This lecture will preview some of the argument of the author’s “Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times” (2023), with a particular focus on political theorist Judith Shklar’s reservations about liberalism in her youth, and the proximity of Cold War liberalism to both neoliberalism and neoconservatism. Returning to how liberalism was disfigured in the origins of the first Cold War prompts a burning question: how to avoid a similar outcome as a new Cold War of the West against China looms.

Samuel Moyn is Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University. He received a doctorate in modern European history from the University of California-Berkeley and a law degree from Harvard University. His areas of interest in legal scholarship include international law, human rights, the law of war, and legal thought, in both historical and current perspective. In intellectual history, he has worked on a diverse range of subjects, especially twentieth-century European moral and political theory. He has written several books in his fields of European intellectual history and human rights history, including “The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History” (2010), and edited or coedited a number of others.

The lecture will take place on Tuesday, 20 June 2023, at 6.15 pm at Lecture Hall I, Law Faculty,
Freie Universität Berlin, Van't-Hoff-Straße 8, 14195 Berlin.