A Liberal World Order in Crisis: Choosing Between Imposition and Restraint. By Georg Sørensen. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011. 218p. $39.95.

Extract

This volume's provocative title recalls a substantial early-twentieth-century literature, spawned by interwar economic instability and the ascent of seemingly thriving authoritarian systems (e.g., fascism and Stalinism), which struggled to explain the fragility of liberal political and economic ideals both at home and abroad. Taking right-wing (e.g., Carl Schmitt's Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy [1928]) as well as left-wing (e.g., Harold Laski's Democracy in Crisis [1931]) forms, that genre combined insights from the latest social scientific scholarship with perceptive and oftentimes prescient political observations. Although we now know that it too often understated liberalism's potential for reform and renewal, abandoning sound analysis for apocalyptic aperçus, that literature sometimes creatively identified liberalism's own internal contradictions as the source of what was then frequently described as “the crisis of our times.”