ON LIBERALISM

The Lament for Icarus by Herbert Draper, 1898

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Liberalism is not a neutral inheritance of Western political development; it is the political expression of a deeper intellectual disease. Its roots lie in Rationalism, the Enlightenment habit of treating reason not as a tool ordered toward truth, but as a sovereign power before which all realities must justify themselves or be dismissed as superstition. Once reason was detached from metaphysics, tradition, and the invisible goods that bind civilizations together, it did not merely illuminate the world. It flattened it.

Rationalism began as a method suited to limited domains. Logic, calculation, and empirical verification work admirably in engineering, physics, and the manipulation of inert matter. But once this instrumental reason was promoted into a total worldview, it became corrosive. What could not be measured, predicted, or mechanized was declared either illusory or morally suspect. Spirit became embarrassment. Mystery became fraud. History became a morality tale of “progress.” Reason, once a servant, crowned itself king, and promptly committed suicide by reducing itself to utility. Pragmatism was the end point: truth as what works, meaning as what satisfies, reason as an algorithm for material success.

In this intellectual climate, the human person was gradually reimagined as a machine. Descartes turned animals into automata; later thinkers completed the job by doing the same to man. Organisms were reduced to chemical processes, societies to contracts, and civilizations to economic systems. The State, once understood as a living political organism with memory, authority, and destiny, was reconceived as a voluntary association of individuals pursuing private ends. Anything “superpersonal” vanished from view because it could not be weighed or quantified.

Liberalism is simply Rationalism translated into politics. It denies the organic reality of the State and replaces it with a fiction: society as a collection of free individuals bound only by consent. From this premise follows its entire moral universe. The highest good becomes individual happiness, usually understood in crude, material terms. Jeremy Bentham’s famous formula merely collectivized selfishness, baptizing it as the “greatest happiness of the greatest number.” It is the morality of the herd, elevated into a philosophy.

Historically, liberalism has survived only by attaching itself parasitically to other forces.

Because liberal reason is quantitative rather than qualitative, it substitutes averages for excellence and statistics for judgment. “Man” becomes an abstraction defined by consumption: food, shelter, leisure, and comfort. Sacrifice for invisible goods—honor, faith, homeland, destiny—appears irrational, even immoral. Politics, which at times demands blood and obedience, becomes suspect. Economics, which promises comfort and growth, is embraced as the true science of human affairs.

Here liberalism finds its twin poles: economics and social ethics. Ethics, emptied of metaphysical grounding, becomes a set of behavioral norms designed to keep the economic machine running smoothly. Freedom, the liberal slogan, is not the freedom to pursue excellence or assume responsibility, but freedom from authority. The State is recast as coercion; the Church as spiritual oppression. Society is to be “free,” meaning uncommanded, unmanaged, and ultimately unformed.

Every political concept is transvalued accordingly. War becomes competition or ideological disagreement. Power becomes regulation or propaganda. States become markets with flags. The will to rule is replaced by programs, metrics, and procedural norms. Liberalism congratulates itself on being humane while presiding over a world increasingly incapable of decisive action.

Despite its self-image, liberalism is not constructive. It builds nothing. It dissolves. It can only critique inherited authorities—throne, altar, hierarchy—while offering no organic substitute. The polarity between rulers and ruled, leaders and led, is not abolished; it is merely obscured. When authority is denied legitimate form, it reappears illegitimately, often in more brutal guises.

Historically, liberalism has survived only by attaching itself parasitically to other forces. It has allied with democracy when useful, despite democracy’s authoritarian tendencies in practice. It has flirted with socialism, anarchism, and even Bolshevism, despite their demands for sacrifice and coercion that liberal theory supposedly rejects. In moments of crisis, liberalism as such disappears. Liberals choose sides, revealing that their doctrine of neutrality is a fiction.

Because liberal anthropology assumes the essential goodness and harmony of human nature, it insists that men should be left alone. But this belief collapses under even casual observation. Locks, prisons, police, and borders exist for a reason. Looting follows disaster with predictable regularity. Political realism begins with facts, not wishes. Liberalism begins with wishes and treats facts as regrettable interruptions.

The liberal insistence on the autonomy of spheres—art, science, economics, law—produces further decay. Art becomes self-referential decadence. Morality becomes social etiquette. Law becomes a weapon for the strong against the weak, sanctifying economic power under the banner of “neutral rules.” Economics, detached from political authority, permits individuals to devastate land, communities, and nations while appealing piously to legality. Wealth accumulates without responsibility, power without accountability.

This is the great asymmetry liberalism refuses to confront: authority entails responsibility, but private power does not. The statesman is bound to history, memory, and judgment. The financier is anonymous, mobile, and unrooted. Liberalism’s claim that power corrupts is only half true. It is unaccountable wealth that corrodes most thoroughly, precisely because it is shielded from higher obligation.

It is no accident that the Age of Reason presided over unprecedented slaughter.

The result is a civilization governed by law without justice, markets without limits, ethics without transcendence, and freedom without form. Liberalism’s ultimate product is atomization: the erosion not only of State authority, but of family, custom, and inherited roles. Marriage becomes optional, hierarchy offensive, obligation suspect. What remains is the isolated individual, legally protected, spiritually empty, and politically impotent.

Liberalism calls this peace. History calls it weakness.

It is no accident that the Age of Reason presided over unprecedented slaughter. By moralizing politics while denying power, liberalism transformed wars into crusades and treaties into instruments of humiliation. It stripped conflict of honor while retaining its brutality. By pretending politics could be abolished, it ushered in an age of absolute politics, fought in the name of humanity itself.

Against this stands an older tradition of political thought—realist, historical, unsentimental—that understands power as an enduring fact of human existence. Machiavelli, Hobbes, Hegel, de Maistre, and others were not lovers of cruelty, but students of reality. They knew that denying conflict does not end it; it merely blinds those unprepared to face it.

Liberalism, in the end, is an evasion. It flees from destiny into comfort, from authority into procedure, from responsibility into rights. It wants history without tragedy, politics without command, life without sacrifice. But history is not a dinner party, and civilizations are not sustained by comfort. The world liberalism imagines cannot exist for long, because it is built on the denial of the very forces that move human affairs.

That is why liberalism always collapses—not from external attack alone, but from internal exhaustion. It dissolves the structures that give it shelter and then wonders why the storm arrives.

Liberalism is not the culmination of Western civilization. It is its interlude of forgetfulness.