The end of Liberalism?

Abstract

The article argues that the liberal family system, as crafted by late 17th Century British political theorist John Locke and enjoying apparent success as late as the 1960s, is now in ruins. Three internal contradictions which brought the system down can be identified: the first was a faulty understanding of human nature, which denigrated males and placed too great of the real family burden on women; the second contradiction was the liberal family’s lack of functions, which led to its material and economic disintegration; the third was its reliance on coercive social engineering, which undermined the very religious values which allowed the known system to work. “Self-actualization” and “gender theory,” Carlson and Hurtado show, are the logical consummation of liberalism, and fatal to its natural family order. They also reveal how and why the liberal ideal of tolerance has failed in recent decades.