Samuel Moyn, 'Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times' (Yal...

By the middle of the twentieth century, many liberals looked glumly at the world modernity had brought about, with its devastating wars, rising totalitarianism, and permanent nuclear terror. They concluded that, far from offering a solution to these problems, the ideals of the Enlightenment, including emancipation and equality, had instead created them. The historian of political thought Samuel Moyn argues that the liberal intellectuals of the Cold War era--among them Isaiah Berlin, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Karl Popper, Hannah Arendt, Judith Shklar, and Lionel Trilling--transformed liberalism but left a disastrous legacy for our time.

Samuel Moyn is Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.