自由主义怎么了？.pdf

Preferred Citation: Beiner, Ronald. What's the Matter with Liberalism?. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1992
1992. :/13030/ft4w10063f/
What's the Matter with Liberalism?
Ronald Beiner
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Berkeley · Los Angeles · Oxford
© 1992 The Regents of the University of California
Preferred Citation: Beiner, Ronald. What's the Matter with Liberalism?. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1992
1992. :/13030/ft4w10063f/
Prefatory Note
This little book was mainly put together during a time of remarkable revolutionary upheavals in Europe.
The Central European revolution was hailed in the liberal, market-oriented West in a selfcongratulatory
mood. The self-congratulation was thought to be warranted because, first, the West had "won" a certain
kind of war that had been waged in the preceding four decades, and second, because the economic
dynamism of liberal societies was deemed to be the decisive mark of superiority of the West over the East
in the winning of this war. One of the intentions of this book was to question whether uncritical self-
congratulation was the most suitable way in which to receive the great changes in the socialist world. The
appropriate questions for us have in fact already been formulated by one of the leaders of that revolution:
The post-totalitarian system has been built on foundations laid by the historical encounter
between dictatorship and the consumer society. Is it not true that the far-reaching adaptability
to living a lie and the effortless spread of social auto-totality have some connection with the
general unwillingness of consumption-oriented people to sacrifice some material certainties
for the sake of their own spiritual and moral integrity? Wit