Rahel Jaeggi (#6: Liberal Democracy and Capitalism)

(Humboldt University)

I have already learned so much today, and I want to end by echoing something Daniel said in his final remarks: those unwilling to speak about socialism should be quiet about fascism. We might add that if one refuses to talk about racism, sexism, or the material dimensions of our forms of life, then one is not adequately addressing the political and social realities of our time. With that in mind, I offer four theses.

1. The Crisis of the Liberal Narrative

We are witnessing a crisis of the liberal narrative, a weakening of the liberal-democratic world order and of the theoretical foundations that once sustained it. Whether this marks its end or a temporary exhaustion remains unclear, but liberalism is under attack externally and internally.

Externally, the rise of illiberal despots, new wars, violations of international law, and the declining relevance of institutions meant to anchor a normative world order are unmistakable. Populist and authoritarian sentiments spread globally, and we should name them for what they often are: fascisms in the plural, or at least fascist tendencies. A stark symbol is the countless people who have drowned in the Mediterranean—deaths that expose the collapse of basic humanity at the borders of a Europe that still portrays itself as the bastion of liberal democracy.

Internally, liberalism faces a loss of trust and legitimacy. The charge of hypocrisy haunts it. And even for those of us who have long critiqued liberalism as ideological or insufficient, there is something unsettling in this moment. Liberalism has been the dominant paradigm of the modern era; its weakening alters our political coordinates. To paraphrase Adorno: solidarity with liberalism in its decline must be conditional – grounded in the demand to push it beyond its limits toward emancipatory transformation.

• What Kind of Democracy Are We Defending?

This leads to my second thesis: when we “stand up for democracy,” we must ask what kind of democracy we are defending. Which elements of liberal democracy—precisely those that have contributed to the current crisis—require critique? Simply defending the status quo will not work.

My suggestion is that liberal democracy has become an exhausted paradigm. Paradigms solve specific problems until they can no longer do so. Two structural challenges help explain this exhaustion:

(1) the challenge of ethical pluralism, and

(2) the transition from status-based to class-based orders in capitalist modernity.

• Ethical Neutrality as a Liberal Failure

Liberalism’s answer to pluralism—ethical neutrality—no longer resolves conflict. Following Rawls, liberal societies were to be organized around neutral institutions permitting diverse life forms to coexist. But neutrality is not neutral. It encodes ways of life tied to individualism, competition, and possessive selfhood. Beyond the West, it appears as a disguised assertion of Western values. As Homi Bhabha noted, the belief that Western culture “has no culture” has become liberalism’s sacred cow.

Today, neutrality is weaponized in anti-woke campaigns by authoritarian and fascist movements. Liberal abstinence regarding substantive questions of family, gender, or morality has left a vacuum—and reactionary forces readily occupy it. Solidarity with liberalism must therefore mean abandoning ethical abstinence—not by returning to premodern moralism but by creating spaces of rational contestation where life forms confront one another openly and critically in the name of emancipation.

• The Class Contradiction in Liberalism

My final thesis concerns liberalism’s role in the transition from status-based to class-based society. This shift helped establish ideals of freedom and equality, but in contradictory form. In theory individuals were freed from inherited status; in practice, as Marx noted, the worker was “free” to starve.

Liberalism created a split between the bourgeois realm of self-interest and the state claiming to represent the public good, a split that never held. The tension between social inequality and political equality has persisted and continues to generate crises.

Liberalism’s responses took three forms: meritocratic blame, redistribution, and attempts to tame capitalism democratically. All rested on two assumptions that have since evaporated: the legitimacy of the achievement principle and the postwar belief in the welfare state.

Even where redistribution is attempted, liberalism refuses to interrogate production. The economy remains a black box, untouched by politics. In the face of climate catastrophe and structural inequality, this blindness has rendered liberalism ineffective. It bracketed ethical questions from politics and economic questions from justice. Both strategies have failed.

Conclusion: A Call for Emancipatory Transformation

For liberalism to survive—and to matter—it must confront the material side of justice through needs-based economics, ecological sustainability, and collective flourishing. It must revisit the ethical foundations of social cooperation. The limits of liberalism are visible; what is needed is not nostalgia but a radical revision of the divisions it once took for granted. In other words: we need to talk again about socialism, institutionally, and practically.

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