The Minimal Requirements for a Society Free From Fear

In 1989, the year the West won the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama published an essay announcing “the end of history.” He wasn’t claiming that historic events would stop taking place; what was over, rather, was the debate about the meaning of those events.

Since the Enlightenment, Western thinkers had believed that history was progressing toward a final destination.

According to communism, the engine of progress was class conflict, and history would end in the creation of a classless society.

With the failure of the Soviet empire, Fukuyama argued, this idea had been discredited.

Only one alternative remained: It was now clear that the “end point of mankind’s ideological evolution” was “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” There would still be disagreements within liberalism—Fukuyama named religion and nationalism as likely fault lines—but there could no longer be any disagreement about liberalism.

To see how that judgment is holding up, just look at the kinds of titles that political theorists are producing these days: How Liberalism Failed , A World After Liberalism , Liberalism Against Itself .

Even Fukuyama wrote a book titled Liberalism and Its Discontents .

Across the West, the far right and the far left are on the rise, and the one thing they agree on is their contempt for liberalism.

To MAGA and its European cousins, such as France’s National Rally and the United Kingdom’s Reform Party, liberals are rootless elitists who look down on their fellow citizens while coddling immigrants and criminals.

To progressives and democratic socialists, liberalism—often qualified with the prefix neo —means ruthless globalized capitalism, prettied up with rhetoric about meritocracy and human rights.

Appeals to liberal principles and defenses of the liberal world order have shown little power to rally the public, or even much of the political establishment.

Now that the liberal triumphalism of the post–Cold War era is dying, what can replace it? The answer may lie in another important essay written in 1989—one that received much less attention than Fukuyama’s, but enjoys a cult reputation among keepers of the liberal flame.

“The Liberalism of Fear,” by Judith Shklar, has just been published for the first time as a book—a small book, because the essay is only about 8,000 words long, but a timely one.

In fact, as the political scientist Mark Lilla says in his introduction, it’s “far more timely today than it was upon its publication.” In 1989, Shklar’s minimalist definition of liberalism as a bulwark against government terror—what she calls, simply, a politics of “damage control”—might have sounded unambitious or uninspiring.