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April 29, 2007
Some good questions posed by Wendy Brown in her Politics Out of History:
What is the effect on liberalism of these transformations in its historical and global location and historical self-understanding? What happens to liberalism's organizing terms and legitimacy when its boundary terms change--when its constitutive past and future, as well as its constitutive others, lose their definitive difference from liberalism's present and identity? What is (nineteenth-century) liberal justice without a narrative of progress that situates it between an inegalitarian and unemancipated ancien régime and the fulfilled promise of universal personhood and rights-based freedom and equality? What is (twentieth-century) liberal democracy without communism as its dark opposite? What is liberalism out of these histories, indeed out of history as we have known it, which is to say, out of a history marked by the periodicity of this particular past-present-future and by the temporality of progressivism?
If liberalism's narratives are destabilized or broken and its foundations are cracked and eroded, then what kinds of politics results? Well we have the return of righteous moralism and the anti-intellectualism of the religious Right into contemporary political discourse. Presumably, after modernity, we have a postfoundational liberalism that is just another western political tradition.
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