Liberal Democracy Critiqued and Affirmed

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Notes

^1. See Fukuyama, The End of History.

^2. Trilling, “Sermon on a Text from Whitman,” 10.

^3. There is a connection with the later development of agonism in political theory. Advocates of agonism include Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics; and Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization.

^4. For an application of Camus’s ethos to American thought, see Bertolini, “Liberal Man in Cosmic Rebellion,” 97–112.

^5. See, e.g., Aron, “Liberal Defense of Liberty,” 73–91.

^6. Niebuhr’s unique defense of liberal democracy is well argued in The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, and in Moral Man and Immoral Society.

^7. Berlin’s classic work in this regard is Four Essays on Liberty.

^8. See, e.g., Kahan, Aristocratic Liberalism; and Fawcett, Liberalism.

^9. See Roelofs, The Poverty of American Politics; and Macpherson, Political Theory of Possessive Individualism.

^10. See Kateb, The Inner Ocean; and Maslow, Farther Reaches of Human Nature.

^11. See Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed.

^12. See, e.g., Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy, and the articles on Putin, Xi Jin Ping, Erdogan, and Orban in the “Autocracy Now” section of Foreign Affairs 98, no. 5 (September-October 2019).

^13. See, e.g., Serwer, The Cruelty is the Point.

^14. Helpful in this larger sense is the work of Becker, The Denial of Death; and Fromm, Man for Himself.