ABSTRACT

There is a definite revival of liberalism under way within western thought. This revival is in one sense rather surprising since much academic opinion had supposed liberalism to be in retreat if not vanquished and discredited. Political economy, it seemed, had been intellectually if not institutionally triumphant over neo-classical economics, critical legal studies were taken to have undermined the liberal theory of law, while Marxism had demolished liberal-democratic political theory, and Frankfurt School critical theory had rendered obsolete Enlightenment notions of liberal rationalism, and exposed the shallow repressiveness of consumer society, leaving radical sociology for its part to destroy the theoretical pretension of liberal Parsonian sociology. While liberalism remained institutionally entrenched in many of the core institutions of academia, its ideologues could be regarded for the most part as a discredited and largely atavistic bunch of cold-war warriors living out a curious sort of decaying intellectual half-life on the margins of intellectual progress. From today’s viewpoint, however, this set of putative victories seems increasingly precarious and in some cases illusory.