In his Quarterly Essay, Waleed Aly finds modern liberalism increasingly hollowed out and detached from older ideas of civic virtue. But Fukuyama, Mill and Australian literature suggest those traditions have never entirely disappeared.
Intellectual liberals take note: Waleed Aly’s recent essay argues that the political creed of modern liberalism has run its race (see ‘Time of Monsters’ in Quarterly Essay No 103, 2026, pp 1–108). Aly’s extensive evidence shows that liberalism is listless – drifting away from any substantive philosophy of the good life. But Aly’s fears about the moral hollowness of modern liberalism neglect reassuring elements of liberal-democratic philosophy.
Aly’s second thoughts about the intellectual limitations of modern liberalism allow him to contrast many intellectual founders of liberalism with pre-liberal views held by ‘the ancients’. Aly persuasively contrasts the minimal civic ethics of the intellectual founders of modern liberalism (notably Hobbes and Locke) with one of ‘the ancients’ greatest political philosophers – Aristotle, whose virtue ethics liberalism sorely needs. The doctrine of modern liberalism appears to rest primarily on institutional structures, such as Hobbes’ all-powerful sovereign or Locke’s separation of the branches of government.
If Aly is right about the limitations of liberalism’s bare-boned individualism, we owe him much for restating the case for older forms of political liberty he finds in Aristotle and ‘the ancients’.
Most conventional accounts of the health and future of modern liberalism look forward rather than backward, hoping to reshape contemporary liberal practices around any number of post-modern fancies which tend to discount what ‘the ancients’ understood as the good life of the human and civic virtues. Aly’s search for pre-modern portraits of those civic virtues so alarmingly discarded by Hobbes and Locke and their liberal followers resembles the controversial conservatism of the late Leo Strauss (never mentioned by Aly). In keeping with the spirit of Strauss’s least conservative book, which is Liberalism, Ancient and Modern, I want to suggest three additions to Aly’s argument. Each of my modest additions builds a somewhat stronger bridge between ‘the ancients’ and contemporary liberals which might reassure Aly that modern liberal regimes are not so completely divorced from classical civic virtue as readers might fear.
Aly mentions the American political philosopher Francis Fukuyama briefly, suggesting that his essays and 1992 book about ‘the end of history’ disguised the underlying weaknesses of ‘the Western model’ of liberal democracy. The real surprise is that Fukuyama actually provides Aly with hard intellectual evidence that liberal democracy can only survive with the help of ‘the ancients’. Fukuyama’s core argument was not that ‘the West has won’ but that the contemporary West had hit a philosophical roadblock with its misguided confidence about ‘the end of history’ – precisely because this false confidence rested on the second part of Fukuyama’s book title which Aly correctly quotes as belief in ‘the last man’. Friedrich Nietzsche used this phrase about modernity celebrating ‘the last man’ (last as in spent or exhausted) in his foreshadowing of what soon became ‘post-modernism’.
Fukuyama’s 2020 reissue of his End of History book included updates providing more argument that liberal democracy can only prosper if it strengthens what he saw as Hegel’s great insight that the vitality of modernity rests on the influence of political virtues originally examined by ‘the ancients’: especially the political virtue of ‘recognition’ (derived from thymos or spiritedness) examined extensively in Plato’s Republic.
Sounds too fanciful? Aly’s general case gets even more support from more recent work by Fukuyama on regenerating liberalism. His 2022 book on Liberalism and its Discontents begins and ends with the recovery of classical Greek concepts of political moderation. His 2026 intellectual memoir, In the Realm of the Last Man, includes a vigorous restatement of how the classical virtue of ‘recognition’ can rehabilitate ‘the realm of the last man’ that Nietzsche used to describe modernity’s corrupt fall from human virtues understood best by ‘the ancients’.
Aly’s greatest champion for liberal enlightenment is John Stuart Mill. Aly carefully navigates his way around Mill’s great, if somewhat abstract, texts On Liberty and Utilitarianism. Mill seems open to Aly’s case about recovering classical virtues yet is overly enthusiastic about the superiority of modern ‘individualism’.
Mill was elected to a seat in the House of Commons (Westminster, in fact) from 1865 until 1868. Mill the political theorist thus practised politics, so it is no surprise to find that his most practical work has lots to say in defence of civic virtue. Mill’s Considerations on Representative Government is the text Aly should have used to make his welcome defence of Mill’s approach to virtue ethics. Mill notes that politics “as conceived by the ancients” rested on “good institutions virtuously administered”. Modern democracy will not prosper if “there is deterioration in virtue”, especially among the core virtues of “industry, integrity, justice, and prudence”: good government depends on “virtue and intelligence of the people”. Mill’s extensive discussion of the qualities of effective representative government has more to say about civic virtue than that one quality of ‘individuality’.
Mill’s defenders admit that this great liberal-democrat sought to promote “the very elite of the country” in his reforms to British governance. Mill wanted to give prominence to “the instructed few” explicitly modelled on classical examples like the outstanding leader Pericles who could help “shape the national character”. Mill even invokes Plato three times when rethinking the practice of modern democracy. Mill also promoted a merit-based form of civil service based on competitive examinations of candidates’ command of “liberal education”.
My third and concluding proposal is derived from the comedy of Australian literature. My recent book on the political novels of Miles Franklin and Joseph Furphy examined the political project shared by Franklin and Furphy to help promote a sounder civic morality than the enterprising ‘individualism’ that both sneered at. Franklin’s My Brilliant Career began her journey into political literature. causing her later to withdraw the book from sale because few readers really understood her deeper theme, which was the corrosive civic culture of the new Australia. Franklin reworked her treatment of that theme in two later novels, the last of which (Cockatoos) was not published until 1954. That last work, published under her pen name of ‘Brent of Bin Bin’, includes three explicit references to Mill’s later work – The Subjection of Women which Franklin saw as highlighting alternatives to the gendered staleness of Australian public culture.
Furphy was equally confident that liberalism in Australia required help from ‘the ancients’. One of Furphy’s very humorous novels is Rigby’s Romance about Jefferson Rigby, an American socialist reformer, whose plea in Australia for greater social solidarity rests heavily on the civic virtues promoted by the classical Stoics. Rigby’s romance for socialism includes high praise for the former slave Epictetus whose views on the civic virtues are held by Rigby as essential to the project for socialist reform. Socialist reformers plan to recover classical Stoicism. Furphy shows how unpersuasive the very smart Rigby was with most, but not all, of his Australian audience.
Waleed Aly is very much on the right track: all his readers need is greater confidence that ‘the ancients’ are well within reach, as Fukuyama, Mill and two very witty Australian novelists all support.
John Uhr
John Uhr is Emeritus Professor of Politics, School of Politics and International Relations, Australian National University. His research interests include Australian politics, political and governmental ethics, parliament, public leadership and democratic theory and practice. His latest book is Promoting Postcolonial Australia: new readings of Miles Franklin and Joseph Furphy (New York: Bloomsbury Academic 2026).