy of liberalism has been forecast so often that a sense of impending doom has become part of its very definition. The various crises prefiguring its demise, however, have only triggered structural adjustments resulting primarily in more efficient versions of the same basic system. Frustration with this political collapse which never came has generated an opposite, equally mistaken, attitude. Thus during the last decade many of the doomsday radicals of the 1960s have become fervent believers in liberalism's eternal validity. Fundamental Enlightenment values, which were already part and parcel of most radicals' Weltanschauung, have ceased to be lofty ideals to be realized in a future social order of “freedom, equality and fraternity” and, instead, are now seen as already embodied in existing institutions requiring only fine tuning to function effectively in this, the best of all possible worlds.