Few words today are as disputed as the meaning of the word “liberalism.” One need only consider the different adjectives attached to liberal in popular and scholarly discourse: “modern liberal,” “left liberal,” “classical liberal,” “social liberal,” “ordo liberal,” “conservative liberal,” etc. All these qualifiers are indicative of profound differences in emphasis, priorities, and principles between those who regard themselves as liberals. At times, one wonders if there is anything that, for example, a conservative liberal like Alexis de Tocqueville has in common with a left liberal like John Rawls.

One way of understanding these differences is to consider what a given person wants to achieve. Tocqueville, for example, wanted to reconcile the freedoms bequeathed by the French Revolution with the moral order that he believed was derived from religion. Rawls’s work, by contrast, was underpinned by strong egalitarian commitments, especially shaped by a decidedly left-leaning conception of social justice.

A different way to think about the variants of liberalism is through the lens of fear. That is the perspective through which Alan S. Kahan, professor of British Civilization at the Université Paris-Saclay, approaches liberalism. He begins his new book, Freedom from Fear: An Incomplete History of Liberalism, by stating that

[l]iberalism is the search for a society in which no one need be afraid. Freedom from fear is the most basic freedom: if we are afraid, we are not free. This insight is the foundation of liberalism. To proclaim our inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is simply an eloquent way of stating the not-so-exalted wish to live without fear (p. 3).

Fear is part of the human condition. Some fear failure. Others fear responsibility. Some fear everyone else. Kahan acknowledges the impossibility of somehow abolishing fear from life. His point is that liberalism is “about building a society in which we need not fear other people” (p. 3), whether individually or as groups. Most fundamentally, Kahan states, liberalism is opposed to the tyranny of the sovereign, whether the sovereign is an unaccountable religious or secular authority or the people writ large. To that extent, those who self-identify as liberal are (whatever their qualifying adjective) especially wary of arbitrary power.

From this it follows that “securing the social and political conditions necessary to give people a feeling of security—the feeling that their person and their community are free—is the historical core of liberalism” (p. 4). The work of reducing fear is thus what drives the positive agenda pursued by liberals. That, for Kahan, is how we can grasp the emergence of different versions of liberalism.

There is much to be said for this thesis, especially as Kahan does not present it in dogmatic terms. He stresses that liberalism is also “a party of hopes” orientated around three pillars of liberal thought and action: “freedom, markets, and morals, or, to put it another way, politics, economics, and religion or morality” (p. 13). Expressed through protocols and institutions like constitutionalism, private property, rule of law, free markets, and “religious and moral incentives” (p. 13), these pillars furnish liberals with agendas that, they hold, will improve the political, economic, and social order.

This is the paradigm that Kahan applies to explain the different priorities pursued by different liberals, what they believe we should fear, and why liberals are often at loggerheads with each other. Some liberals, for instance, have regarded religion as a force to fear, especially if it forms part of the political structure of a given society, and thus an element to be reduced in influence. This was certainly part of John Maynard Keynes’s outlook as a young man. Other liberals, however, have argued that religion—or at least, specific religions—has the potential to provide liberal principles and institutions with moral foundations that help to limit state power, which liberalism seems unable to generate by itself. This was the standpoint of German ordo-liberals like Wilhelm Röpke and Walter Eucken, both of whom were believing Christians.

Kahan stresses that much depends on the specific circumstances faced by a given society and what different liberals regard as the greatest thing to fear at specific moments in time. In the 1930s, liberals across Europe were deeply worried by the emergence of authoritarian movements of left and right, and the opportunities that the Great Depression gave them to establish totalitarian governments. For Keynes, that fear translated into a need for more economic planning, thereby compromising economic freedom in the hope that greater state intervention into the economy would ward off the appeal of authoritarians.

Keynes’s great rival, F. A. Hayek, took a different position. According to Hayek, the growing penchant for economic planning—whether by authoritarians or liberals like Keynes—and its limiting effects on economic liberty could not help but seep over into other spheres of freedom. The success of Keynes and his disciples in persuading policymakers and political parties to adopt his outlook helps explain both why modern liberalism and left liberalism flourished after World War II, and why the strong identification of laissez-faire economics with classical liberalism after the two world wars reduced classical liberals to a telephone-box minority.

Kahan’s coverage of all shades of liberalism and liberals, beginning with what he calls the proto-liberalism of late-eighteenth-century thinkers like Montesquieu and Adam Smith, and concluding with late-twentieth-century figures such as Rawls, Robert Nozick, and Milton Friedman, is historically and intellectually comprehensive. His use of the three pillars to explain the varying stances of liberals is especially effective. Friedman, for instance, focused heavily on market freedom, said relatively little about political liberty, and had almost nothing to say as a liberal about the moral pillar (at times even indicating a rather relativistic view of morality). Like Friedman, Hayek and Röpke were free market economists but were equally focused on the political and moral dimensions of liberty, especially from the late-1930s onward.

But one of the strongest parts of Kahan’s book is the last chapter, “Liberalism and Populism: The Search for a Solution.” It is one of the most sophisticated analyses of the turn against liberalism and toward populism and nationalist versions of populist sentiments across the West that I have read. He shows how, for example, populism is not a monolithic phenomenon. The policy differences between left populists like the late Hugo Chavez and right populists like Marine Le Pen, for example, are substantial.

Kahan also stresses that populist parties have enjoyed considerable success in economically prosperous countries like Austria and the Netherlands, thereby showing that greater economic prosperity is by no means the sure-fire cure for populism that some market liberals believe it is. Cultural factors—whether associated with mass migration and the apparent inability of Western governments to control it, or the sense that liberal elites inhabit a different and privileged universe compared to everyone else—are, from Kahan’s standpoint, just as (if not more) salient. In many cases, Kahan states, “Money is not the main root of populist feelings” (p. 429) and

“More money is not the solution because cultural alienation cannot be overcome with cash” (p. 434). Put another way, if those attracted to populism believe that liberals basically despise anyone who isn’t like them, no amount of economic prosperity is likely to change their attitudes toward liberalism.

More generally, liberals, in Kahan’s view, must do much better in understanding and categorizing the populist phenomenon, hazy and incoherent as it may be, if they are to address it. They should recognize, for instance, that while “right populism” has become politically successful in North America and Europe, it is “left populism” that has taken the lead outside, in regions like Latin America.

But however salient these and other distinctions, Kahan believes that liberals have to engage in a dispassionate analysis of what populists of left and right fear (however irrational some such fears may be) and then determine what they can and cannot do to alleviate such concerns. “To overcome populism,” Kahan writes, liberals “must find a way to reduce the fears of populists, overcome their cultural alienation, and regain, to the extent that it is possible, legitimacy in their eyes. Where it is not possible, liberals must find a way to defeat them” (p. 433).

Kahan does not propose much by way of policies to show the way forward. He does, however, stress that what he regards as the failure of twenty-first-century liberals to articulate a convincing moral rationale (as opposed to highly materialist or strictly proceduralist explanations) for their positions helps explain the collapse of liberalism’s legitimacy in many people’s eyes. That diagnosis suggests that the solution is a return to a three-pillar liberalism, with a particular emphasis on the moral dimension: something that would be well understood by a liberal like Tocqueville but arguably less so by a liberal like Friedman.

On that insight may well depend the revival of liberalism or its eclipse in the near future.