Helena Rosenblatt’s The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century is the most recent entry into these debates about the meaning and future of liberalism. Although different in tone, perspective, and prescription, all of these recent works reflect anxiety about liberalism and what can be expected from it. Others, like Mark Lilla’s The Once and Future Liberal, suggest liberalism can be saved and exhort liberals to reject divisive identity politics in favor of valued shared by all citizens. Some, like Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed, attribute contemporary political, social, and economic discontent to liberalism’s secular and flawed ideology. In recent years, with Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, and the rise of far-right groups and figures such as Italy’s Northern League and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro suggesting further cracks in liberalism’s supposed hegemony, we have seen a spate of books exploring liberalism and its likely future. The years following 1989 have shown all too clearly that this optimism was misplaced, with scholars like Samuel Huntington weighing in on counterforces to liberalism, such as nationalism and religious fundamentalism. AS THE COLD WAR ended and the Soviet Union collapsed, Francis Fukuyama famously speculated that we had reached “the end of history” and that with the demise of communism, liberal ideas and institutions would become universal.

The lost history of liberalism