Liberal: spoken in a certain tone, heard more and more often lately, it summons up permissiveness, materialism, rootlessness, skepticism, relativism run rampant. How has liberalism, the grand democratic ideal, come to be a dirty word? This hook shows us what antiliberalism means in the modern world--where it comes from, whom it serves, and why it speaks with such a forceful, if everchanging, voice.

In the past, in a battle pitting one offspring of eighteenth-century rationalism against another, Marxism has been liberalism's best known and most vociferous opponent. But with the fall of communism, the voices of ethnic particularism, communitarianism, and religious fundamentalism--a tradition Holmes traces to Joseph de Maistre--have become louder in rejection of the Enlightenment, failing to distinguish between the descendants of Karl Marx and Adam Smith. Stephen Holmes uses the tools of the political theorist and the intellectual historian to expose the philosophical underpinnings of antiliberalism in its nonmarxist guise. Examining the works of some of liberalism's severest critics--including Maistre, Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and Alasdair Maclntyre--Holmes provides, in effect, a reader's guide to antiliberal culture, in all its colorful and often seductive, however nefarious, variety. As much a mindset as a theory, as much a sensibility as an argument, antiliberalism appears here in its diverse efforts to pit "spiritual truths" and "communal bonds" against a perceived cultural decay and moral disintegration. This corrosion of the social fabric--rather than the separation of powers, competitive elections, a free press, religious tolerance, public budgets, and judicial controls on the police--is what the antiliberal forces see as the core of liberal politics. Against this picture, Holmes outlines the classical liberal arguments most often misrepresented by the enemies of liberalism and most essential to the future of democracy.

Constructive as well as critical, this book helps us see what liberalism is and must be, and why it must and always will engender deep misgivings along with passionate commitment.

Stephen Holmes:Walter E. Meyer Professor of Law.

Courses:

Federalist Papers

Legal Change After Communism (year)

Law and Security Colloquium

Education:

B.A., Denison University, 1969

M.A., Yale University, 1974

M. Phil., Yale University, 1975

Ph.D., Yale University, 1976

Representative Publications

"Plato’s Dogs: Reflections on the University After 9/11," in To Restore American Democracy: Political Education and the Modern University (Robert E. Calvert, ed., Rowman & Littlefield, 2006)

"Al Qaeda, September 11, 2001," in Making Sense of Suicide Missions (Diego Gambetta , ed., Oxford University Press, 2005)

"Review of Geoffrey Stone, Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism," The New Republic, Feb. 28, 2005, at 31.

"Review of Paul Berman, Power and the Idealists: Or, the Passion of Joschka Fischer (Softskull Press, 2005); and David Rieff, At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention (Simon & Schuster, 2005)," The Nation , Nov. 14, 2005, at 29.

The Cost of Rights: Why Liberty Depends on Taxes (Norton, 1998) (with Cass R. Sunstein)

Passions and Constraint: On the Theory of Liberal Democracy (University of Chicago Press, 1995)

The Anatomy of Antiliberalism (Harvard University Press, 1993)

Benjamin Constant and the Making of Modern Liberalism (Yale University Press, 1984)

Research

Defense Against Transnational Terrorism Within the Bounds of Liberal Constitutionalism

The History of European Liberalism and the Disappointments of Democracy and Economic Liberalization After Communism

Appointments

Walter E. Meyer Professor of Law, 2003

Professor of Law, 1997

Other Appointments

Professor of Politics, Princeton University, 1997

Professor of Political Science and Law, University of Chicago Law School, 1989