What Comes after Liberalism? More Liberalism!
| DOI | 10.1177/0305829810363510 |
| Author | Ronnie D. Lipschutz |
| Date | 01 May 2010 |
| Published date | 01 May 2010 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
© The Author(s), 2010. Reprints and Permissions:
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Millennium: Journal of International Studies Vol.38 No.3, pp. 545–551
ISSN 0305-8298; DOI: 10.1177/0305829810363510
http://mil.sagepub.com
545
What Comes after Liberalism?
More Liberalism!
Ronnie D. Lipschutz1
Liberalism will survive this crisis, as it has many others, but it will
have changed. The felt need to ensure the security of the economy,
and the threats posed to the social order by individuals with poten-
tially threatening capabilities, will require more and more surveil-
lance of our everyday lives and more and more of our participation in
those processes of ‘keeping an eye out’ for anonymous parcels, suspi-
cious behaviours, provocative speech and dangerous thoughts. We
will all be enlisted in the Army of Observation, free to choose but
self-regulating in our choices. Everyone will watch everyone, and the
new age of opto-liberalism will have dawned.
Keywords: governmentality, popular culture, security, surveillance
Two thousand and nine is a year of anniversaries. Over the two days of
this Millennium conference, various speakers have pointed out that it has
been 90 years since the end of the First World War, 70 years since the start
of the Second World War, 50 since the publication of Kenneth Waltz’s
opus Man, the State and War, and 20 since the fall of the Berlin Wall. To
these, I would add two other anniversaries. It has been 60 years since the
appearance of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel (here ren-
dered as 1984) and 10 years since the theatrical release of the Wachowski
brothers’ film The Matrix. In these comments, I propose to focus only on
the last two anniversaries, inasmuch as I think they have something to say
about what comes ‘After Liberalism’. I will explore these two products of
popular culture, written and visual, British and American, to frame some
reflections and arguments about the theme of the conference, the con-
cluding roundtable and what we might expect from the future.
Both novel and film are somewhat dystopic in tone and content but,
as it turns out, they also both address a classical liberal conundrum, to
wit, the tensions between ‘liberty’ and ‘security’, between freedom and
safety, between love and fear. Popular culture often deals with such
1. This article is based on a presentation given on the concluding roundtable of
the 2009 Millennium Conference, ‘After Liberalism’, London School of Economics,
17–18 October.
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