Political and Legal
Liberalism and Its Discontents by francis fukuyama. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022, 192 pp.
In this learned work, Fukuyama shows that liberalism’s great advantage over rival ideologies in the modern era has been its ability to create the political conditions that allow for the coexistence of an array of hallowed but often contradictory values: liberty, equality, individualism, and community. He argues that liberalism is now being challenged from both the right and the left, as older compromises over class and culture have broken down. Progressives decry liberalism as neoliberalism, as manifest in ruinous financial crises and growing inequality. Conservatives point to the elevation of personal autonomy and identity politics as a threat to traditional religious and cultural beliefs. According to Fukuyama, the extreme versions of these critiques will lead not to reform, compromise, and a rebalancing of principles but to a deeply divisive postliberal future. Right-wing forces may push their societies in the direction of authoritarianism, while those on the left will seek a more systemic redistribution of wealth and power, as well as the greater formal recognition of group, rather than individual, rights. Fukuyama sees the right-wing threats to liberalism as much more immediate and existential. But if liberalism is to survive, partisans across the political spectrum will need to find new grand compromises, rediscovering and forging national traditions of universal civic rights and shared political community.
The Age of the Strongman: How the Cult of the Leader Threatens Democracy Around the World by gideon rachman. Other Press, 2022, 288 pp.
Rachman provides one of the most vivid and incisive accounts yet of the new authoritarianism that has swept the world. In Brazil, China, Hungary, India, the Philippines, Poland, Russia, Turkey, and the United States, a diverse cohort of would-be authoritarian leaders have emerged, each seeking to establish personalistic forms of one-man rule by serving up political cocktails of fear, grievance, nationalism, and reactionary populism. What Rachman finds most interesting is that the strongman model of rule has grown in both democratic and autocratic systems. From former U.S. President Donald Trump
to Russian President Vladimir Putin, strongman leaders cement their hold on power through a cult of personality, contempt for the rule of law, and populist attacks on the elite establishment and the liberal consensus of the 1990s. In country after country, strongman leaders appeal to people “left behind” in rural areas and small towns, invoking nostalgia for a lost glorious past. Rachman argues that the strongman ethos is deeply rooted in global economic and technological changes and in the failures of and disillusionment with liberal democracy. But strongmen have their own weaknesses: personalistic rule cannot last forever, and dictators are rarely able to deliver what they promise.
Rules: A Short History of
What We Live By by lorraine daston. Princeton University Press, 2022, 384 pp.
In this intimidatingly erudite tour de force, Daston offers a sweeping global history of the rise and evolution of rules in societies and civilizations. Most of what Daston uncovers is hidden in plain sight. Rules emerged and proliferated everywhere to support and constrain human activity, ranging from the simple (rules for driving, tipping in a restaurant, and when to leave a dinner party) to the intricate and world-spanning (rules for managing the global economy, fighting wars, and pursuing scientific research). Daston’s history suggests that rules have proliferated in the last two millennia, creating a “cat’s cradle of complexity almost as complex as culture itself.” She argues that since Greco-Roman antiquity, rules have taken three forms: tools of measurement and calculation, models or paradigms, and laws. Using these categories, the book ranges omnivorously across monastic orders, cookbooks, mechanical calculations, military manuals, and legal treaties. Daston traces an arc of development from the ancient era to modern times that moves from a world of high variability and unpredictability to a more predictable and knowable world. But there is no inexorable logic of modernity at work in the evolution of rules; in the past and the present, rules can be used both to liberate and to oppress.
Where the Evidence Leads: A Realistic Strategy for Peace and Human Security by robert c. johansen. Oxford University Press, 2021, 440 pp.
In this ambitious and masterful study, Johansen advances a set of sweeping principles and strategies for peace-building and security in the twenty-first century. Driving the book is a sustained critique of realist-inspired U.S. foreign policy, which may have served U.S. interests during the Cold War but which is now completely incapable of grappling with today’s planetary threats and dangers. Johansen hopes for a paradigm shift in Washington’s global security strategy, one that recognizes that the United States must reckon with the declining utility of war, the rise of nonstate actors, the proliferation of transnational problems such as climate change, and the growth of world poverty and desolation. If this new vision is to take hold, activists and transnational social movements will need to lead the way. Johansen’s eloquent appeal for new thinking is inspired by cosmopolitanism and deep moral conviction, but his eye
remains firmly fixed on how policymakers in the real world can shift their priorities to move the United States and the rest of the world closer to the realization of unifying human ideals.
The Downfall of the American Order? edited by peter j. katzenstein and jonathan kirshner. Cornell University Press, 2022, 246 pp.
This engaging collection of essays brings distinguished scholars of political economy together to explore the changing faces of economic liberalism within the U.S.-led postwar international order. Kirshner considers the role of Keynesian ideas in the postwar efforts to find a “third way” between unfettered markets and planned economies. Mark Blyth offers a revisionist account of the establishment of the initial U.S.-led order between World War II and the 1970s, stressing not the farsighted power of planners in Washington but accidents and improvisations driven by Cold War imperatives. Rawi Abdelal makes the provocative argument that the neoliberalism that came to the fore in the 1980s was the work of European thinkers, not American ones, and that it ushered in growth and prosperity in the global South even as it generated economic inequality and financial instability in the North. Katzenstein offers trenchant observations on the complexity and contingency of the evolution of liberalism in all its varieties across the last century. The value of this volume is not in a shared judgment about the future of the U.S.-led international order but in the richness of the debate about how orders, liberal and otherwise, are shaped and reshaped.