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........

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