There are words we know, and there are words we argue about, working our way to a shared meaning. And then there is that unique category of terms that, once they appear, stubbornly refuse to succumb ...

I assume the title of Deirdre N. McCloskey’s “Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All” (Yale, 384 pages, $28) is meant as a riposte to the ...

In today's post, I will present a general theory of liberalism and conservatism that incorporates modern social science research. I will begin with examples of liberal and conservative attitudes in ...

“Don’t mention the word ‘liberalism,’ ” the talk-show host says to the guy who’s written a book on it. “Liberalism,” he explains, might mean Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to his suspicious audience ...

A conversation with Samuel Moyn about the Cold War’s profound and negative influence on the liberal worldview and his new book, Liberalism Against Itself. Before the First World War, to be a liberal ...

Cold War liberalism was a catastrophe—for liberalism. This distinct body of liberal thought says that freedom comes first, that the enemies of liberty are the first priority to confront and contain in ...

“Liberalism made the modern world, but the modern world is turning against it,” an article in The Economist lamented last year, on the occasion of the magazine’s hundred-and-seventy-fifth anniversary.

Meditating on the first and most simple operations of the human soul, I believe that I perceive in it two principles that are prior to reason, of which one makes us ardently interested in our ...

Arguably no contemporary scholar has thought more deeply about how liberalism as a political tradition and philosophy has been historically and structurally biased towards the socioeconomic interests ...

Mr. Acemoglu, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2024. With President Trump back in the White House, it should be ...

“The intellectuals cast a veil over the dictatorial character of bourgeois democracy not least by presenting democracy as the absolute opposite of fascism, not as just another natural phase of it ...