The Cold War roots of liberalism’s present crisis “[A] daring new book.”—Becca Rothfeld
Washington Post “A fascinating and combative intellectual history.”—Gideon Rachman
Financial Times By the middle of the twentieth century many liberals looked glumly at the
world modernity had brought about with its devastating wars rising totalitarianism and
permanent nuclear terror. They concluded that far from offering a solution to these problems
the ideals of the Enlightenment including emancipation and equality had instead created them.
The historian of political thought Samuel Moyn argues that the liberal intellectuals of the
Cold War era—among them Isaiah Berlin Gertrude Himmelfarb Karl Popper Judith Shklar and
Lionel Trilling—transformed liberalism but left a disastrous legacy for our time. In his
iconoclastic style Moyn outlines how Cold War liberals redefined the ideals of their movement
and renounced the moral core of the Enlightenment for a more dangerous philosophy: preserving
individual liberty at all costs. In denouncing this stance as well as the recent nostalgia for
Cold War liberalism as a means to counter illiberal values Moyn presents a timely call for a
new emancipatory and egalitarian liberal philosophy—a path to undoing the damage of the Cold
War and to ensuring the survival of liberalism.
