"Liberalism is the search for a society in which no one need be afraid. Freedom from fear is the most basic freedom: if we are afraid, we are not free. This insight is the foundation of liberalism. To proclaim our inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is simply an eloquent way of stating the not-so-exalted wish to live without fear."
Alan S. Kahan, Freedom from Fear
Process philosophy and theology are often described as “liberal” ways of thinking, yet the term liberal itself is frequently left undefined. In Freedom from Fear: An Incomplete History of Liberalism (Princeton University Press, 2023), Alan S. Kahan offers a historical and conceptual account of liberalism centered on what he takes to be its deepest animating aim: the pursuit of freedom from fear. Across its many expressions, liberalism seeks to build societies in which people are protected from the fears of poverty, violence, and arbitrary domination—whether political or religious.
Kahan argues, however, that in contemporary contexts many self-identified liberals have narrowed their focus to economics and politics alone. In doing so, they have often neglected the constructive—and at times destructive—role that religion plays in shaping human lives. They have wrongly assumed that human beings, when left to their own devices, are motivated by rational self-interest, but not by moral or religious concerns.
This narrowing has fostered a secular mindset ill-equipped to address deeper human needs for meaning, belonging, moral formation, and shared purpose. In some cases, this secularism takes the form of a wholesale dismissal of religion as an unqualified evil, often supported by what amounts to a worship of science, otherwise called scientism. More commonly, it rests on the assumption that politics and economics are the true engines of history, while religion is treated as marginal, epiphenomenal, or simply irrelevant.
As this happens, right-wing populisms move in to fill the void. They offer thick narratives of identity, belonging, and moral meaning that secular liberalism has too often failed to supply. Drawing on religious symbols, moral language, and shared grievances, they speak directly to fears that cannot be addressed by policy or markets alone—fears of cultural displacement, moral erosion, and the loss of communal purpose. Yet in doing so, they frequently weaponize religion rather than renew it, bending spiritual traditions toward exclusion, resentment, and domination. What emerges is not a constructive public role for religion, but its deformation into an instrument of illiberal power.
Against both secular reductionism and religious distortion, Kahan proposes that a renewed liberalism must rest on three interdependent pillars: economics, politics, and religion (or moral culture). Historically, liberal thinkers assumed that all three were necessary for a stable and humane social order. Liberalism weakens when it collapses into one- or two-pillar frameworks—typically procedural politics or market economics—while neglecting the moral and spiritual resources that sustain restraint, trust, and solidarity.
It is at this point that process philosophy and theology may have a role to play. They can contribute one voice to the religious pillar of a revitalized political and moral vision—one that affirms freedom from domination while taking seriously human longings for meaning, relationship, and moral orientation. Yet this contribution will be credible only if process thought speaks beyond a narrow circle of self-described “progressive” believers. To matter politically and culturally, it must engage living religious traditions as they are actually practiced, addressing their fears, hopes, symbols, and ethical struggles. Process philosophers and theologians must get over their desire to provide a 'new' way of thinking and show how they can help revitalize 'old' ways of thinking that are wise and nourishing.
It is not necessary that this renewed vision continue to be called liberalism—especially if the term is widely heard to imply not only freedom from fear, but freedom from tradition and community, and from the idea of love as a non-coercive yet guiding force within the universe. Precisely here process philosophy and theology have something distinctive to offer: a metaphysical and theological account of love as persuasive rather than coercive, as relational rather than dominating, and as capable of guiding communal life without erasing freedom.
But process thought can make this contribution only if it is itself liberated from the parochialisms of secularized liberalism. If it remains captive to assumptions that treat religion as marginal or merely symbolic, it will fail to address the deeper sources of fear and hope that shape human lives. The task, then, may be not simply to renew liberalism, but to name a broader orientation—one that preserves liberalism’s core concern with freedom from fear while recovering the moral and relational depth it once presupposed.
What word might take the place of liberalism? Perhaps terms such as relational,community-minded, respectful and inclusive can carry some of the intended meaning. They gesture toward a social vision grounded not in abstraction or domination, but in mutual belonging, shared responsibility, and an expansive love that binds freedom and community together rather than setting them at odds. It is possible that a phrase like generous populism might help - understood as an alternative to left-wing and right-wing populisms.
What is needed here are not simply theorists but poets who can help find the needed language, in an age where liberalism as a word may have past its prime, but concerns for freedom from fear are in their prime.
- Jay McDaniel
Freedom From Fear
Freedom from Fear offers a striking new account of the dominant political and social theory of our time: liberalism. In a pathbreaking reframing of the historical debate, Alan Kahan charts the development of Western liberalism from the late eighteenth century to the present. Examining key liberal thinkers and issues, Kahan shows how liberalism is both a response to fear and a source of hope: the search for a world in which no one need be afraid.
Freedom from Fear reveals how liberal arguments typically rely on three pillars: freedom, markets, and morals. But when liberals ignore one or more of these pillars, their arguments generally fail to persuade. Extending from Adam Smith and Montesquieu to today’s battles between liberals and populists, the book examines the twists and turns of the “incomplete” or unfinished liberal tradition while demonstrating its fundamental continuity. It combines fresh accounts of familiar figures such as Tocqueville and Rawls with discussions of less-famous but pivotal thinkers such as A. V. Dicey and Jane Addams, and explores how liberals have dealt with crucial issues, from debates over male and female suffrage to colonialism and liberal anti-Catholicism.
By transforming our understanding of the history of liberal thought and practice, Freedom from Fear provides a new picture of the political creed today: the paths liberals need to follow, the questions they need to answer, and the dead ends they must avoid—if they are to win.
Freedom from Fear reveals how liberal arguments typically rely on three pillars: freedom, markets, and morals. But when liberals ignore one or more of these pillars, their arguments generally fail to persuade. Extending from Adam Smith and Montesquieu to today’s battles between liberals and populists, the book examines the twists and turns of the “incomplete” or unfinished liberal tradition while demonstrating its fundamental continuity. It combines fresh accounts of familiar figures such as Tocqueville and Rawls with discussions of less-famous but pivotal thinkers such as A. V. Dicey and Jane Addams, and explores how liberals have dealt with crucial issues, from debates over male and female suffrage to colonialism and liberal anti-Catholicism.
By transforming our understanding of the history of liberal thought and practice, Freedom from Fear provides a new picture of the political creed today: the paths liberals need to follow, the questions they need to answer, and the dead ends they must avoid—if they are to win.
Key Points in Alan Kahan's
Freedom from Fear
The book is organized chronologically around four dominant “fears” that shaped liberal thought in different historical periods:
Each of these fears concentrated liberal attention in a particular era, even as earlier anxieties never fully disappeared.
Running throughout the book is Kahan’s account of the “three pillars of liberalism”: freedom, markets, and morals—that is, politics, economics, and morality or religion.
Freedom from Fear argues that until the Second World War, most liberals regarded all three pillars as essential to a stable liberal order. Since the mid-twentieth century, however, liberalism has increasingly been reduced to one-pillar frameworks—most often economic or political/procedural—at the expense of moral and religious dimensions.
Kahan contends that this narrowing has weakened liberalism’s capacity to sustain itself.
Each major wave of liberalism developed characteristic strategies for addressing the fear most pressing in its time:
Across these periods, liberals deployed whatever tools were available to counter fear. Rights frequently served as important instruments, but Kahan insists they were never, by themselves, constitutive of liberalism.
Liberalism vs. Populism Today: Towards Liberalism 4.0?
With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, it appeared as if the only remaining political debate in the Western world was between different variations on liberal themes. But the celebratory period was brief, and the rise of illiberal populisms soon revealed the liberal victory to be hollow.
Liberalism 3.0 was shown to be inadequate to the stormy present, and the search for Liberalism 4.0 has commenced. Populism has become the fifth fear to attract the lion’s share of liberal attention
Definitions of populism vary widely, but they have one thing in common: populism is always seen as illiberal. There is a simple reason for this. Populists always want to make some people afraid, those seen as not really part of the nation, in particular two groups at opposite ends of the social spectrum, immigrants and “elites”.
The rise of populism was fueled in part by the disappearance of the moral pillar from liberal discourse. Human nature abhors a moral vacuum, and populists rushed in to fill it.
The book concludes with a study of the rise of populism and a discussion of what liberals can do about the overlapping illiberal consensus, the alliance of nationalists, religious fundamentalists, and anti-globalists that has arisen almost everywhere.
One suggestion is that liberals need to return emphasizing all three-pillars, freedom, markets, and morals, as they did in the nineteenth century. Liberals need to do more than suggest political procedures and give people the right to choose, without having anything at all to say about what choices they think might be good ones.
The triumph of liberalism, despite what so many people thought in the 1990s, is not inevitable. An illiberal world is possible. Liberals must build a new operating system, Liberalism 4.0, to respond to the new challenges of the twenty-first century, or risk seeing liberalism swept into the dustbin of history. Freedom from Fear makes no pretence of neutrality. It is not just a history of liberalism, but a liberal’s call for a new kind of liberalism.
In this struggle, liberals have one thing on their side: no one wants to be afraid.
About Freedom from Fear: An Incomplete History of Liberalism, by Alan S. Kahan (Princeton University Press, 2023), Politics and Rights Review, February 24, 2025.
- Religious persecution and absolutism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
- Revolution and reaction, spanning from the American and French Revolutions to roughly 1873
- Poverty, the central concern of the fin de siècle period (1873–1919)
- Totalitarianism, which preoccupied liberals from approximately 1920 to 2000
Each of these fears concentrated liberal attention in a particular era, even as earlier anxieties never fully disappeared.
Running throughout the book is Kahan’s account of the “three pillars of liberalism”: freedom, markets, and morals—that is, politics, economics, and morality or religion.
Freedom from Fear argues that until the Second World War, most liberals regarded all three pillars as essential to a stable liberal order. Since the mid-twentieth century, however, liberalism has increasingly been reduced to one-pillar frameworks—most often economic or political/procedural—at the expense of moral and religious dimensions.
Kahan contends that this narrowing has weakened liberalism’s capacity to sustain itself.
Each major wave of liberalism developed characteristic strategies for addressing the fear most pressing in its time:
- First-wave liberals emphasized constitutional design as a means of guarding against both revolution and reaction.
- Second-wave liberals constructed welfare states to confront the problem of poverty.
- Third-wave liberals turned to technocratic solutions to blunt the appeal of totalitarian movements.
Across these periods, liberals deployed whatever tools were available to counter fear. Rights frequently served as important instruments, but Kahan insists they were never, by themselves, constitutive of liberalism.
Liberalism vs. Populism Today: Towards Liberalism 4.0?
With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, it appeared as if the only remaining political debate in the Western world was between different variations on liberal themes. But the celebratory period was brief, and the rise of illiberal populisms soon revealed the liberal victory to be hollow.
Liberalism 3.0 was shown to be inadequate to the stormy present, and the search for Liberalism 4.0 has commenced. Populism has become the fifth fear to attract the lion’s share of liberal attention
Definitions of populism vary widely, but they have one thing in common: populism is always seen as illiberal. There is a simple reason for this. Populists always want to make some people afraid, those seen as not really part of the nation, in particular two groups at opposite ends of the social spectrum, immigrants and “elites”.
The rise of populism was fueled in part by the disappearance of the moral pillar from liberal discourse. Human nature abhors a moral vacuum, and populists rushed in to fill it.
The book concludes with a study of the rise of populism and a discussion of what liberals can do about the overlapping illiberal consensus, the alliance of nationalists, religious fundamentalists, and anti-globalists that has arisen almost everywhere.
One suggestion is that liberals need to return emphasizing all three-pillars, freedom, markets, and morals, as they did in the nineteenth century. Liberals need to do more than suggest political procedures and give people the right to choose, without having anything at all to say about what choices they think might be good ones.
The triumph of liberalism, despite what so many people thought in the 1990s, is not inevitable. An illiberal world is possible. Liberals must build a new operating system, Liberalism 4.0, to respond to the new challenges of the twenty-first century, or risk seeing liberalism swept into the dustbin of history. Freedom from Fear makes no pretence of neutrality. It is not just a history of liberalism, but a liberal’s call for a new kind of liberalism.
In this struggle, liberals have one thing on their side: no one wants to be afraid.
About Freedom from Fear: An Incomplete History of Liberalism, by Alan S. Kahan (Princeton University Press, 2023), Politics and Rights Review, February 24, 2025.