Beyond the global culture war

by Adam Kempton Webb

Beyond the Global Culture War is a broad-ranging political, historical, and philosophical account of the clash between liberal modernity and the forces that resist it. The book starts by identifying four ethoses, or self-understandings, that have contended in all civilizations through history. It shows that liberal modernity amounts to an upending of history, the disruptive rise of one of those four ethoses to unprecedented dominance in public culture. In its first third, the book traces how the ethos that underlies liberalism managed to break past age-old checks on it, through a series of ideological maneuvers between the late nineteenth and mid twentieth centuries. Then it turns to the global culture war today. On one side is the liberal vision of an "end of history," of markets, moral relativism, and technocratic rule. On the other is the strident backlash from Islamists, populists, the Christian Right, Chinese and Hindu nationalists, and the like.The book argues that today's resist