Liberalism on the Defensive

The apparent dominance of liberal-democratic ideas in the 1920s was replaced in the following decade by explicitly anti-liberal and anti-democratic political trends. Nevertheless, liberalism retained some of its intellectual potential: “national liberalism” continued the pre-1918 projects of national emancipation and modernization incorporating also the feminist agenda; “bourgeois liberalism” focused on the defense of the political, social, and economic position of the bourgeoisie; and “economic liberalism” centered on the issue of free markets, while criticizing state involvement. Cultural modernism emerged as an influential intellectual current, and in the 1930s the subculture of “progressivist modernism” also represented liberal values, even though it was ill-disposed toward economic liberalism. The period also saw the reconfiguration of feminism. Lastly, East Central European critiques of totalitarianism developed under the pressure of the proximity of Soviet Russia, fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany. They singled out the dark aspects of the “total state,” dehumanization, and the cult of violence, often in a comparative way.