Session 1: Approaching the Issue of Liberal Democracy’s Illness

Lea Ypi

Lea Ypi discusses the promise of freedom under capitalism and some of the contradictions it involves. She argues that we need to return to the core definition of the Enlightenment as the “emergence from people’s self-incurred immaturity” and develop a new critique of society, able to challenge the political and economic institutions of the present and to develop a radical democratic global alternative.

Keynote: Are Elites Deaf to Social and Economic Discontent

Michael Lind

Populism is often portrayed by embattled establishment parties in Europe and North America as a movement of fascists and racists that threatens liberal democracy.  But this analysis misdiagnoses the real problem—the popularity of many populist positions among working class voters of all races, and the capture of parties of the center and center-left by college-educated elites.  Only by repudiating extreme and unpopular positions on immigration, gender, and other issues can centrist and center-left parties meet the populist challenge.

Session 4: The Few vs. the Many: Moving Away from the Old Class Struggle

David Hopkins

Party supporters of the left and the right are increasingly divided by educational attainment, both in the United States and across the democratic West. This new “diploma divide” reflects the rising salience of cultural debates in contemporary global politics. Parties of the left are losing popular support among the traditional working class, while gaining adherents among the college-educated segment of the electorate.

Session 5: Waking Back from the Culture Wars: How

Jean-Claude Kaufmann – Two Worlds Pulling Apart

Capitalism, or the market economy, can be seen as just one variant—or, from a more critical perspective, a distortion—of a broader and deeper historical process that began with the Enlightenment: the rise of individual autonomy paired with the rationalization of existence. We have entered an era defined by the affirmation of the individual.

One by one, the traditional frameworks that once defined individual identity are being dismantled in favor of an emancipatory utopia—both thrilling and uncertain. The last and most resistant of these frameworks, biology itself, is now being undone before our eyes. In many democratic countries today, if someone identifies as a woman despite biological markers indicating otherwise, that identity can be affirmed and legally recognized. The individual—the self—now stands as the ultimate reference point.

This process is essentially the deepening and expansion of democracy—moving beyond politics to shape every aspect of daily life. Today, we can (and must) personally choose our morality, our truth, our relationships, and our identity. Identity—now a growing topic of discussion—is no longer inherited but self-constructed. And it has become a new and fundamental source of social inequality.

Individual emancipation has opened new spaces for freedom and creativity, particularly among the economically and culturally privileged. Yet, it also brings psychological fragility and mental fatigue. These challenges, however, are minor compared to the upheaval felt by the working class. The loss of traditional reference points has fueled deep existential anxiety, reinforced by a growing sense of lost recognition and respect.

As a result, society is splitting into two opposing cultural worlds. On one side, progressivism, driven by its emancipatory ideal. On the other, those left behind—disoriented and dismissed as archaic—the poorest and most vulnerable, seeking new anchors and a sense of pride. Abandoned by modernity’s rapid transformations, they have become the backbone of the rising wave of national populism, now surging across Europe and the world.

Addressing this deepening societal divide is urgent, as it carries serious political risks. First, we must better understand the forces at work—particularly the pressures of identity—that are reshaping how people think. Then, we must introduce safeguards to ensure that individual emancipation does not unfold blindly. To prevent both social chaos and a dangerous resurgence of reactionary forces, we must learn to navigate and guide the course of modernity.

Session 6: Postliberal Criticism to be Taken Seriously

John Milbank

As it gets evermore extreme, liberalism also enters evermore into crisis. This is because it has impossible foundations: basing all on the isolated individual and monopolized coercive state power in pretense that humans do not first exist always already in social groups, and also in pretense that every civilization is not in reality founded upon a tripartition between priests, rulers and laborers. Instead, liberalism tries to keep a formal order via market and state and by strict but artificial division of spheres and powers, especially between the political and the economic. Yet in reality we get new and concealed modes of oligarchic group power, the transgression of spheres upon each other to engender a sinister corporatism, and a new tripartition of scientific priests, moneyed rulers, and a proletariat now expanded to include erstwhile professionals. Populist protests against that marginalization have now been captured by nationalist forces that are only a new mutation of neoliberalism and so of liberalism: more effectively deregulating and reducing all to competition than was achieved by globalization. Instead, we need a genuine postliberalism: this would rework tripartition more democratically and virtuously, espouse pluralism in sovereignty, and drive out bad corporatism with a good one. The latter involves both economic democracy and representation of firms besides locales. In short, the way forward for Catholic social thinking is to update Quadragesimo Anno.

Roundtable: The Way Forward – Rescuing Liberalism from Itself

Alessandro Ferrara – Laying the blame at the correct doorstep

Among other things, politics is also about getting the narrative right. If we want to move forward and rescue liberalism, one crucial detail concerns the correct address at which to deliver the blame for the predicament of liberal-democracy, now insidiously challenged by rightwing populists who deftly grabbed the electoral mantle of protectors of the weak and by autocrats who assert their power more defiantly on the world stage.

Liberal-democracy is a very capacious category. Death has resuscitated Jimmy Carter from the oblivion that his victor, Ronald Reagan, unduly consigned him to. Carter, the moralist of the “malaise speech”, the exemplar of unassertiveness but defender of human rights and environment protection, who can’t be held accountable for tax-cuts and deregulation, was incomparably more distant from his opponent than later Clinton would be from the two Bush administrations before and after him. Starting with Clinton, neoliberal priorities made inroads into the Democrats’ agenda. Can both versions of liberaldemocracy – the welfare-state centered and the neoliberal, finance and market centered – be equally responsible for what we’re experiencing now? If not, in whose interest is it to conflate the two in one indictment of “liberal-democracy” as such? Different indications for “rescuing liberalism” follow depending on which diagnosis we adopt.