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Advocates of political liberalism hold it as a superior alternative to perfectionism on the grounds that it avoids superfluous and/or controversial claims in favor of a maximally-inclusive approach undergirded by a "free-standing" justification for the ideology. These assertions prove difficult to defend: political interpretations of liberalism tend to be implicitly ethnocentric; they often rely upon a number of controversial, and even empirically falsified, assumptions about rationality and can much more effectively accommodate the illiberal challenge.

The four essays in this collection address the history of liberalism outside Europe, at the same time as they reinscribe European liberalism in global contexts. They ask where, beyond Europe and the North Atlantic, has liberal thought flourished as a way to think about problems of state formation, political economy and social order? They take historical scholarship beyond territories that were formally "colonies" of Europe (or of Europeans) to centres of intellectual activity stimulated and challenged by the global circulation of Western liberalism: the Ottoman Empire, the kingdoms of East Asia, the colonial world, the revolutionary world. Their "global" character is less evident in their individual geographical reach, and more apparent in their individual contributions to the sum of what we know about the appearance of liberal ideas beyond their transatlantic intellectual streams. We have brought them together here in order to raise questions about both the limits of liberalism as a concept, and the conceptual frontiers of intellectual history.

Why is liberalism so often dismissed by thinkers from both the left and the right? To those calling for wholesale transformation or claiming a monopoly on "realistic" conceptions of humanity, liberalism's assured progressivism can seem hard to swallow. Bleak Liberalism makes the case for a renewed understanding of the liberal tradition, showing that it is much more attuned to the complexity of political life than conventional accounts have acknowledged. Amanda Anderson examines canonical works of high realism, political novels from England and the United States, and modernist works to argue that liberalism has engaged sober and even stark views of historical development, political dynamics, and human and social psychology. From Charles Dickens's Bleak House and Hard Times to E. M. Forster's Howards End to Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, this literature demonstrates that liberalism has inventive ways of balancing sociological critique and moral aspiration. A deft blend of intellectual history and literary analysis, Bleak Liberalism reveals a richer understanding of one of the most important political ideologies of the modern era.

Part of a special section, "Is There a 'Telos' left in Telos? Reflections after 100 Issues," discussing the progressive developments of historical ideologies & the true nature of modern liberalism, as distinct from nineteenth-century Western liberalism. New liberalism is described as oppressive, & the claims of some critics that this liberalism will be defeated through populist federalism are unsubstantiated. This form of liberalism is a bureaucratic democracy that enforces equality & secularization; it arose from industrialization, urbanization, & capitalism. The ruling class creates conformity by maintaining peace & sharing profits; even multiculturalism is a tool for controlling minorities. For any form of populist challenge to succeed in the US, it must replace the Republican Party, which seeks to maintain the status quo. M. Piciocchi

This dissertation examines the Romantic beginnings of nineteenth-century British liberalism. It argues that Romantic authors both helped to shape and attempted to resist liberalism while its politics were still inchoate. By shifting the question of Romantic politics away from the traditional radical/revolutionary and conservative/loyalist binary forward into the more ambiguous realm of early liberalism, the dissertation develops new readings of both first- and second-generation Romantic authors, including Charles Lamb, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Leigh Hunt, and William Hazlitt.