Yes, you read that right. It is not an incoherent nor a rhetorical figure. It is not a self-accusation of contradiction of our non-liberal thinking either. It is pretty much the sum of our ideas, both in its basis and in its consequences, even when it puzzles everyone and makes them ask how someone can be liberal and illiberal at the same time, and how some concept can be a part of something and be against it simultaneously.
The contemporary world is pretty much liberal, at least in a political sense. Almost every single one of its polities are based on the philosophical principles of western, enlightened liberalism, most societies try to enhance individual liberties as much as they can, and all people, all entities, and all states are connected in an economic network of markets. We live in a liberal world.
As such, the people who oppose the current liberal establishment, such as reactionaries, traditionalists, and conservatives, are called illiberal because they criticize and point out the problems that liberalism itself has created and is creating in our societies. This division is straightforward and does not need further explanation.
But liberalism, on a higher scheme of understanding, isn’t really liberal, not in a classical sense anyway, because liberalism shouldn’t only be understood as a political and economic system, but also as a value and principle, as the virtue of generosity.
In his book Leftism, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn describes this concept in the following manner:
The root is liber (‘free’). The term liberalis (and liberalitas) implies generosity in intellectual and material matters. The sentence ‘he gave liberally’ means that the person in question gave with both hands. In this sense liberality is an ‘aristocratic’ virtue. An illiberal person is avaricious, petty-minded, tight-fisted, self-centered. Up to the beginning of the Nineteenth century the word ‘liberal’ figured neither in politics nor really in economics.
Based on this, liberalism should be a philosophy of generosity and aristocracy, and the world it has created should be composed of generous aristocrats who learn and teach without limits, who give themselves and their wealth freely and for altruistic and philanthropic causes. And in a sense, it has, as it has promoted prosperous people who create charities and fund educational programs.
But modern liberalism is far from a generous and aristocratic mindset because by taking the cause of progressivism as its own, it has undermined its own foundations for a false sense of freedom, one that promotes equality as a god and general material and intellectual misery as justice.
This shouldn’t be a surprise though, as liberals, in their original form, were the original leftists until continental socialists took over their position and influenced their thinking with progressive ideals, thus corrupting them.
Traditional conservatives, on the other side, have always been more genuine, especially because they have taken to heart their label as illiberal, shaping themselves as a true opposition to liberals and creating an ever-growing sum of ideas composed of all things past.
In a sense, conservatives are the true liberals since they are the generous and aristocratic ones: they offer a larger corpus of thinkers, they can adopt a full spectrum of options while choosing their policy, and they promote a merit-based society in which good people will be recognized as such and dignity for all will be preserved.
In comparison, modern liberals are nothing but a pale negative of them. Dogmatic, calculating, and narrow-minded, they adopt the ideas of a few thinkers as a holy text, interpret them as a golden panacea of solutions for all kind of problems, and in the end, try to impose them with legislation or what F.A. Hayek called rationalist constructivism, which means they try to create heaven on earth with coercion and get hell instead.
This should not be a surprise either because one way or another, modern liberals have always been leftists as the sons of the Revolution they are. The thing is that the farther they get from their origins, the further radicalized they become, as they forget who their predecessors were and what ideas they promoted.
Kuehnelt-Leddihn, as always, underlines the history of this decay in his essay called The Four Liberalisms. He begins by categorizing the origin of the name, the times, and the relevant people to each time, creating a clear timeline of liberalism from the Revolution to our days.
The first era of liberalism was pretty much a conservative period, as most conservatives were liberals. One can think of famous conservative ideologues such as Edmund Burke, René de Chateaubriand, the father of modern economics Adam Smith, and even the hard-liner traditionalists such as Juan Donoso Cortés and Joseph de Maistre who were liberals at some point during this time.
These people understood that liberty was not an absolute but the result of a fair and just government that promoted a natural and organic order in which power was clearly defined and justice was its mandate. They would influence the Founding Fathers of the United States as well in their political project, and that influence is well recorded, especially in the Federalist Papers.
It is also worth mentioning that the liberal label was first introduced for the Spanish right, the very same group that would later transform into the reactionary and traditionalist Carlism after French-inspired reformists took over government and took for themselves that label.
The second era of liberalism was still very conservative. One can think of it as the time of Catholic aristocrats promoting and preserving liberty since the two biggest figures of this moment in the history of ideas were none other than Alexis de Tocqueville and Lord Acton.
The liberals of this era were not progressive, and even if the division between Tories and Whigs as of conservatives and liberals dates up to here, most liberals were conservatives at heart, simply because they wanted to preserve liberty with order and knew tradition was the best way to do so.
This teaching was the one that determined the bases on which the third generation of liberals grew (people like Mises, Hayek, Friedman, and the neoliberal economic consensus of the 30s to the 70s). They even tried to name their rag-tag group of intellectuals the Acton-Tocqueville Society.
This, of course, outraged the more Jacobin wing of the third generation which consisted of people like William Roepke who pushed for a name unrelated to two Catholic aristocrats. The group was ultimately named in honor of the place where the first meeting was held (the Mont Pelerin hotel), and this, of course, marked the inevitable rift between them.
The spiritual followers of the liberals in the conservative tradition ended up becoming more illiberal than any other school of thought, given that their radicalism was inspired by an opposition to the liberal order which they saw as the cause of all abuse, disorder, and entropy.
Kuehnelt-Leddihn himself was a part of this group which included investors such as Peter Thiel, most of Mises’s intellectual successors, and, interestingly, free market traditionalists such as the Polish monarchists, a wing of Spanish Carlists, and the French National-Liberals led by Henry de Lesquen.
Liberal illiberals reject the gospel of equality and social justice of the current liberal status quo, as it undermines liberty and responsibility, and theorize about anarchy under the Great Tradition and medieval monarchy as suitable alternatives that could prevent the feared collapse of civilization.
Their sources are never-ending and can combine things as unexpected as serious ethnic studies with state governance proposals, theology with economics, and the development of law with primate morality.
But the followers of the progressive wing (very influenced by the welfare doctrine of both the American New Right as well as of the new Democrats) quickly adopted social issues as their brand of liberalism, calling for higher licentiousness in all moral matters and a bigger government to provide not only for their governance needs but also for their material needs as well.
Their main inspiration was, of course, Karl Popper and his idea of an open society in which individual freedom would be hyper-developed under a welfare state framework.
Investor, Wall-Street broker, and the mind behind behavioral economics, George Soros, would take his ideas and promote them through his charities, funding several progressive groups all around the world, the most recent examples being the Black Lives Matter organization (which proudly calls itself Marxist) and the feminist offshoots of Planned Parenthood in Latin America whose sympathizers are said to be responsible for church burning and monument desecrating from Mexico to Argentina.
Illiberal liberals isolated themselves in the left wing of politics, economics, and culture, and have grown as a tumor inside of media and academia, self-replicating into repeating zombies who talk contradictorily about equality but distinguish races as oppressive and oppressed, who enjoy the fruits of diversified markets but ask for a centralized economy, and who call for tolerance but use law as a prosecution tool against all who disagree with them, labeling them as heretics in their religion of progressivism.
If liberalism is generosity and aristocracy, then modern liberals are for sure no liberals at all, and we illiberals are the true liberals, as we haven’t been indoctrinated yet into the dogmas of their Marxist prophets, and we try to find truth wherever it lies. It is our duty to liberalize illiberalism and spread it like a wildfire to all corners of Earth, as it will cement us as the foundations of the coming reaction and the revival of the Great Tradition. We cannot do otherwise.
- Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, The Four Liberalisms, in Religion and Liberty Vol. 2, No. 4, 1992 (https://www.acton.org/pub/religion-liberty/volume-2-number-4/four-liberalisms)
- Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Leftism Revisited: From De Sade and Marx to Hitler and Pol Pot, 1991 (https://www.amazon.com/-/es/Erik-Von-Kuehnelt-Leddihin/dp/0895265370)
- Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, The Road from Serfdom, 1992
- Friedrich August von Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, 1973 (https://www.amazon.com/-/es/F-Hayek/dp/0226320863)
- Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, 1945 (https://www.amazon.com/-/es/Karl-R-Popper/dp/0691158134)
- George Soros, In Defense of Open Society, 2019 (https://www.amazon.com/-/es/George-Soros/dp/1541736702)
- Robert Leeson, Hayek: A Collaborative Biography Part IV, England, the Ordinal Revolution and the Road to Serfdom, 1931–50 (https://link.springer.com/book/10.1057/9781137452603)
- Santiago Galindo Herrero, Donoso Cortés, in Temas españoles, nº 26, 1953 (http://www.filosofia.org/mon/tem/es0026.htm#p01)
- Roger McKinney, The Christian Origins Of Austrian Economics, in Townhall Finance, 2020 (https://finance.townhall.com/columnists/rogermckinney/2020/01/23/the-christian-origins-of-austrian-economics-n2559993)
- Brad Polumbo, Is Black Lives Matter Marxist? No and Yes, in FEE.org, 2020 (https://fee.org/articles/is-black-lives-matter-marxist-no-and-yes/)