This book comes from a man on the front lines, fighting daily battles with liberals in the courts of law and public opinion. It challenges conservatives to speak out with forceful clarity on America's big issues--race relations, government's role in our lives, political correctness, the media, immigration, environment, the runaway court system and its impact on freedom.

This interdisciplinary study on liberalism explores the history of liberal thought in philosophy, the social sciences, cultural theory, and American political theory. The discussion focuses on an internal conflict between cultural and political values that favor political elitism and doctrines that favor some form of political democracy. Telling the story of the liberal elite and its ambivalent relationship to democracy, Hollingers show why the decline of liberalism does not pave the way for democratic participation. Addressing the current political and cultural climate, Hollinger outlines a postmodern view of democracy.

Political correctness, idealizing the oppressed, and an affinity for authoritarian and charismatic leaders are all parts of what Ellis calls "the dark side of the left."

Publisher Description

In this definitive historical investigation, Italian author and philosopher Domenico Losurdo argues that from the outset liberalism, as a philosophical position and ideology, has been bound up with the most illiberal of policies: slavery, colonialism, genocide, racism and snobbery. Narrating an intellectual history running from the eighteenth through to the twentieth centuries, Losurdo examines the thought of preeminent liberal writers such as Locke, Burke, Tocqueville, Constant, Bentham, and Sieys, revealing the inner contradictions of an intellectual position that has exercised a formative influence on today's politics. Among the dominant strains of liberalism, he discerns the counter-currents of more radical positions, lost in the constitution of the modern world order.

A timely defense of liberalism that draws vital lessons from its greatest midcentury proponents Today, liberalism faces threats from across the political spectrum. While right-wing populists and leftist purists righteously violate liberal norms, theorists of liberalism seem to have little to say. In Liberalism in Dark Times, Joshua Cherniss issues a rousing defense of the liberal tradition, drawing on a neglected strand of liberal thought. Assaults on liberalism—a political order characterized by limits on political power and respect for individual rights—are nothing new. Early in the twentieth century, democracy was under attack around the world, with one country after another succumbing to dictatorship. While many intellectuals dismissed liberalism as outdated, unrealistic, or unworthy, a handful of writers defended and reinvigorated the liberal ideal, including Max Weber, Raymond Aron, Albert Camus, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Isaiah Berlin—each of whom is given a compelling new assessment here. Building on the work of these thinkers, Cherniss urges us to imagine liberalism not as a set of policies but as a temperament or disposition—one marked by openness to complexity, willingness to acknowledge uncertainty, tolerance for difference, and resistance to ruthlessness. In the face of rising political fanaticism, he persuasively argues for the continuing importance of this liberal ethos.

One of Europe’s leading intellectual historians deconstructs the dark side of liberalism, sifting through 3 centuries of liberal writings by John Locke, Alexis de Tocqueville, and others. In this definitive historical investigation, Italian author and philosopher Domenico Losurdo argues that from the outset liberalism, as a philosophical position and ideology, has been bound up with the most illiberal of policies: slavery, colonialism, genocide, racism and snobbery. Narrating an intellectual history running from the eighteenth through to the twentieth centuries, Losurdo examines the thought of preeminent liberal writers such as Locke, Burke, Tocqueville, Constant, Bentham, and Sieyès, revealing the inner contradictions of an intellectual position that has exercised a formative influence on today’s politics. Among the dominant strains of liberalism, he discerns the counter-currents of more radical positions, lost in the constitution of the modern world order.