Afterword

The afterword offers a coda to the volume, without addressing individual essays’ achievements individually. Rather, it reflects on how the essays reconceive the problem of Cold War liberalism as a category less in Atlantic intellectual history or political theory than in the history of the foreign relations of the American hegemon after World War II. The contemporary renaissance of Cold War liberalism suggests that pondering how it arose and dominated in the first place will continue to teach useful lessons about its senescent phase, which is unlikely to end soon. Someday geopolitical transformations will bring into being a different enough world than the Cold War liberal one that emerged in the middle of the twentieth century. Until then, the meanings and outcomes of Cold War liberalism will demand investigation, and this volume will play a pivotal role in an ongoing referendum on how contemporary politics came about, and on what should happen next.