ABSTRACT
This chapter examines liberalism’s transformation from ideology to a supposedly neutral meta-ideology, capable of providing the ground-rules for all legitimate ideological disputes, and critically evaluate its suitability for this role. Indeed, sociology became the official philosophy of the Third Republic, supposedly showing the ideals of solidarist liberalism to be inherent to the proper functioning of contemporary societies. The chapter examines three broadly neo-classical attempts to develop this point and to rethink liberalism in a quite different manner to the social liberals: that of the Italian theorist Vilfredo Pareto; the Austrian economists; and the German sociologist Max Weber. The rise of fascism and communism in the 1920s and 1930s appeared to confirm the pessimism of Weber concerning the demise of liberal values in the modern world. The major exponent of contemporary social democratic liberalism is John Rawls, whose A Theory of Justice is probably the most important work of political philosophy written in English since the Second World War.
