Danielle Allen on Why Technocratic Liberalism Failed

That means the project of democracy is just always and perpetually to be undoing the challenge of oligarchic capture. And now the good fight with Yasha Monk. One way to think about this moment is that philosophical liberalism is facing a serious external crisis. This has happened a number of times before. in the history of liberalism.

In the mid-late 19th century, liberals didn't quite know how to deal with transformation of the economy, with the rise of factories in the north of England, with industrial capitalism and the immiseration of big parts of a new proletariat. In the middle of the 20th century, liberals didn't quite know how to deal with the threat from totalitarian ideologies like fascism and communism. And in each of these moments, liberals reinvented their political tradition. refurbished their ideas in a way where the basic values remained, but they were able to speak to this political moment. That is some of the intellectual work that I I'm trying to do in my own writing on this podcast at Persuasion.

And I thought that I would invite one of the most prominent political theorists at work today in the United States to think with me about some of these issues. Danielle Allen is the James Bryant Conant University professor at Harvard University. She holds a number of other roles at the university and she is also the founder and publisher of a substack called Renovator. She also had a recent piece in persuasion about why we should abolish partisan primaries.

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