Liberalism and Civilization

Civilization talk is everywhere these days. Worries of civilizational collapse are often appended to other anxieties—climate change, national security, the birth rate, AI, and immigration, among many others. If there is a problem in 2026, actual or hypothetical, chances are that, somewhere, someone’s saying that civilization is at stake. It’s a rhetorical magnifier. If your societal problem doesn’t seem large enough, just claim that civilization may collapse. The word works its magic.

The idea that civilization is at stake is common among liberalism’s critics. More precisely, they worry that liberalism is the source of the danger. In 1981, Alasdair MacIntyre closed After Virtue by claiming the new dark ages were already upon us. Over a generation later, both Patrick Deneen and Rod Dreher have taken up the same thread. At the lower end, the argument circulates as an image macro.

This way of thinking ultimately charges that liberalism fails to be generative. It is sterile, emasculating, or enfeebling, and it will, through various hypothesized routes, lead to collapse and ruin. One might wonder, of course, if liberalism is such a pernicious ideology, how it became so prevalent in the first place. Lowbrow critics may resort to alleging a conspiracy.

Illiberal states are also quick to don the mantle of “civilization,” at times in contrast to liberal America. Russia’s Foreign Policy Concept, signed by President Vladimir Putin in March 2023, formally designates the country an original “state-civilization” uniting the peoples of the “Russian World” (Russkiy mir). China’s President Xi Jinping regularly speaks of Chinese civilization—and its indivisibility. Neither state describes itself as merely a government, but rather, as an essence that inheres in the right combination of bloodlines, traditions, and soil. And U.S. President Donald Trump infamously claimed that “a whole civilization will die tonight” with his bombing of Iran. 

“Civilization” has been an anchor for a host of moral panics, outbursts of violence, and dubious state-aggrandizing schemes. Liberalism’s enemies may say that we can’t have it. And yet we must, and we will. Liberalism isn’t just compatible with civilization. Liberalism offers an understanding of civilization that’s worth wanting and defending.

Civilization’s Many Meanings

Liberals have many reasons to be wary of how the word “civilization” has been deployed, even among intellectuals. Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order has served as an unfortunate rallying point for those who think a civilization’s main job is to fight with other civilizations. “To civilize” can be a transitive verb, and it means subjecting others to conquest and cultural erasure: “We must civilize them.” To make things worse, civilization has always come packaged with a troublesome antonym—barbarism. In Aristotle’s telling, barbarians, non-Greeks, were thought dispositionally to be natural slaves, suitable to be ruled over by the Greeks, who tended more often to be natural masters. “Civilization” itself is commonly modified by “western,” which may bear implications about those on the other side of the binary. A liberal who would reclaim civilization talk mustn’t sweep in anti-pluralism, ethnocentrism, or other forms of chauvinism. 

Civilization, though, is a broad word; many definitions have been ventured. On almost any of them, it points to a massive aggregate of phenomena, many of them contradictory. In much scholarship, though, it has been used to identify a long-term process that is neither colonialism nor the domination of any specific ethnicity: Civilization is that state of affairs that is marked by increasing technological, material, and cultural complexity and structure. This growth in complexity, though, must be absolutely bounded by the ethical development of the individual. It is no civilizational advance, in this sense, to conquer another and rule over them. The act of conquest itself gives the game away. Material progress must always be built, never stolen.

In these considerations, I follow the philosopher and theologian Albert Schweitzer, who united them in his unfinished 1923 work The Philosophy of Civilization.[1] These two dimensions, moral and material, have each had a long history. On the material side, Leslie White proposed in 1943 that a culture develops in proportion to the energy it harnesses per head and the efficiency of the tools with which it harnesses that energy; Václav Smil has more recently written the history of civilization as a history of energy conversion. The Kardashev scale proposes to extend this analysis to the cosmos, and it bears directly on the search for extraterrestrial civilizations.

Back on earth, the second dimension of civilization is that of moral restraint. Norbert Elias’s 1939 The Civilizing Process tracked a remarkable development across centuries of etiquette manuals: bodily restraint went from being an external rule to an internal disposition. Manners became more demanding, in a sense, but performing them signaled something valuable: The individual at hand had mastered his or her cruder desires. 

The growth of the central state, and its charge to repress violence via law and punishment, played a key role in that shift. But it was also a practical necessity, driven by the increasing dependence of strangers on one another and the removal of violence from private hands. This need for greater self-discipline was noted earlier, in somewhat more lurid and evocative terms, by Sigmund Freud, who saw civilization as the process of taming our internal drives, with our natural aggression turned inward as guilt. It appears from studies of past violence that we are indeed restraining our impulses to harm one another, if fitfully and imperfectly.

Liberalism has a good claim, then, to be civilizational. Throughout its history in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, liberal societies have seen a significant increase in both technological and material progress. Deirdre McCloskey has called it the Great Enrichment, and her image for it is a hockey stick, as shown on just about any graph of per capita world economic output: One sees only millennia of flat subsistence, and then, from around 1800, there’s a steep and durable increase. Real income per head has risen roughly tenfold worldwide, and it continues to rise. We in the present enjoy a civilization that is quantifiably unlike any other, and we should never forget it.

But, as McCloskey is keen to emphasize, this civilizational progress is sustained by a political and moral foundation. Liberalism rests on a respect for the individual dignity of persons. A liberal civilization builds an ever-increasing circle of citizens who enjoy full political, civic, and economic rights. Liberals understand that progress achieved in the material realm can only be genuine if all are able to participate in various spheres of life. Liberalism’s technological and economic dynamism is not disconnected from its ever-expanding scope. The civilization that banishes violence from interpersonal relations may reap the benefits of trade, which won’t materialize when individuals fear of injury or death. But those benefits will be narrower, even for the rulers, if all are not included. Yes, even the lowly.

If I may use the term, a liberal civilization finds its essence in freedom and respect, not in soil or bloodline. On the basis of that freedom and respect, and not on any other, liberal civilization produces healthy, educated, rich, culturally sophisticated, and morally upright people. And a liberal civilization can do all of this without conquest or domination.

A critic might ask: Aren’t I ultimately still describing western civilization? That qualifier can be useful as a historical description, but not as an essence, when applied to liberalism. It’s right and proper to learn from the liberal tradition, which originated as a self-conscious political movement in nineteenth-century Europe. But anyone can practice civilization in the sense that I mean it here, and certainly not everything European is a part of what we should call civilization. Other western political ideas have included totalitarian communism and fascism. By this definition, they are anti-civilizational; they impoverish and morally compromise their subjects, and their westernness can do nothing to save them. Westernness is neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition.

A different critic might ask: Aren’t concepts like these inherently contestable? Postmodernism famously demands incredulity about metanarratives, of which this is one. But the postmodern objection casts a long shadow: Many, many terms are inherently contestable, once we start asking the right questions. Forsaking all of them would silence not just us, but the entire project of the humanities. 

Whatever its truth might be, it’s hard to act constructively on the postmodern objection. Should liberals in particular be silent, and not others? Surely not. As we shall see, there are postmodern barbarians, and they’re happy to speak their truths. There are also postmodern advocates of something like the civilizing process that I describe here. Between them, how then should one choose? 

It may be a question of worldview. For Schweitzer, “The greatest of all the spirit’s tasks is to produce a theory of the universe [Weltanschauung], for in such a theory all the ideas, convictions and activities of an age have their roots.” Civilization, or one’s conscious participation in it, starts with an individual choosing to see the world in a certain way: Nature is subject to thoughtful, directed improvement, as is our own behavior. We should act accordingly, in concert with all like-minded people.

If, as I suspect, metanarratives are inevitable, one can surely do worse than this. If nothing else, the metanarrative that one is a participant in an important and morally serious civilizational project improves the self, while leaving it ready for a wide range of other actions. “The lordship of spirit over the powers of nature” was the aim of civilization, wrote Schweitzer—capacious terms that encompass both ethical and moral progress, both for the individual and for society. 

A worldview must be adopted consciously and responsibly. It’s work that can only be done by an individual, but worldviews also have social consequences. As Schweitzer saw it, it’s on their consequences that we should judge them. In asking liberals to consider themselves the protectors of a certain kind of civilization, I don’t ask for the defense of a mere word or style of argument. I ask us to understand ourselves differently. We are the guardians of a worldview, one with important material and ethical consequences.

Liberalism stands for and produces more than just material benefits. Liberalism can also make a claim, nearly unique among contemporary ideologies, to ushering in a truly global civilization, one that encourages, to the greatest extent possible, worldwide cooperation on increasingly voluntary terms. Imperfectly, with failures, but to a degree unknown in prior human history, the past eighty years have seen an increase in freedom and prosperity globally, with growing interconnection, commerce, and communication. Liberalism doesn’t mean global government, but it has led to a most impressive architecture for global governance. It has brought global freedom, health, literacy, and enrichment. And it’s done so without global domination.

Of course, there are many illiberal states, some of them large, with an ambivalent, hostile, or arm’s-length relationship to this world. There is nothing inevitable about the liberal world’s safety or development. But a possibility has been glimpsed, and it has a worldwide appeal. Not all can join it yet, but we ought to insist, with the Cold War liberals, that the project, now in a new era, must endure and prevail against new challenges, and that it must defend itself as a worthy alternative.

In the sense that I intend it, civilization can easily be lost. Consider the era just before World War I, an era that liberals and postliberals continue to discuss and contest. The Europe of the nineteenth and early twentieth century is remembered for its neoclassical architecture and fine orchestral music. It’s recounted with nostalgia by Marcel Proust and Thomas Mann. Like ours, it was an era of insurance policies and telecommunications, of mass sanitation and mass transit. It was also an era of rising barbarism. Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday, written in the chaos of World War II and published after the author’s suicide, captured both of these aspects, starting with the security:

Zweig knew and wrote of the rising barbarism as well:

No era demonstrates it better: Civilization isn’t a stage that a culture works toward and eventually achieves. If that were true, then World War I should never have happened. Worse, a worldview that sees civilization as a static benchmark inevitably pits one culture against another, find a winner, and starts setting up social hierarchies.

Civilization also isn’t the natural end of a culture’s lifespan, as Oswald Spengler and others have described it. In The Decline of the West, Spengler argued that cultures are fated to rise and fall, that they all reach exhaustion after about a thousand years of progress, and that the decline of the West had already begun—around the year 1800. In short, Spengler beheld the very moment when a typical European could expect, at long last, to enjoy a living standard above subsistence, and all he could see was decadence. 

Liberalism sees it differently. Civilization is a continuous process. It can move forward or regress, and at times a culture, being made up of individuals, can be civilized and barbaric at the same time, but in different respects. That was the paradox of the nineteenth century, and it was the shame of the twentieth. Liberals, though, should know that the development of culture isn’t driven by vitalist forces, and that individuals and their choices are what really matter. Our civilization will live, if we want it to.

Against Civilization?

I’ve reclaimed “civilization.” What of barbarism? How does refining the meaning of a word affect its antonym? It’s not just an academic question; in some corners of the Right today, barbarism is valorized as a more authentic and vital mode of existence, sometimes in so many words.

Barbarism, though, is where life and property are not secure. In Sid Meier’s popular Civilization video games, the barbarians are the non-player characters who destroy your farms and pillage your cities. The games’ barbarians don’t make much in the way of art or literature; they don’t build like the civilized player characters do. There’s a kernel of truth to that.

But barbarism, as I would use it, is never a term for any ethnic group or combination. It is a state of affairs where violence and cruelty are given free rein, and the ethical restraints of civilized life fall away. Barbarism can even be accomplished in supremely civilized societies, like Germany, Belgium, or the United States. When, in World War I, the Imperial German Army bombarded Notre-Dame de Reims, they behaved as barbarians, and all of the achievements of German civilization did nothing to redeem them.

Barbarism is that which rejects the moral, technological, and social progress that liberalism would prefer to think through and embrace. Barbarism moves away from mutually beneficial gains through trade, and toward one-sided gains through plunder. It moves away from the open, cosmopolitan society, based on the free association of equals, and toward a closed, hierarchical one, based on violence and domination.

The idea that life itself depends on conquest, that conquest is fundamental to life in ways that peaceful pursuits cannot be—it’s hard to miss that meaning in this passage from Bronze Age Mindset:

Civilization is a net negative, we are told, when we view it from the secret vantage point of life itself: “[U]nfortunately in the long run the development of civilization and comfort leads to the proliferation of damaged life… and men on the periphery who want to preserve the natural order begin to plot the end of everything.”

I would call those men barbarians. So would the self-styled Bronze Age Pervert, only he applauds them: “In the next hundred years and even before, barbaric piratical brotherhoods will wipe away this corrupt civilization, as they did at the end of the Bronze Age.” 

Here we can see one of liberalism’s contemporary intellectual opponents explicitly take the side of barbarism. He is incredulous at the metanarrative of civilization; his is a postmodern barbarism, concerned not with truth, but with the development of a superior type of human. He holds a theory of the world, a Weltanschauung, that is ultimately incompatible with both civilization and liberalism. 

Bronze Age Mindset amounts to a revolt against Zweig’s culture of security, and ours. It offers a vitalist alternative, by which a man—and it is always a man—can recover his truest essence, despite corruptions like office work, vaccines, and industrialized food. Such technologies, we read, sap the true essence of the organism. Man, though, ought to be developed to his purportedly natural end, which is conquest. 

If vitalists like Bronze Age Pervert give a colorable theory of barbarism, the practice of it—a delight in cruelty—is always a potential in human nature, and it needs no particularly fine philosophy to develop. When populist movements erupt, they are often ugly in their manifestations. True to their antagonistic priors, they are typically organized so as to pit one segment of society against another. Sometimes this “other” is abstract or nebulous. But at other times, the identification is quite concrete, as with the Haitian residents of Springfield, Ohio. “In Springfield, they are eating the dogs. The people that came in, they are eating the cats. They’re eating—they are eating the pets of the people that live there,” said President Donald Trump, falsely, during a 2024 presidential debate.

These are mere words, some might object, and the freedom of speech should be sacrosanct. Indeed it should, so I will speak as well: This was barbaric. Demonizing whole groups of people is the opposite of what a protector of civilization should do. To enact better and better moral restraint, and to elaborate a more technologically and socially complex human order—both of these efforts demand that individuals be honored in all of their particularity, not herded into camps on the basis of ugly stereotypes.

Cruelty inevitably turns on its practitioners. Both of the major totalitarian systems of the twentieth century trafficked in cruelty, not just as a consequence of their political theory, but as a way to bind their adherents more tightly to the regime while severing their other loyalties. Frank Dikötter has noted how, for Chairman Mao Zedong, getting people to participate in violence against their neighbors was part of sealing a pact of blood between leaders and followers. The extensive surveillance states of the Soviet Bloc compromised the integrity of vast swaths of a formerly civilized population. In the United States today, immigrants and others wonder who among their neighbors might turn them in, and which parts of their social networks aren’t safe to exist in anymore. This is barbarism. We liberals should have the vocabulary to say so, and we should.

On Narrower Grounds

Not all of liberalism’s critics delight in images of pagan vitalist warriors or fantasies of plundering cities. They may instead describe themselves as wanting to go back to an earlier foundation for human life: The tribe. The church. Perhaps the family or the clan. Many of the conservative ideologies described in Laura K. Field’s Furious Minds are of exactly this type, including, to cite just one example, Catholic integralism.

Such stances amount to a narrowing of the grounds of civilization. Medieval Christendom was indeed a civilization; it made many moral and philosophical advances, and it has much to commend about itself in comparison to the slave societies of antiquity. Medieval Christendom was undeniably majority Catholic. Still, medievalists—those whose profession it is to study the era in question—would be the first to insist that the Church of that era wasn’t all-powerful. Heretics abounded, as did idiosyncratic religious practices. Rival institutions, those of guilds, nobles, kings, and emperors, all had a say. The medieval world was culturally and institutionally more complex than moderns generally remember, and it was more fractious than its biggest fans may like to admit. This is often true with illiberal accounts of the past. When it is, liberals should say so.

In our day, and followed to its extreme, integralism would subject nonbelievers—and likely believers of the wrong creed—to legal disadvantage. Single people, particularly single women and sexual minorities, would face unequal treatment in policy and potentially in rights. This narrowing of rights is a common thread among newer conservative ideologies. Doug Wilson, the evangelical pastor whose influence has been acknowledged by U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, has argued that only heads of household should vote; Vice President J.D. Vance has suggested not just voting by household, but giving more weight to households with more children. As I see it, limiting the bounds of civic, intellectual, and economic life, and excluding those previously granted entry, is narrowing the foundation of civilization.

One might say that I’m showing a peculiar regard for equal rights in my idea of civilizational greatness. Perhaps I am. But even those who prefer the grandeur of the collective should consider these examples: Did Sparta exceed Athens in its civilizational footprint by being an oppressive slave society? No, and whatever affection some ancients may have had for Sparta, its literature was feeble, its science was scanty, and its system of government was a dead end. Did Christianity supplant the beliefs of the ancient world by depicting itself as only the religion of the citizen? Again, no. In the era of its greatest expansion, Christianity appealed to the marginalized and gave them a worldview in which their personal salvation mattered. Did Rome reach its heights by purity of blood? Once again, no: it recruited outsiders, gave them citizenship, and expanded its civilizational frontier. When Rome finally fell, it had many would-be heirs, stretched all across the ethnic diversity of Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. Far from being hostile to Rome’s memory, they were mostly appreciative of its cosmopolitan civilization, which they hoped to continue. I’m not much interested in the glory of collectives, but it seems to me that even on this measure, to roll back rights and freedoms is to take a step toward a much less promising world order. 

Barbarism can be done piecemeal or wholesale, in the name of your favorite collective or even in the name of an admired individual. Those who would value civilization must learn to recognize its antonym in all of its many forms. The civilizational advances of Rome must be identified, built upon, and above all improved upon and corrected—not made static and enshrined forever. In our day, the latter would be a barbarism.

Liberalism has excellent bona fides to be not just civilizational, but to be the proper name for the civilization that we are presently living in. Liberalism has been the framework within which commerce, individual rights, individual dignity, and democratic representative government all have grown and flourished. We liberals should not be afraid to say that we are the ones best able to uphold and develop our civilization.

The author would like to thank Michael Tolhurst for contributing to this essay.

Note

[1] In the original German, Schweitzer used the word Kultur, not Zivilisation. As I discuss below, at the time the two held connotations that were nearly opposites from one another. Spengler and others had argued that Kultur was authentic, vital, and essential, while Zivilisation was inauthentic, artificial, and degenerate. For Spengler, a Kultur was fated to ossify into a Zivilisation, after which it ceased to be a creative force in the world. Schweitzer chose the less loaded term. For our purposes, though, his English translator was correct: “Civilization” had a bad odor in German owing to Spengler, but in English it puts Schweitzer in conversation with Elias, who in 1939 used Zivilisation to describe a positive, developmental process. And likewise Freud; the standard English translation of Freud’s Das Unbehagen in der Kultur is Civilization and Its Discontents.