ABSTRACT
American liberalism finds itself in disarray both politically and intellectually, but its plight brings no joy to the conservative. In 1976 liberalism understandably enough pretends to the status and the advantages it bestows, but the claims grow increasingly hard to believe. Liberalism departed too far from reality, too far from its own received assumptions, to retain its prestige as an establishment. According to one participant, socialists have at one time or another taken issue with all three elements of the liberal formula: political liberalism, economic liberalism, and anthropological liberalism. The socialist critique of economic liberalism has taken two forms: first, a denial of the doctrine of economic harmony of interests; and second, a critique of the liberal state. Liberalism's sense of crisis thus reflects a more general problem of disorientation and loss of belief; it is the legacy of a decade of turmoil and uncertainty.
