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- Vol 36 No 18
- What keeps liberalism alive?
- Andrew Hamilton
- 16 September 2026
Waleed Aly is one of our most incisive commentators on political and social topics. He moves beyond the immediate news items, with their slogans and dichotomies that characterise most commentary, and asks what lies deeper within the issues. His recent Quarterly Essay Time of Monsters: What Future for Liberalism? is characteristically incisive. I shall not review it here, but simply summarise the framework of his argument and try to take it further.
Aly begins with the current discontent evident in responses to political, social and other issues, and beneath the fierce differences finds a common conviction that the present order has failed to deliver a good life. He traces this discontent through the succession of crises in this century and identifies an underlying shared conviction that the future will be worse than the present. People no longer believe in progress.
This belief in progress is central to the political and social order since the Second World War that Aly describes as liberalism. It is expressed in the network of a free press, freedom of speech, personal freedom, the understanding that all are equal under the law, independent judges and freedom of individual choice. These are trusted to shape a society marked by progress, in which individuals can enjoy a better life than their predecessors and achieve their own goals. As people give up hope in progress, the networks that protect liberalism come under attack from both left and right.
I shall leave it to the reader of Waleed Aly’s essay to see how dexterously he develops this argument. I wish here to explore the reasons why the structures of liberalism have so frequently and widely been seen to fail. I believe that they lie precisely in the difficulty of establishing and preserving the kind of culture they are designed to protect. This task requires more than societies can normally provide.
The difficulty is enshrined in the slogan of the French Revolution: liberty, equality and fraternity. Stripped of its bloody history, it names the values that are central to the liberal enterprise. The difficulty inherent in embodying them in society lies in the fact that, in order to be liberal, a society must simultaneously embody all three values. If any is excluded, or one is given full play at the expense of another, the progress that the slogan promises will be denied.
The society that emerged from the French Revolution itself failed to meet this challenge. The single-minded defence of equality led to a dictatorial regime that compromised its promise of liberty, and to a bitterly divided society in which fraternity yielded to suspicion. The exercise of power inevitably undermined the goals enshrined in the Revolution. The same dynamic was also evident in the Leninist and Stalinist regimes in Russia, where their leaders postponed liberty in the interests of equality and, in the process, inevitably corroded fraternity and eventually undermined equality itself.
The underlying difficulty in establishing and maintaining a society committed to liberty, equality and fraternity lies in the reality that many of its members neither share nor practise these ideal qualities. The ideal does not allow for the mixture of generosity and larceny in the blood of real human beings. It requires both constant reinforcement in public conversation and sustained attention to ensure that the institutions and processes of governance reward life lived virtuously and disadvantage life lived selfishly. This demands some restrictions on liberty, on the amassing of wealth and power, and on communication. The trust that rulers will act with wisdom and courage and promote progress depends on the effectiveness of this reinforcement.
These conditions are ethical in character. That is to say, they presuppose an understanding of what it means to be human and what it means for human beings to flourish. They assume the belief that each human being is precious and may not be used as a means to others’ ends. They also assume that, in order to flourish, each human being depends on others. The freedom of individuals to secure their own goals is limited by the claims of the common good.
"They assume the belief that each human being is precious and may not be used as a means to others’ ends. They also assume that, in order to flourish, each human being depends on others. The freedom of individuals to secure their own goals is limited by the claims of the common good."
These ethical understandings underlie the processes of law, administration and governance in Western democracies. They are enshrined in such principles as the presumption that citizens are innocent until found guilty by independent courts; that each person’s voice should count equally; that the wealthy should be taxed to support the common good; that government actions should be transparent; and that administrators should be honest and impartial.
The challenge posed by the Enlightenment lay in the historical circumstance that its values, enshrined in the catchphrases of liberty, equality and fraternity, were detached from their previous religious framework. This was important for establishing a secular state in which religious freedom was an essential part. Later societies, however, became increasingly technological in their thinking, and so concerned with which initiatives might work rather than with which human values they serve. As a result, ethical reasoning is commonly dismissed as irrelevant or as a matter of opinion by the political and managerial forces that shape government policy.
When this results, as it does in many Western nations, in a society marked by gross inequalities in wealth and access to power, radical technological threats to future human life, and governments that fail to serve the people they represent by addressing these large questions, people naturally lose hope in progress and in the institutions and principles that claim to guarantee it.
If we attend to the noisy voices attacking the bulwarks of liberal society from both the nominal left and right, we might imagine that the future will necessarily lie in a dystopian authoritarian society controlled by technological interests. That may turn out to be the case, but voters’ rejection of political parties and managerial processes may not represent the abandonment of hope in human growth. It may instead affirm a desire to build a society that is free, fraternal and equal. People may simply wish to be offered a better way — one that respects human values.
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