I appreciate your thoughtful comment, but I think several of the claims here don’t hold up under scrutiny.
Nazism was not a product of Enlightenment rationality The Frankfurt School’s thesis in Dialectic of Enlightenment, that the Holocaust was somehow a product of Enlightenment reason, is one of the most influential yet poorly supported claims in 20th-century social theory. The problem is simply that Nazism was explicitly anti-Enlightenment and anti-rational.
The Nazis rejected virtually every core Enlightenment principle. They replaced reason with Blut und Boden mysticism, the Führerprinzip (the principle that the leader’s intuition supersedes all evidence and deliberation), and a racial pseudoscience that bore no meaningful resemblance to the scientific method. They burned books and celebrated instinct, will, and blood over careful reasoning.
The Frankfurt School argument relies on equivocating between two very different meanings of “rationality.” Yes, the Nazis used trains, bureaucracy, and industrial logistics efficiently. But efficiently using technology to implement your goals is far broader than the Enlightenment commitment to reason and evidence as guides to truth—and was already done in antiquity. We discuss a closely related issue in the essay under differential intellectual regress: fanatical regimes can maintain or even advance technological capabilities while systematically degrading wisdom, moral reflection, and reason. Scientific and technological progress requires some narrow form of rationality, and can certainly enable you to do much more harm. But that’s a point about the power of technology, not about Enlightenment values or classical liberalism.
The Jakarta Method and Cold War interventions The 1965–66 Indonesian massacres are among the worst atrocities of the 20th century, and it’s horrible that the US intelligence community encouraged and supported them.[1] I totally agree that the US bears substantial responsibility for this and other atrocities like the Vietnam War, supporting Pinochet’s coup against the democratically elected Allende, arming radical Islamist Mujahideen in Afghanistan (helping enable the Taliban), and orchestrating the 1953 Iranian coup. We briefly mention some of these in the essay (e.g., in the first bullet point here, Appendix F, and the spreadsheet of historical atrocities).
But these atrocities were largely driven by fanatical anti-communism (especially on the US side) that divided the world into an existential struggle between good and evil, dehumanized the enemy, and held that defeating communism was so important that it justified “any means necessary”, including supporting malevolent autocrats and mass killings. They represent failures of liberal democracies to live up to their own principles, not evidence that those principles caused the violence. Classical liberalism provides the intellectual resources to condemn the Jakarta killings.
On the critical theory tradition You suggest that ideology should be understood as something structural and embedded rather than merely a matter of overt zealotry. But this is a false dichotomy. We explicitly mention how fanatical ideologies can become normalized and mainstream (that’s partly why we chose the term “fanaticism” over “extremism”).
Several of the thinkers you cite exemplify a reflexive skepticism toward liberal universalism that treats all claims to reason, evidence, and universal moral concern as merely disguised exercises of power. This is its own form of epistemic closure. If every appeal to evidence is just “instrumental rationality serving domination,” you’ve constructed an unfalsifiable framework. Of course, power absolutely shapes knowledge production, and Western intellectual traditions have real blind spots. But there’s a crucial difference between “we should be attentive to how power can distort reasoning” (true) and “Enlightenment rationality is always a tool of domination”; an extraordinary claim that, taken seriously, would undermine the very epistemic tools needed to identify and correct injustice, including the injustices you rightly highlighted.
The Act of Killing, in which some of the perpetrators cheerfully reenact their murders decades later, is one of the most horrifying and interesting documentaries I’ve ever watched.
I think your response raises important criticisms, but some of the disagreement comes from talking past what the theoritical argument is actually trying to do, and I also may be oversimplifying what I intend to convey for the sake of clarity but lost its nuances in the first place. It may help to narrow the disagreement rather than treat it as a choice between Enlightenment reason vs. its critics. (PS: I don’t think we’re disagreeing much here.)
OnNazism and Dialectics of Enlightenment
You are right that the movement was openly anti-liberal and hostile to many Enlightenment ideals. It rejected universalism, elevated myth and authority, and subordinated evidence to ideology. In that sense, describing Nazism as a direct product of Enlightenment thinking is historically misleading.
What thinkers like Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno were trying to claim however was different. They were not claiming that Nazis were faithful heirs of Enlightenment values. The argument is that Enlightenment reason contains an internal tension: the drive to master nature through calculation and control can, under certain historical conditions, narrow into what they call “instrumental reason”. This form of rationality focuses on efficiency and domination while detaching itself from ethical reflection and critical self-awareness. Their concern is that modern societies could retain technical rationality while losing emancipatory aims. Whether one agrees or not, the argument is about a tension inside modernity, not a simple causal claim that reason produces barbarism.
On technology, bureaucracy, and moral reasoning
Your distinction between technological efficiency and Enlightenment commitments to truth-seeking is correct. Yet the critical theory concern is precisely that these can become decoupled. A society may maintain scientific competence while weakening norms of criticism, pluralism, or moral restraint. The historical question is whether this decoupling is accidental or structurally enabled by modern forms of organisation. In other words, the disagreement is really about whether this separation is accidental misuse or something modern institutions make easier.
On Cold War violence.
Critics are usually making a narrower claim: that existential framing during the Cold War allowed liberal states to suspend their own norms in practice. Works like The Jakarta Method are less an argument against liberal philosophy than an attempt to show how geopolitical fear reshaped moral boundaries on the ground.
The concern about critical theory becoming unfalsifiable is also somewhat fair. Some versions do slide into treating every appeal to reason or universality as disguised power, which collapses into skepticism about knowledge itself.
But the stronger version of the tradition is closer to a warning than a rejection: that reasoning always happens inside institutions and power structures that can distort it. The productive version of this insight is methodological modesty: reason operates within institutions and incentives that can distort it. The unhelpful version is total suspicion.
The disagreement should be located between these two readings rather than framed as reason versus anti-reason. One reading treats reason primarily as a normative commitment: evidence, logical consistency, revisability of beliefs, and universal standards for justification. In this view, failures such as ideological violence occur when societies abandon reason or fail to live up to it. The problem is moral / institutional deviation.
The other reading treats reason as historically situated. It asks how particular forms of reasoning become dominant, which questions are considered legitimate, what kinds of evidence are prioritised, and how certain assumptions become invisible background conditions. The focus shifts from whether reasoning is used correctly to how epistemic frameworks themselves are formed and stabilized.
From that perspective, the issue is epistemological rather than anti-rational.
Thanks, I think this narrows the disagreement productively! :)
On the reframed Frankfurt School argument: I strongly agree with the claim that modern societies can retain technical rationality while losing wisdom and ethical reflection (cf. the section “differential intellectual regress”).
Where I still disagree is with locating this tension inside Enlightenment reason. The decoupling of technological competence from moral reasoning isn’t something Enlightenment values produce. It’s what happens when Enlightenment values are abandoned while the technology remains. Nazi Germany didn’t gradually narrow Enlightenment reason into instrumental reason; it rejected Enlightenment values from the start and kept the trains running. It seems that the Frankfurt School framing suggests we need to be suspicious of reason itself, while the fanaticism framing suggests we need more reason, more epistemic humility, more willingness to revise beliefs—i.e., more Enlightenment values, not fewer.
On whether the decoupling of technological capacity from wisdom is “accidental or structurally enabled by modern forms of organization”: I think the empirical record makes this fairly clear. Barbarism long predates modernity, antiquity and the Middle Ages were full of it. Hunter-gatherers engaged in lots of tribal warfare. In contrast, most modern liberal democracies conduct far fewer wars, have far less poverty, and produce far better outcomes across virtually every metric of human flourishing than any pre-modern society (see footnote 9 on the huge drop in violence rates). So modern institutions are clearly neither necessary nor sufficient for producing barbarism.
What often leads to barbarism is the abandonment of core principles of liberal democracy like separation of powers, universal rights, and the rule of law—especially when ideologically fanatical or malevolent actors are in charge. Modernity gives you better tools, but the tools aren’t inherently the problem. That said, I agree that modernity results in great technological capacity which increases the stakes and increases the harm if bad things happen.
On the “productive version” of critical theory as methodological modesty (that reason operates within institutions and incentives that can distort it) I certainly agree with that! But I’d note that many Enlightenment thinkers themselves already understood this perfectly well. Adam Smith, for instance, warned that regulatory proposals from businessmen “ought always to be listened to with great precaution… It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even oppress the public.” So you don’t necessarily need the Frankfurt School apparatus to get to “institutional incentives distort reasoning.”
One more side note, I am actually glad that, you as one of the author of this post are aware of the existing body of scholarship and the broader historical reality of the world’s politics. My concern was whether you are trying to reinvent the wheel while substantial body of work has been produced about this topic. I apologize if I have been overly provocative.
The second generation of the Frankfurt School, particularly Jürgen Habermas, also addresses the totalizing tendencies in the first generation’s argument, though that is a separate discussion.
“Classical liberalism provides the intellectual resources to condemn the Jakarta killings. ”
Communism probably also provides intellectual resources that would enable you to condemn most of the many very bad things communists have done, but that doesn’t mean that those outcomes aren’t relevant to assessing how good an idea communism is in practice.
Not that you said otherwise, and I am a liberal, not a communist. But I do think sometimes liberals can be a bit too quick to conclude that all crimes of liberal regimes having nothing distinctive to do with liberalism, while presuming that communist and fascist and theocratic crimes are inherent products of communism/fascism/theocracy. (I have less than zero time for fascism or theocracy, to be clear.)
Communism probably also provides intellectual resources that would enable you to condemn most of the many very bad things communists have done, but that doesn’t mean that those outcomes aren’t relevant to assessing how good an idea communism is in practice.
But much less clearly so than classical liberalism. Communism lacks any clear rejection of violence, provides no robust mechanism for resolving disagreements or conflicts, and doesn’t advocate for universal individual rights. Lenin, one of its most influential theorists, explicitly advocated for a “desperate, bloody war of extermination”.
So it’s no surprise that communism almost always led to disaster and essentially never to a prosperous, flourishing society, in contrast to classical liberalism, which much more rarely led to disaster and much more often to flourishing.
Less clearly, sure. I’m mostly warning about complacency about liberals being safe from error just because you can use liberal ideas to criticize bad things liberals have done, rather than defending communism. Certainly lots of communists have, for example, attacked Stalinism in communist terms.
I don’t really understand why liberalism is getting the prefix “classical” here though. The distinction between “classical” and other forms of liberalism, like social liberalism, is more about levels of government support for the poor through the welfare state and just how strong a presumption we should have in favour of market solutions vs government ones, with agreement on secularism, individual human rights, free speech, pluralism, a non-zero sum conception of markets and trade etc. I also think that insofar as “liberals” have an unusually good record, this doesn’t distinguish “liberals” in the narrow sense from other pro-democratic traditions that accept pluralism: i.e. European social democracy on the left, and European Christian democracy, and Anglosphere mainstream conservatism 1965-2015 on the right. If anything classical liberals might have a worse record than many of these groups, because I think classical liberal ideas were used in the 19th century by the British Empire to justify not doing anything about major famines. Of course there is a broad sense of liberal in which all these people are “liberals” too, and they may well have been influenced by classical liberalism. But they aren’t necessarily on the same side as classical liberals in typical policy debates.
I’m mostly warning about complacency about liberals being safe from error
I can certainly agree with that. :)
I don’t really understand why liberalism is getting the prefix “classical” here though.
Mostly to reduce the chance of misinterpretation. In the US, “liberal” is often used interchangeably with something like “leftist”, “Democrat”, or “progressive”, and I wanted to make clear that I don’t want any of these connotations. I also wanted to emphasize the core principles of liberalism, and avoid getting bogged down in specific policy debates.
Thank you for the post, which was an interesting read.
But these atrocities were largely driven by fanatical anti-communism (especially on the US side) that divided the world into an existential struggle between good and evil… They represent failures of liberal democracies to live up to their own principles, not evidence that those principles caused the violence.
If liberalism simply has temporary failings—is this not something of a no true Scotsman? Marxists might (and often do) say similarly that the examples you cite were the result of the leaders not living up to communist principles in practice. It would seem to undermine the idea that these are ‘time-tested bulwarks’ if the principles do, and have, failed periodically.
Similarly, the Nazis may have been anti-enlightenment, but they rose to power in a fairly liberal society, including by exploiting the classically liberal value of free speech to spread propaganda. So it seems a bit difficult definitionally to judge this only by what the Nazis did when in power, rather than the (liberal) conditions that enabled this to happen in the first place.
I recognise I’m oversimplifying things quite a bit here, but I think speaks to the difficulty of drawing neat lines around whether some ideologies are inherently more stable than others—or at least in assuming that the values typically counted within the classical liberal bucket (and it’s a wide bucket) are all inherently anti-fanatical, rather than some being more likely than others to be a source of instabliity over time. (See for example leftist critiques of individual economic liberty to this end.)
Fair point. But I think there’s a genuine structural asymmetry here. When liberal democracies commit atrocities, they do so by violating their own safeguards—secrecy, executive overreach, circumventing checks and balances. The CIA’s Cold War operations required hiding what they were doing from Congress and the public, precisely because the actions were incompatible with the system’s principles. And liberal democracies contain built-in self-correcting mechanisms: free press, independent courts, elections, public accountability. The US eventually declassified the documents and the atrocities became part of the historical record that we can openly discuss and condemn. This self-correction is a core feature of classical liberalism.
The “not real communism” defense has the opposite problem. Concentrating all power in a vanguard party, suppressing class enemies, and eliminating institutional checks aren’t deviations from Marxism-Leninism, they’re core features. Once you’ve done all that, totalitarian horror isn’t a failure of implementation but a foreseeable consequence of the design. (Also, the CCP is still putting Mao on all their banknotes.)
”Time-tested” doesn’t mean “never fails”, it means better outcomes on average, less catastrophic failures, and mechanisms to recognize and correct its own failures. The right question isn’t “does liberalism guarantee safety?” (nothing does), it’s “which system produces the best outcomes and has the strongest safeguards?” The historical record is pretty clear.
On the Nazis exploiting Weimar democracy
The argument seems to be essentially: “Nazis rose to power in a liberal society, therefore liberalism enabled Nazism.” But this arguably confuses background conditions with causation. The Nazis also exploited elections, but most people still seem quite partial to them.
The actual causal story involves the Treaty of Versailles, hyperinflation, the Great Depression, Weimar’s specific constitutional weaknesses, the mutual radicalization spiral between communists and Nazis, and the political establishment’s catastrophic miscalculation in thinking they could “control” Hitler. Free speech was a minor ingredient, if that.
The fact that safeguards sometimes fail doesn’t mean the safeguards are the problem. Some people die in car crashes even while wearing seatbelts.
The wide classical liberalism bucket
I agree that not all values in the admittedly wide “classical liberal bucket” are equally anti-fanatical. For what it’s worth, I’m quite concerned about extreme wealth inequality, partly because it enables potential oligarchs to subvert the very system of liberal democracy. But the core claim is about the procedural principles—separation of powers, rule of law, universal rights, institutional checks—and those seem pretty robustly anti-fanatical to me.
I appreciate your thoughtful comment, but I think several of the claims here don’t hold up under scrutiny.
Nazism was not a product of Enlightenment rationality
The Frankfurt School’s thesis in Dialectic of Enlightenment, that the Holocaust was somehow a product of Enlightenment reason, is one of the most influential yet poorly supported claims in 20th-century social theory. The problem is simply that Nazism was explicitly anti-Enlightenment and anti-rational.
The Nazis rejected virtually every core Enlightenment principle. They replaced reason with Blut und Boden mysticism, the Führerprinzip (the principle that the leader’s intuition supersedes all evidence and deliberation), and a racial pseudoscience that bore no meaningful resemblance to the scientific method. They burned books and celebrated instinct, will, and blood over careful reasoning.
The Frankfurt School argument relies on equivocating between two very different meanings of “rationality.” Yes, the Nazis used trains, bureaucracy, and industrial logistics efficiently. But efficiently using technology to implement your goals is far broader than the Enlightenment commitment to reason and evidence as guides to truth—and was already done in antiquity. We discuss a closely related issue in the essay under differential intellectual regress: fanatical regimes can maintain or even advance technological capabilities while systematically degrading wisdom, moral reflection, and reason. Scientific and technological progress requires some narrow form of rationality, and can certainly enable you to do much more harm. But that’s a point about the power of technology, not about Enlightenment values or classical liberalism.
The Jakarta Method and Cold War interventions
The 1965–66 Indonesian massacres are among the worst atrocities of the 20th century, and it’s horrible that the US intelligence community encouraged and supported them.[1] I totally agree that the US bears substantial responsibility for this and other atrocities like the Vietnam War, supporting Pinochet’s coup against the democratically elected Allende, arming radical Islamist Mujahideen in Afghanistan (helping enable the Taliban), and orchestrating the 1953 Iranian coup. We briefly mention some of these in the essay (e.g., in the first bullet point here, Appendix F, and the spreadsheet of historical atrocities).
But these atrocities were largely driven by fanatical anti-communism (especially on the US side) that divided the world into an existential struggle between good and evil, dehumanized the enemy, and held that defeating communism was so important that it justified “any means necessary”, including supporting malevolent autocrats and mass killings. They represent failures of liberal democracies to live up to their own principles, not evidence that those principles caused the violence. Classical liberalism provides the intellectual resources to condemn the Jakarta killings.
On the critical theory tradition
You suggest that ideology should be understood as something structural and embedded rather than merely a matter of overt zealotry. But this is a false dichotomy. We explicitly mention how fanatical ideologies can become normalized and mainstream (that’s partly why we chose the term “fanaticism” over “extremism”).
Several of the thinkers you cite exemplify a reflexive skepticism toward liberal universalism that treats all claims to reason, evidence, and universal moral concern as merely disguised exercises of power. This is its own form of epistemic closure. If every appeal to evidence is just “instrumental rationality serving domination,” you’ve constructed an unfalsifiable framework.
Of course, power absolutely shapes knowledge production, and Western intellectual traditions have real blind spots. But there’s a crucial difference between “we should be attentive to how power can distort reasoning” (true) and “Enlightenment rationality is always a tool of domination”; an extraordinary claim that, taken seriously, would undermine the very epistemic tools needed to identify and correct injustice, including the injustices you rightly highlighted.
The Act of Killing, in which some of the perpetrators cheerfully reenact their murders decades later, is one of the most horrifying and interesting documentaries I’ve ever watched.
Hi there :)
I think your response raises important criticisms, but some of the disagreement comes from talking past what the theoritical argument is actually trying to do, and I also may be oversimplifying what I intend to convey for the sake of clarity but lost its nuances in the first place. It may help to narrow the disagreement rather than treat it as a choice between Enlightenment reason vs. its critics. (PS: I don’t think we’re disagreeing much here.)
On Nazism and Dialectics of Enlightenment
You are right that the movement was openly anti-liberal and hostile to many Enlightenment ideals. It rejected universalism, elevated myth and authority, and subordinated evidence to ideology. In that sense, describing Nazism as a direct product of Enlightenment thinking is historically misleading.
What thinkers like Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno were trying to claim however was different. They were not claiming that Nazis were faithful heirs of Enlightenment values. The argument is that Enlightenment reason contains an internal tension: the drive to master nature through calculation and control can, under certain historical conditions, narrow into what they call “instrumental reason”. This form of rationality focuses on efficiency and domination while detaching itself from ethical reflection and critical self-awareness. Their concern is that modern societies could retain technical rationality while losing emancipatory aims. Whether one agrees or not, the argument is about a tension inside modernity, not a simple causal claim that reason produces barbarism.
On technology, bureaucracy, and moral reasoning
Your distinction between technological efficiency and Enlightenment commitments to truth-seeking is correct. Yet the critical theory concern is precisely that these can become decoupled. A society may maintain scientific competence while weakening norms of criticism, pluralism, or moral restraint. The historical question is whether this decoupling is accidental or structurally enabled by modern forms of organisation. In other words, the disagreement is really about whether this separation is accidental misuse or something modern institutions make easier.
On Cold War violence.
Critics are usually making a narrower claim: that existential framing during the Cold War allowed liberal states to suspend their own norms in practice. Works like The Jakarta Method are less an argument against liberal philosophy than an attempt to show how geopolitical fear reshaped moral boundaries on the ground.
The concern about critical theory becoming unfalsifiable is also somewhat fair. Some versions do slide into treating every appeal to reason or universality as disguised power, which collapses into skepticism about knowledge itself.
But the stronger version of the tradition is closer to a warning than a rejection: that reasoning always happens inside institutions and power structures that can distort it. The productive version of this insight is methodological modesty: reason operates within institutions and incentives that can distort it. The unhelpful version is total suspicion.
The disagreement should be located between these two readings rather than framed as reason versus anti-reason. One reading treats reason primarily as a normative commitment: evidence, logical consistency, revisability of beliefs, and universal standards for justification. In this view, failures such as ideological violence occur when societies abandon reason or fail to live up to it. The problem is moral / institutional deviation.
The other reading treats reason as historically situated. It asks how particular forms of reasoning become dominant, which questions are considered legitimate, what kinds of evidence are prioritised, and how certain assumptions become invisible background conditions. The focus shifts from whether reasoning is used correctly to how epistemic frameworks themselves are formed and stabilized.
From that perspective, the issue is epistemological rather than anti-rational.
Thanks, I think this narrows the disagreement productively! :)
On the reframed Frankfurt School argument: I strongly agree with the claim that modern societies can retain technical rationality while losing wisdom and ethical reflection (cf. the section “differential intellectual regress”).
Where I still disagree is with locating this tension inside Enlightenment reason. The decoupling of technological competence from moral reasoning isn’t something Enlightenment values produce. It’s what happens when Enlightenment values are abandoned while the technology remains. Nazi Germany didn’t gradually narrow Enlightenment reason into instrumental reason; it rejected Enlightenment values from the start and kept the trains running. It seems that the Frankfurt School framing suggests we need to be suspicious of reason itself, while the fanaticism framing suggests we need more reason, more epistemic humility, more willingness to revise beliefs—i.e., more Enlightenment values, not fewer.
On whether the decoupling of technological capacity from wisdom is “accidental or structurally enabled by modern forms of organization”: I think the empirical record makes this fairly clear. Barbarism long predates modernity, antiquity and the Middle Ages were full of it. Hunter-gatherers engaged in lots of tribal warfare. In contrast, most modern liberal democracies conduct far fewer wars, have far less poverty, and produce far better outcomes across virtually every metric of human flourishing than any pre-modern society (see footnote 9 on the huge drop in violence rates). So modern institutions are clearly neither necessary nor sufficient for producing barbarism.
What often leads to barbarism is the abandonment of core principles of liberal democracy like separation of powers, universal rights, and the rule of law—especially when ideologically fanatical or malevolent actors are in charge. Modernity gives you better tools, but the tools aren’t inherently the problem. That said, I agree that modernity results in great technological capacity which increases the stakes and increases the harm if bad things happen.
On the “productive version” of critical theory as methodological modesty (that reason operates within institutions and incentives that can distort it) I certainly agree with that! But I’d note that many Enlightenment thinkers themselves already understood this perfectly well. Adam Smith, for instance, warned that regulatory proposals from businessmen “ought always to be listened to with great precaution… It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even oppress the public.” So you don’t necessarily need the Frankfurt School apparatus to get to “institutional incentives distort reasoning.”
On Cold War violence, it sounds like we agree! :)
One more side note, I am actually glad that, you as one of the author of this post are aware of the existing body of scholarship and the broader historical reality of the world’s politics. My concern was whether you are trying to reinvent the wheel while substantial body of work has been produced about this topic. I apologize if I have been overly provocative.
The second generation of the Frankfurt School, particularly Jürgen Habermas, also addresses the totalizing tendencies in the first generation’s argument, though that is a separate discussion.
“Classical liberalism provides the intellectual resources to condemn the Jakarta killings. ”
Communism probably also provides intellectual resources that would enable you to condemn most of the many very bad things communists have done, but that doesn’t mean that those outcomes aren’t relevant to assessing how good an idea communism is in practice.
Not that you said otherwise, and I am a liberal, not a communist. But I do think sometimes liberals can be a bit too quick to conclude that all crimes of liberal regimes having nothing distinctive to do with liberalism, while presuming that communist and fascist and theocratic crimes are inherent products of communism/fascism/theocracy. (I have less than zero time for fascism or theocracy, to be clear.)
But much less clearly so than classical liberalism. Communism lacks any clear rejection of violence, provides no robust mechanism for resolving disagreements or conflicts, and doesn’t advocate for universal individual rights. Lenin, one of its most influential theorists, explicitly advocated for a “desperate, bloody war of extermination”.
So it’s no surprise that communism almost always led to disaster and essentially never to a prosperous, flourishing society, in contrast to classical liberalism, which much more rarely led to disaster and much more often to flourishing.
Less clearly, sure. I’m mostly warning about complacency about liberals being safe from error just because you can use liberal ideas to criticize bad things liberals have done, rather than defending communism. Certainly lots of communists have, for example, attacked Stalinism in communist terms.
I don’t really understand why liberalism is getting the prefix “classical” here though. The distinction between “classical” and other forms of liberalism, like social liberalism, is more about levels of government support for the poor through the welfare state and just how strong a presumption we should have in favour of market solutions vs government ones, with agreement on secularism, individual human rights, free speech, pluralism, a non-zero sum conception of markets and trade etc. I also think that insofar as “liberals” have an unusually good record, this doesn’t distinguish “liberals” in the narrow sense from other pro-democratic traditions that accept pluralism: i.e. European social democracy on the left, and European Christian democracy, and Anglosphere mainstream conservatism 1965-2015 on the right. If anything classical liberals might have a worse record than many of these groups, because I think classical liberal ideas were used in the 19th century by the British Empire to justify not doing anything about major famines. Of course there is a broad sense of liberal in which all these people are “liberals” too, and they may well have been influenced by classical liberalism. But they aren’t necessarily on the same side as classical liberals in typical policy debates.
I can certainly agree with that. :)
Mostly to reduce the chance of misinterpretation. In the US, “liberal” is often used interchangeably with something like “leftist”, “Democrat”, or “progressive”, and I wanted to make clear that I don’t want any of these connotations. I also wanted to emphasize the core principles of liberalism, and avoid getting bogged down in specific policy debates.
Thank you for the post, which was an interesting read.
If liberalism simply has temporary failings—is this not something of a no true Scotsman? Marxists might (and often do) say similarly that the examples you cite were the result of the leaders not living up to communist principles in practice. It would seem to undermine the idea that these are ‘time-tested bulwarks’ if the principles do, and have, failed periodically.
Similarly, the Nazis may have been anti-enlightenment, but they rose to power in a fairly liberal society, including by exploiting the classically liberal value of free speech to spread propaganda. So it seems a bit difficult definitionally to judge this only by what the Nazis did when in power, rather than the (liberal) conditions that enabled this to happen in the first place.
I recognise I’m oversimplifying things quite a bit here, but I think speaks to the difficulty of drawing neat lines around whether some ideologies are inherently more stable than others—or at least in assuming that the values typically counted within the classical liberal bucket (and it’s a wide bucket) are all inherently anti-fanatical, rather than some being more likely than others to be a source of instabliity over time. (See for example leftist critiques of individual economic liberty to this end.)
Thanks for the comment!
On the No True Scotsman concern
Fair point. But I think there’s a genuine structural asymmetry here. When liberal democracies commit atrocities, they do so by violating their own safeguards—secrecy, executive overreach, circumventing checks and balances. The CIA’s Cold War operations required hiding what they were doing from Congress and the public, precisely because the actions were incompatible with the system’s principles. And liberal democracies contain built-in self-correcting mechanisms: free press, independent courts, elections, public accountability. The US eventually declassified the documents and the atrocities became part of the historical record that we can openly discuss and condemn. This self-correction is a core feature of classical liberalism.
The “not real communism” defense has the opposite problem. Concentrating all power in a vanguard party, suppressing class enemies, and eliminating institutional checks aren’t deviations from Marxism-Leninism, they’re core features. Once you’ve done all that, totalitarian horror isn’t a failure of implementation but a foreseeable consequence of the design. (Also, the CCP is still putting Mao on all their banknotes.)
”Time-tested” doesn’t mean “never fails”, it means better outcomes on average, less catastrophic failures, and mechanisms to recognize and correct its own failures. The right question isn’t “does liberalism guarantee safety?” (nothing does), it’s “which system produces the best outcomes and has the strongest safeguards?” The historical record is pretty clear.
On the Nazis exploiting Weimar democracy
The argument seems to be essentially: “Nazis rose to power in a liberal society, therefore liberalism enabled Nazism.” But this arguably confuses background conditions with causation. The Nazis also exploited elections, but most people still seem quite partial to them.
The actual causal story involves the Treaty of Versailles, hyperinflation, the Great Depression, Weimar’s specific constitutional weaknesses, the mutual radicalization spiral between communists and Nazis, and the political establishment’s catastrophic miscalculation in thinking they could “control” Hitler. Free speech was a minor ingredient, if that.
The fact that safeguards sometimes fail doesn’t mean the safeguards are the problem. Some people die in car crashes even while wearing seatbelts.
The wide classical liberalism bucket
I agree that not all values in the admittedly wide “classical liberal bucket” are equally anti-fanatical. For what it’s worth, I’m quite concerned about extreme wealth inequality, partly because it enables potential oligarchs to subvert the very system of liberal democracy. But the core claim is about the procedural principles—separation of powers, rule of law, universal rights, institutional checks—and those seem pretty robustly anti-fanatical to me.