Welcome to Liberalism.org. It has been almost exactly a year since we first started kicking around plans for this new journal of liberal ideas, and it’s wonderful to finally have it out in the world. At the Institute for Humane Studies, we’ve spent 65 years building and supporting an extraordinary network of scholars pushing liberal argument and research forward in their work. Liberalism.org gives us a way to share those ideas with you.
Liberalism is a conversation. It has been for centuries, and it will be for centuries more. It is an ongoing process of debate, discovery, and negotiation. At its core, it is a family of ideas, doctrines, principles, and values that share a common grounding in equal dignity, the rule of law, and constrained government. It is a commitment to human flourishing—not as a single, imposed vision dictated by the few, but as the tremendous and diverse dynamism of free people pursuing their interests in a culture of mutual support and respect, guarded by institutions aimed at enabling and protecting that freedom.
And that conversation has delivered. The liberal tradition has produced the freest, most prosperous, and most innovative societies in human history. It has lifted billions out of poverty. It has expanded the circle of dignity to include those once excluded from it—women, religious minorities, the enslaved and their descendants, people persecuted for whom they love. It has created the conditions for scientific revolutions, artistic flourishing, and the everyday miracle of strangers cooperating peacefully across vast differences. None of this happened by accident. It happened because liberal institutions—markets, constitutions, norms of toleration and open inquiry—channeled human energy toward mutual benefit rather than zero-sum domination. The story of liberalism is, overwhelmingly, a story of things getting better.
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It’s common in our illiberal moment, however, to hear claims that the liberal conversation has failed. Critics claim it failed in constraining populist urges. They argue it failed in providing the kind of community and meaning—and meaning in community—that people desperately desire and need. Feeling atomized and adrift, the argument goes, people have naturally turned to authoritarians, strongmen, and totalizing ideologies promising to restore order and bestow that missing meaning, if only they are granted the power to use force to do so. Illiberal ideologies have ultimately risen to the commanding heights of politics and culture, the argument goes, because of these failures.
This pessimistic view gets liberalism wrong, however. It fails to understand liberalism not just as a set of rules for political institutions, but as an inspiring vision of how we live well together. And not just inspiring, but one with a proven track record of working, contrasted with the track record of illiberalism failing every time.
The reason liberalism succeeds where illiberalism doesn’t is that it recognizes a fundamental and unavoidable truth about our world: It is always changing. It is never static. As the philosopher Robert Nozick noted, liberty upsets patterns. When free people are allowed to make autonomous choices—to innovate, to move, to create, to challenge or ignore orthodoxies—the static patterns of the past inevitably shift. Yes, we are deeply embedded in communities, families, cultures, and societies, and we are profoundly shaped by them. But a liberal society recognizes that robust meaning and authentic identity aren’t imposed on us from the top down. They are dynamically forged from the bottom up through free association, personal interest, evolving tastes, and shared endeavors. When individually unique people live together peacefully, trade peacefully, and seek out happiness and flourishing peacefully, the world around us today won’t look like it did yesterday, and it won’t look the same tomorrow.
Our current illiberal moment isn’t about a failure in liberalism. Liberalism has, though inconsistently and in fits and starts, been wildly successful. And the illiberal moment is a reaction to that success, and a reaction to the way that liberalism succeeds. It is a rejection of liberalism’s inherent dynamism. The political theorist Patrick Deneen has argued that liberalism’s achievements are in fact its undoing—that the liberty it promises “requires liberation from all forms of associations and relationships, from family to church, from schools to village and community.” Taking that academic case and sharpening it into a political program, a future United States senator from Missouri put it this way while working out the ideas underpinning his illiberalism: liberalism “is a philosophy of liberation from family and tradition, of escape from God and community, a philosophy of self-creation and unrestricted, unfettered free choice” and this freedom “denigrates the common affections and common loves that make our way of life possible.” Both Deneen and Hawley ultimately want a politics where today looks as it did yesterday, and tomorrow will, as well. That’s not liberalism, and cannot be, but the liberal vision is clearly a better one, and one not just more at peace with the unavoidable nature of the world, but which embraces it to the benefit of all.
None of this means that liberals have gotten everything right, or that the reaction we face is entirely exogenous. The liberal tradition has real failures to reckon with—places where its institutions haven’t delivered on their promises, where the benefits of openness have been unevenly shared, where liberals have been better at defending abstract principles than at addressing the lived concerns of their fellow citizens. Liberalism.org exists in part because we believe the liberal tradition has the intellectual resources to meet these challenges—but only if we’re honest about them. Renewal requires self-examination, not just self-congratulation.
Illiberalism is ultimately a demand that a specific pattern—economic, cultural, or social—be artificially preserved against the free choices of others. It’s almost always about preserving someone’s place in an existing social hierarchy, or else about setting up some new hierarchy, one that can supposedly last forever. But we cannot make permanent what is inevitably impermanent. Insisting otherwise requires coercion and brings widespread distress, impoverishment, and governing failure. Illiberalism is, at its root, a profound discomfort with the openness and diversity of a changing world, leading illiberals to demand that strong leaders step in and forcibly put a stop to it.
At Liberalism.org, we reject the fear of a changing world. We recognize that an open society does not leave us adrift. Rather, it creates a positive feedback loop that actively rewards the very traits—tolerance, curiosity, mutual respect, delight in others’ success—that lead to ethical, happy, and flourishing lives. Our liberalism is open. Open societies, open markets, open minds, open hearts.
We believe the path forward isn’t found in reactionary nostalgia or angry polemics, but in reimagining and actively building a robust liberal future. As our President, Emily Chamlee-Wright, notes in her introductory essay, we are making a wager that a serious, principled coalition can bend the hinge of history toward liberty, equality, and justice.
We aim to show a future worth wanting, one that is achievable, and one that can inspire. We want to outline a vision that promises a better world and, with your help, delivers it. Whether you are a scholar, a student, a policymaker, or simply a citizen looking for serious, constructive solutions and fruitful ways of thinking about your world, we invite you to join this conversation.
