Post-Liberalism: Recovering a Shared World
Fred Dallmayr
Abstract
This book is about a paradigm shift occurring under our very eyes, a shift where everything hangs and changes together. The title Post-Liberalism gestures toward this shift, without being able to exhaust it. What the title suggests is that Western modernity (the past four hundred years) was in large measure the time of a self-centered and anthropocentric “liberalism,” an ideology celebrating human autonomy or independence from everything. This view is no longer tenable. Having become a bit more mature, we have come to realize the relationality or “inter-independence” of anything. Socially and ... More
This book is about a paradigm shift occurring under our very eyes, a shift where everything hangs and changes together. The title Post-Liberalism gestures toward this shift, without being able to exhaust it. What the title suggests is that Western modernity (the past four hundred years) was in large measure the time of a self-centered and anthropocentric “liberalism,” an ideology celebrating human autonomy or independence from everything. This view is no longer tenable. Having become a bit more mature, we have come to realize the relationality or “inter-independence” of anything. Socially and politically this means that we are moving toward the practice of shared “public freedom” in a relational democracy and commonwealth. As used here, “post-liberalism” involves neither the denial of genuine freedom nor the endorsement of illiberal collectivism or nationalism. Basically, the book’s point is to find a path beyond atomistic selfishness or narcissism and collectivist populism in the direction of a shared, interhuman space or world. In addition to charting this path, the book wrestles with other forms of relationality: between local and global concerns; between secular reason and faith or spirituality; and between concrete particularism and “world maintenance.”
Keywords:
liberalism,
narcissism,
public space,
democracy,
socialism,
globalism,
relationality,
neo-liberalism,
nationalism,
populism
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2019 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780190949907 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May 2019 |
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780190949907.001.0001 |
