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1 " Even though individualism may be historically contingent, it has become so deeply part of the way that modern people understand themselves that it is hard to see how it gets walked back. Modern market economies depend heavily on flexibility, labor mobility, and innovation. If transactions need to take place within limited cultural boundaries, the size of markets and the kind of innovation that comes from cultural diversity will necessarily be limited. Individualism is not a fixed cultural characteristic of Western culture as alleged by certain versions of critical theory. It is a by-product of socioeconomic modernization that gradually takes place across different societies. "
― Francis Fukuyama , Liberalism and Its Discontents
2 " The postmodernist critique of liberalism and its associated cognitive methods has now drifted over to the right. White nationalist groups today regard themselves as a beleaguered identity group. During the Covid epidemic, a much broader group of conservatives around the world used the same conspiratorial critique of modern natural science that had been pioneered by critical theory and the left. "
3 " The substantive conservative critique of liberalism—that liberal societies provide no strong common moral horizon around which community can be built—is true enough. This is indeed a feature and not a bug of liberalism. The question for conservatives is whether there is a realistic way to roll back the secularism of contemporary liberal societies and reimpose a thicker moral order. "
4 " The self-care and wellness movements are simply contemporary manifestations of Rousseau’s vision of the “plenitude” of the inner self. That self is good, and its recovery is the original fount of human happiness. But it has been polluted by an outer society that feeds us unhealthy foods full of pesticides and artificial flavors, that sets goals and expectations that build anxiety and self-doubt, and by competitive urges that undermine our self-esteem. "
5 " Liberal individualism does not preclude or deny human sociability; it simply means that most social engagements in a liberal society will ideally be voluntary. You can join with other people, but what groups you join are, to the maximum extent possible, a matter of personal choice. "
6 " Liberalism was one of the early driving forces of the French Revolution, and was initially an ally of democratic forces that wanted to expand political participation beyond the narrow circle of upper- and middle-class elites. The partisans of equality, however, broke with the partisans of liberty, and created a revolutionary dictatorship that ultimately gave way to the new empire under Napoleon. The latter, nonetheless, played a critical role in spreading liberalism in the form of law—the Code Napoléon—to the far corners of Europe. This then became the anchor for a liberal rule of law on the Continent. "
7 " an idea that became foundational in modern thought, that we have deeply hidden inner natures that are smothered by the layers of social rules imposed on us by the society surrounding us. Autonomy for him meant recovery of that authentic inner self, and escape from the social rules that imprisoned it. "
8 " Kant picked up on Rousseau’s idea of perfectibility, and turned it into the core of his moral philosophy. At the beginning of the Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, he says that the only thing that is unconditionally good is a good will, and that the capacity to make moral choices is what makes us distinctively human. Human beings are ends in themselves and should never be treated as a means to other ends. "
9 " an autonomous self that has been detached from all prior loyalties and commitments “is not to conceive of an ideally free and rational agent, but to imagine a person wholly without character, without moral depth”: "
