Sublime

That is, the much-vaunted ‘autonomous individual’ of modernity makes its first appearance, as the author of true assertions, while truth ceases to be the sun, an all-encompassing horizon in which we live, something that inspires love and desire.

Each of these developments is consistent with principles of liberality like pluralism, tolerance and generosity, and yet none of them are reflected in contemporary liberalism.

Mill held that truth emerges from an unfettered competition of ideas and that individual character is most improved when allowed to find its own way uncoerced. That vision was insufficient for 20th-century American liberalism.

This revolution is required in order to get from the unstated and almost always uncontested assumption of our contemporary society that autonomy and choice are necessarily and of themselves both possible and ultimately good to the biblical view that autonomy (understood in the sense of being independent from God in our judgements and evaluations) i

This demand for constant offerings from taxpayers, hardworking families or ‘strivers’, all while living standards stagnate, means we are now experiencing what Eastern Bloc socialism endured after the 1970s. Two conspicuous hallmarks of that era similarly characterise our present: falling economic growth and crumbling ideological hegemony. The words

Against the more insane forms of subjectivism in modern times there have been various reactions. First, a half-way compromise philosophy, the doctrine of liberalism, which attempted to assign the respective spheres of government and the individual. This begins, in its modern form, with Locke, who is as much opposed to “enthusiasm”—the individualism