Liberalism in dark times: The liberal ethos in the twentieth century
2022; Palgrave Macmillan; Volume: 23; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1057/s41296-022-00586-1
ISSN1476-9336
Autores Tópico(s)Political Economy and Marxism
ResumoStefan Zweig (1881-1942) questions the priorities that the American president, Woodrow Wilson, made at the Paris Peace Conference and settled in the Treaty of Versailles in 1919(Zweig, 2013[1940]).Wilson paid more attention to the institutionalization of the liberal idea of perpetual peace in terms of the League of Nations than to the hard work of political wisdom in the muddy negotiations and compromises about a peace settlement likely to create stability in the region.Zweig emphasizes how Wilson's liberal idealism fails to address the terms of political reality and to solve the political issues at stake immediately after the First World War at a time in history where the European populations' belief in liberalism was decreasing and their faith in nationalism growing.Zweig's short story addresses the crisis of liberalism in the early twentieth century that constitutes the background of Joshua L. Cherniss' book, Liberalism in Dark Times.The historical context of the liberal political thought that Cherniss reads in his book is the crisis of liberalism and capitalism in the 1920s and 1930s, and the rise of totalitarianism -communism, fascism and nazism -with severe consequences for the inhumane warfare in the Second World War and the political climate in the Cold War.The focus in Liberalism in Dark Times is how a handful of liberal political thinkers reconstructed liberalism in various ways given the historical political context and their own political experiences in avoiding the pitfalls of an idealist liberalism and an anti-liberal politics.The Leitmotiv is what one of the chosen liberal political thinkers, Isaiah Berlin , calls 'the liberal predicament', i.e. 'how to combat anti-liberal movements … without either sacrificing political efficacy or betraying basic liberal principles in the name of defending them?Faced with ruthless anti-liberal attacks, to remain a good liberal … threatens to make one a failed liberal.Yet to become
Referência(s)