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Liberalism and Its Discontents
- Narrated by: Christopher Ragland
- Length: 5 hrs and 13 mins
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Publisher's summary
An audiobook about the challenges to liberalism from the right and the left by the bestselling author of The Origins of Political Order.
Classical liberalism is in a state of crisis. Developed in the wake of Europe’s wars over religion and nationalism, liberalism is a system for governing diverse societies, which is grounded in fundamental principles of equality and the rule of law. It emphasizes the rights of individuals to pursue their own forms of happiness free from encroachment by government.
It's no secret that liberalism didn't always live up to its own ideals. In America, many people were denied equality before the law. Who counted as full human beings worthy of universal rights was contested for centuries, and only recently has this circle expanded to include women, African Americans, LGBTQ+ people, and others. Conservatives complain that liberalism empties the common life of meaning. As the renowned political philosopher Francis Fukuyama shows in Liberalism and Its Discontents, the principles of liberalism have also, in recent decades, been pushed to new extremes by both the right and the left: neoliberals made a cult of economic freedom, and progressives focused on identity over human universality as central to their political vision. The result, Fukuyama argues, has been a fracturing of our civil society and an increasing peril to our democracy.
In this clear account of our current political discontents, Fukuyama offers an essential defense of a revitalized liberalism for the twenty-first century.
A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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The world is in turmoil. From India to Turkey and from Poland to the United States, authoritarian populists have seized power. As a result democracy itself may now be at risk. Two core components of liberal democracy - individual rights and the popular will - are at war with each other. As the role of money in politics soared and important issues were taken out of public contestation, a system of "rights without democracy" took hold. Populists who rail against this say they want to return power to the people. But in practice they create a system of "democracy without rights."
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Not worth it
- By DailyShopper on 06-07-18
By: Yascha Mounk
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Suicide of the West
- How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy
- By: Jonah Goldberg
- Narrated by: Jonah Goldberg
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Only once in the last 250,000 years have humans stumbled upon a way to lift ourselves out of the endless cycle of poverty, hunger, and war that defines most of history. If democracy, individualism, and the free market were humankind’s destiny, they should have appeared and taken hold a bit earlier in the evolutionary record. The emergence of freedom and prosperity was nothing short of a miracle.
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Put some gratitude in your attitude
- By Amazon Customer on 04-25-18
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Capitalism
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The foundations of capitalism are being battered by a flood of altruism, which is the cause of the modern world's collapse. This was the view of Ayn Rand, a view so radically opposed to prevailing attitudes that it constituted a major philosophic revolution. In this series of essays, she presented her stand on the persecution of big business, the causes of war, the default of conservatism, and the evils of altruism.
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Ashame this is not taught in our
- By Karen on 08-18-07
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A manifesto for deep and radical change, Creating Freedom explores the limits placed on freedom by human nature and society. It explodes myths, calling for a profound transformation in the way we think about democracy, equality, and our own identities.
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The BEST book, I've listened to in a long time
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The Idea of America
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The preeminent historian of the American Revolution explains why it remains the most significant event in our history
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Sophisticated analyses
- By Roger on 01-25-12
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The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution
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For most of Western history, Sitaraman argues, constitutional thinkers assumed economic inequality was inevitable and inescapable - and they designed governments to prevent class divisions from spilling over into class warfare. The American Constitution is different. Compared to Europe and the ancient world, America was a society of almost unprecedented economic equality, and the founding generation saw this equality as essential for the preservation of America's republic.
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Very well done
- By JLyman on 08-27-17
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A Time to Build
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Americans are living through a social crisis. Our politics is polarized and bitterly divided. Culture wars rage on campus, in the media, social media, and other arenas of our common life. And for too many Americans, alienation can descend into despair, weakening families and communities and even driving an explosion of opioid abuse. Left and right alike have responded with populist anger at our institutions, and use only metaphors of destruction to describe the path forward: cleaning house, draining swamps. But, as Yuval Levin argues, this is a misguided prescription.
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Incisive and Illuminating
- By Jakob on 01-26-23
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Right Here, Right Now
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The world is in flux. Disruptive technologies, ideas, and politicians are challenging business models, norms, and political conventions everywhere. How we, as leaders in business and politics, choose to respond matters greatly. Right Here, Right Now sets out a pragmatic, forward-looking vision for leaders in business and politics by analyzing how economic, social, and public policy trends - including globalized movements of capital, goods, and services, and labor - have affected our economies, communities, and governments.
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Excellent book on Politics for Canadians AND Americans
- By John Fernandes on 10-19-18
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The Socialist Temptation
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Just 30 years ago, socialism seemed utterly discredited. An economic, moral, and political failure, socialism had rightly been thrown on the ash heap of history after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Unfortunately, bad ideas never truly go away — and socialism has come back with a vengeance. A generation of young people who don’t remember the misery that socialism inflicted on Russia and Eastern Europe is embracing it all over again.
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Full Of Important Insights
- By Ralph Alderson on 12-17-20
By: Iain Murray
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Where do you get your values and sensibilities from? If you grew up in a Western democracy, the answer is probably liberalism. Conservatives are right about one thing: liberalism is the ideology of our times, as omnipresent as religion once was. Yet, as Alexandre Lefebvre argues in Liberalism as a Way of Life, many of us are liberal without fully realizing it—or grasping what it means.
What listeners say about Liberalism and Its Discontents
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- XiaoHu
- 05-21-22
A defense of liberalism
The author defends liberal traditions believed to be the human destiny in his "The End of History and the Last Man" published 30 years ago in 1992 at the eve of collapse of the Soviet empire. It lays out a strong argument of liberalism against the attack from the far right-- mainly Neoliberalism on economics, white nationalists on politics, and Evangelical conservatives on culture. It also presents a critique on the critical theory that has served as the intellectual foundation for identity politics of the progressive left challenging the liberal order's failures to protect equality. Though the threats to liberal democracies are from both the far right and extreme left, the threats from the former are clearly more immediate and direct. An example is Trump's and his hard-core nationalism followers' challenge of the very heart of the liberal principles of equality, diversity, and tolerance. The book is full of information and references, useful for both students of politics and the general audience. The title emulates Sigmund Freud's classics "Civilization and Its Discontents".
The idea in the book that Eastern spirituality, tied by the author to the movement of individual actualization in the west, somehow contributes to extremity of self identity is misunderstanding if not completely nonsense. Cultivating consciousness in the eastern philosophical tradition is for achieving a non-self (no Ego) which, to a large extent, can contribute to collectiveness and public spirit.
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- Bill
- 08-31-22
Reading to think
One reason I read is to stimulate my thinking. Deeper is good. Broader is good. A different “lens” is good. Having listened to what Fukuyama has to say on liberalism, I am encouraged to buy the hard copy of his book and to encourage my grown sons to read it so I can obtain their reactions and conclusions and to refine my own.
This is an excellent book. Thoughtful and accessible.
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- Dimitrios
- 12-20-22
A little biased but good in general
A little biased but not much for the day we live in. Unfortunately a classical liberal is hard to find nowadays
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- Kindle Customer
- 10-25-22
An important voice at the table...
Fukuyama articulates and correlates each of the big, over-arching intersections where political conflicts are occuring in the U.S. He does so by revisiting the founding tenets of liberalism while staying dispassionate and clearly apart from any theory, in particular dialogues around critical theories, that in his estimation are too conditional, group-focused, and exacting in their causal analyses to have any import what-so-ever to adequately address the broader global effects of neo-liberal philosophy. This, in my humble assessment, ultimately is Fukuyama's myopia as he dismisses these out-group proposals as little more than "critical stories" better suited for the individual to seek repair through litigation than serious socio-economic group/class critique. With such considerations dismissed, he is freed to offer a set of ideas for how these conflicts could be addressed or at the least attenuated if our increasingly polarized and self-centered aspirations are not moored to some common cultural and political anchor. This is a necessary and important analysis, that over time, would ultimately be required to acknowledge its own patriarchal underpinning and not ignore the perspectives provided by the same passionate proponents of critical theory who have been traditionally marginalized and excluded from this discussion of a shared "commons,".
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- DMax
- 09-29-22
For those who haven’t given up yet.
Important and timely, the author offers critical correctives to the unhinged extremes of the political Left and Right. Offers the rest of us with the patriotic, economic, historical, and philosophical underpinnings to support the Classical Liberal project, and invites us to reinforce the freedoms and responsibilities inherent thereto.
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- Experienced Buyer
- 09-16-23
Intellectually Honest
This book aims at deconstructing and criticizing radical views from the left and right. He seems to redefine classic liberalism as a much more calibrated version of what is generally perceived (e.g. Neoliberalism).
Not a book that will bring crowds to the street on passionate support of Fukuyama's ideology; but one that should!
Radically centrist and intellectually calibrated.
This book definitively deserves to be read by anyone who want to understand the polarized world we live in today.
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- Dena L. Wiederkehr
- 04-18-23
Another fantastic work
Dr. Fukuyama remains one our most important political scholars and thinkers. I heartily recommend this book to anyone who wants a nonpartisan view of modern politics.
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- Andrew
- 03-31-23
Unbiased. Pragmatic. Necessary.
This is a fantastic framing of the current global political landscape of the Western world. What I came away with was not just how important it is to strike a better balance through policy, but what that rebalancing act would involve. Fantastic book!
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- Gene Brown
- 05-22-22
Fukyama wins again.
I enjoy Fukyama. after his Origins series his understanding of political theory makes sense of our complex world.
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- Paul A. Hinenburg
- 08-31-24
Clarity considering
Considering the muddle we are in this work, clarifies the battlefield quite a bit rather than slinging more mud.
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