ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the most essential or fundamental constitutive elements of liberalism and how these fare when subjected to the force of radical value-pluralism. It argues that what is living in liberalism is the historic inheritance, now re-emerging in parts of the world in which it was suppressed, of a civil society whose institutions protect liberty and permit civil peace. Liberal orders have, then, no universal or apodictic authority, contrary to liberal political philosophy. To affirm the identity of liberal intellectual tradition spanning Mill and Rawls is not to deny that it is a very complex tradition, containing recessive and dialectical moments. It is difficult for liberals to see in this process undoubtedly real, though fortunately not without exceptions of global cultural homogenization any loss of value. The chapter concludes that none of the four constitutive elements of doctrinal liberalism universalism, individualism, egalitarianism and meliorism survives the ordeal by value-pluralism, and that liberalism, as a political philosophy, is therefore dead.
