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.

Fukuyama isthe Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and a faculty member at Stanford's Institute on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. His previous books include Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment and The End of History and the Last Man.

Liberalism and its Discontents