... a thoughtful critique but ultimately a stalwart defence of liberalism ... urgent and timely ... His exegesis of critical theory from Marcuse through to Foucault, and how it has been widely adopted as a tool of sociopolitical analysis, is a brilliantly acute summary of the way some aspects of liberal thought have consumed themselves ... Although he outlines some familiar complaints about social media monopolies and their baleful effect on political discourse, the overall sense you gain from this book is that liberalism is in crisis because of the complacency that set in with its successes. Liberal democracy has delivered on many fronts, but with each step forward it left many constituencies behind ... This book does not supply all, or enough, of the answers. But it’s a good place to start with asking the essential questions.
This all sounds rather dense and abstract, but Fukuyama succeeds in his explaining his objections to identity politics with great clarity and concreteness. He does not lapse into the wilful obscurity that is the calling card of critical theorist of the left ... Nor is he unwilling to criticise a particular form of liberalism, known in America as neo-liberalism ... Fukuyama doesn't offer any particular solutions to liberalism’s crisis. He just assumes reason and moderation will ultimately prevail. He quotes Churchill’s aphorism that democracy is the worst form of government apart from all the rest. But perhaps we are beginning to realise, in Ukraine, that the defence of liberal democracy involves more than being reasonable.
... [an] academic treatise that may actually have influence in the arena of practical politics ... Fukuyama writes with a crystalline rationality ... Fukuyama disdains what he calls 'a laundry list' of policy proposals and, rather elegantly, settles on a plea for moderation.
In bald summary, Fukuyama’s bravura prosecution sounds harsher than it reads. He is stringent but never parodic or snide. His call to order ends with a short, positive to-do list for shoring up the liberal centre: effective, 'impersonal' government; devolution or subsidiarity; antitrust, especially for big media; less quarter for group demands; a 'liberal' patriotism against the wrong sort of nationalists. Humane as ever, he adds two practical virtues: intellectual moderation and a feel for the achievable ... It is hard to think of a better case for liberal centrism with a conservative tinge than Liberalism and Its Discontents. Or, to be exact, a better case against liberal centrism’s more vocal critics.
Fukuyama, like many of us, is a chastened liberal. But his argument is more persuasive as a result. He takes seriously the criticisms of liberalism from left and right and is not sparing in his own criticisms of public policy ... In his desire to resuscitate liberalism, Fukuyama occasionally gives too much ground to its critics ... Fukuyama is too worried about the supposed amorality of liberalism.
Essential reading for all students of political science. Fukuyama’s scholarly, yet approachable work is highly recommended for any reader interested in understanding the current political environment.
Fukuyama’s takedown of neoliberalism makes the book an interesting read for a moment, but it becomes hollow and deflating as the criticism gets lost in his attachment to 'economic individualism' as the locus of liberalism. All we get then is the realization that neoliberalism went off the rails because its foundations were 'historically contingent.' Attention neoliberals: beware of history ... Fukuyama writes that he is not concerned with policy; his book is about the principles of liberalism. That is too bad, because it prevents him from wrestling with the contradictions of classical liberalism ... In rejecting the notion that illiberalism is produced from liberalism, Fukuyama ignores how the two are concurrent—how liberalism can tolerate inequality to the point that it will undo its principles ... Missing from Fukuyama’s book is any substantive discussion of United States foreign policy ... ultimately offers readers a worldview that rejects progress in favor of revanchism. Fukuyama turns out not to be the neoconservative he is often labeled, but a conservative akin to Edmund Burke, someone who would prefer a lasting plutocracy over a liberalism that might temporarily destabilize society so that, in time, more individuals obtained political rights. Whereas the neoconservative project is premised on global disruption—what is more disorderly that forcing, and enforcing, democratic governance through the barrel of a gun?—Fukuyama’s project is anti-modern. He wants a liberalism without liberals ... On the one hand, therefore, Fukuyama has a book-length straw man ... can be read as an inadvertent indictment of the past thirty years of history and what we have done to make sense of it. Fukuyama would prefer that capital not be rapacious, that people not be selfish political beings, that materialism not yield greed, that we chasten the impulse to confirm our preconceived biases. No such world exists. And it cannot, given how the events after the Cold War were interpreted in ways that led us to this moment. Fukuyama’s argument relies on world history to rewrite his own, to correct the history he failed to foresee in 1989. For teleology, whether in the hands of historians or former government officials, is ultimately a reactionary and artificial effort to attribute order to complexity. Unable to arrange history in a triumphalist narrative, in an arc that bends toward democracy, Fukuyama asks us to forget the present to preserve the past.
... incisive ... Fukuyama’s lucid, insightful analysis traces liberalism’s development back to its medieval Christian roots and forward to modern philosophical muddles and today’s wrangles over voting restrictions and cancel culture, offering tart criticism for all sides ... The result is an authoritative and accessible diagnosis of how liberalism went wrong and how it can reclaim its best impulses.
