THE CONTINENTAL CURSE:

Today's political discourse is rife with the prognosis that liberalism is in trouble, evidenced by the rise of anti-liberal and post-liberal thought, each of which maintains that a politics based on material self-interest is incapable of providing the meaning and nobility necessary for its own maintenance.  Waller Newell's Tyranny and Revolution: Rousseau to Heidegger makes clear that this sentiment is not the exclusive preserve of the twenty-first century but is nearly as old as liberalism itself.  Newell's book provides an overview of a strain of thought he terms the German Philosophy of Freedom, which paradoxically both contributed to the rise of the liberal state (in the thought of Georg Friedrich Hegel) and reacted against the emergence of liberal politics (in the writings of Hegel's successors).  Tracing this school from its incipient beginnings in Rousseau's thoughts through Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, Waller Newell posits that the unifying thread that holds these thinkers together is their commitment to restore a classical conception of human existence, one that is rooted in devotion to community and virtue in the face of the dreary utilitarianism of Enlightenment philosophy. 

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