Of all the political currents that arose in the wake of the French Revolution, liberalism is the hardest to pin down. This certainly has to do with the fact that it is located in the middle of the political spectrum and is therefore just as open on both sides as it needs to be differentiated. In fact, the political parties that use the term liberal in their name have occupied quite different political positions: national liberals and social liberals, economic liberals, civil rights liberals, liberal conservatives, neoliberals and so on. It is only with populist movements that liberalism cannot get involved without losing its identity. There is hardly a political current that he has placed so much emphasis on demarcation as compared to populism.
But even with democracy, liberalism has not always gone hand in hand, but has often seen itself as a limitation and restriction of democracy: not everything that is decided on the basis of democratic majorities is compatible with the liberal understanding of freedom.
The formula of “liberal democracy” is therefore anything but a pleonasm.
The fact that Victor Orbán explicitly described the political order he prefers for Hungary as “illiberal democracy” is only the most recent example.
Liberal thinkers often have something honest about them
Anyone who describes themselves as an “illiberal democrat” usually wants to provoke; In a socio-political world in which everyone is "somehow" liberal or at least claiming liberality for themselves, an illiberal takes a decided political position: Under no circumstances do you want to belong to the part of the political spectrum where most of the people are . It is therefore much easier to write a book on illiberalism than one on liberalism. Accordingly, in the last few decades, at least in Germany, a great deal more work has been done on the opponents of liberalism than on the liberals themselves - which has turned the political balance on its head. However, this not only has to do with the fact that the liberals are difficult to define, but also seldom does the extraordinary,Finds original, eccentric. Liberal thinkers are often stuck with something conservative, committed to common sense, which is why one usually takes note of their ideas and arguments without being particularly impressed by them. That is the disadvantage of everything that is taken not only to be right but also to be taken for granted.
Christoph Möllers has taken on a lot with the plan to explore “liberal elements in the political field”, as the original subtitle of his book was. He has neither written a history of political liberalism in the western world nor a theory of political liberalism, although approaches to both can be found again and again in his book. In principle, he keeps his distance from the project of forming a political movement like liberalism out of liberal elements. This is because, according to the main idea of his book, he gets entangled in self-contradictions time and again when he strengthens a certain aspect of the liberal alone, such as individual freedom, and in doing so inevitably marginalizes its opposition, such as social responsibilityas has happened again and again to the liberal parties in many Western countries.