ABSTRACT
Over thirty-five years ago Alfred Hoernle, a founder of present-day liberalism in South Africa, wrote that liberalism was under attack and ‘On the decline all over the world’. The liberal has tended to assume that too much of the world out there is fixed, amenable to logic, fundamentally rational and open to persuasion. Moreover, that there are certain truths about people which are eternal and absolute, for example that they love and strive after freedom under all circumstances. It is surely due to these assumptions that a certain paradoxical doctrinaire stance appears among some liberals which they share with Marxists, perhaps because of their common love of high-level generalisations. But it is more important, in the South African situation at least, that this assumption is clearly what lies behind the liberals’ rejection of violence, of radical socialism and of nationalism which has excluded them from effective politics in that country.
