The End of Liberalism

WE ARE NOW BEYOND the end of the great age of the past 500 years, what has often been called the “modern age.” Its main feature was the rise of democracy—the rule of majorities and not of minorities—for perhaps the first time in the history of mankind. Consider that. Will what has begun last long? We cannot know. We live forward, but whatever we know comes from the past. That includes words and their origins. The word democracy existed in ancient Greece, but in the past 2,000 years it has been put into practice only here and there, during short episodes. More frequent and longer lasting was republic, a word of Roman origin: res publica, public matter, public rule, public business, public concern, a “common weal” in English.

Five centuries ago, most states in the world were ruled by monarchs and by many of their subservient aristocracies. Erasmus wrote in 1517 that a new, brighter age was arriving. (Now this kind of optimism hardly exists.) Four centuries ago, in some states of Europe, the function of some monarchs was changing. This was so in England, where after