Chapter 1: What is shaping the West?

[Note to readers: I'm putting together a longer summary of my political argument in the form of an e-booklet. This is the first instalment. Eventually there will be a single link to the entire booklet, divided into separate chapters. I apologise if you've come across the material before, but it's useful for new readers if it's put together in a complete and coherent form.]

What has brought us to the way we are now? What can explain the rapid changes in Western societies?

To answer these questions you need to know the world view of the Western political class. It is the belief system shared by the Western political class which determines what is thought to be moral and legitimate, which then, over time, drives society in a particular direction.

But what orthodox view is shared by nearly all members of this class?


Liberalism as orthodoxy

The Western political class shares a commitment to a liberal political philosophy. There are very few politicians, academics, writers or intellectuals whose beliefs are not based on an underlying liberalism.

That’s why an American professor of politics, Steven Kautz, is able to state that,

The political philosophy of liberalism ... is in some sense our political philosophy: we are somehow all liberals. [1]

The political writer James Kalb observes that,

Liberalism so surrounds us that it is hard to imagine an alternative. Even those who see difficulties with it almost never reject it fundamentally, but attempt to reinvent it in some way or another. [2]

Professor Appiah of Princeton University describes liberalism as encompassing,

... nearly all members of nearly all of the mainstream political parties in Europe and North America. [3]

Alasdair MacIntyre, a philosophy professor at the University of Notre Dame, tells us that,

Contemporary debates within modern political systems are almost exclusively between conservative liberals, liberal liberals, and radical liberals. There is little place in such political systems for the criticism of the system itself, that is, for putting liberalism in question. [4]

Another prominent political philosopher, Professor John Gray, believes that,

We are all liberals nowadays ... It sometimes seems as if the spectrum of ideas in political life ranges from the sovereign consumer of the neo-liberal right to the sovereign chooser of the egalitarian left. [5]

And Professor John Schwarzmantel, who teaches politics at the University of Leeds, holds that,

Contemporary liberal-democracy is an ideological society, where a particular version of liberalism prevails ... [which] has been able to ... capture if not public enthusiasm then at least acceptance as ‘the only game in town’. This then gives rise to a very impoverished spectrum of ideological and political debate ... [6]

Next chapter: Autonomy theory


[1] Steven Kautz, Liberalism & Community (New York: Cornell University Press, 1997), 28.

[2] James Kalb, The Tyranny of Liberalism (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2008), x.

[3] Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), xi.

[4] Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (University of Notre Dame Press, 1998).

[5] John Gray, “What liberalism cannot do,” New Statesman, 20 September 1996, 18.

[6] John Schwarzmantel, “Hegemony and Contestation in Post-ideological Society,” Paper presented at the ECPR Joint Sessions of Workshops, Uppsala, 13-17 April 2004.