Liberalism is Enduring and Urgent

Abstract: Liberalism is a philosophy of political economy that offers enduring principles about how we should seek to interact in groups and in human society more generally. Far from being outdated or archaic, those principles offer more convincing and powerful responses to our current challenges than any competing philosophy. While populism claims to offer straight-forward solutions to some of the difficulties of globalisation, it offers only half-hearted remedies for weaknesses in the operation of representative democracies, and populism has little capacity to reckon with the wave of technological changes set to revolutionise the global economy. Liberalism, by contrast, is uniquely suited to clarify and tackle these challenges. It offers coherent responses to globalisation, dissatisfaction with representative institutions, and technological change. This is not to say that all is well in the house of liberalism. There is an opportunity, if not to reconstruct, then to refresh and retarget liberal thinking on these issues.

Available at SSRN