Moyn is not afraid to admit that his present-day political commitments inform his recasting of the Cold War liberal tradition. The specter of Moyn's critique of the contemporary neoliberal hegemony in Anglophone political culture is palpable.  However, contrary to the more predictable polemics in the crisis of liberalism literature, Moyn moves beyond stale technocratic solutions or takedowns of liberalism's enemies on the left or the right. The very idea of liberalism requires just as radical a reinvention in the post-Brexit/Trump era as it underwent in the 1940s and 50s.  

What Moyn's reflections do leave us with is a challenge: liberalism must innovate or die. Simply superimposing an early Cold War Christian realism onto a set of post-Cold War late capitalist conundrums may not necessarily be the solution. Yet, Christian realism offers a good starting point for the imaginative worldmaking process. The reflections of Niebuhr and Butterflied do indeed present a radical middle way between pessimism and utopia, a theologically-inspired skeptical liberalism that does not compromise a higher commitment to social progress and justice.