Where is the joie de vivre? Brad Evans’s book offers one of the most sweeping condemnations of liberalism that drives biopolitical arguments to their all-encompassing logical conclusions. One cannot help but feel a bit terrorized in the wake of Evans’s bleak assessments of liberalism’s assaults on our political imaginations that have stripped away any sense of the joy of life. He argues that in response to the events of 9/11, liberalism has constructed an “all-hazard spectrum of threat” (p. 174), which requires all-encompassing interventions to preempt life’s own self-destructive tendencies (p. ix). The liberal terror is the fear of the contingent, catastrophic event that can emerge at any point in time from within the very “life-world” that we all inhabit. All aspects of life are now regarded as potentially life-threatening. The author’s aim is twofold: to reveal the “liberal will to rule planetary life” (p. 11) and to open up lines of critical engagement that will enable us to repose the questions of power and politics contra their present biopolitical framing (p. 69).

Liberal Terror lays out a philosophically rich analysis of the onto-theological aspects of liberal thought, which, as Evans argues, have always been its key defining feature (p. 55). “Liberalism has always sought to secure life for its own productive betterment” (p. 55). The text guides us through the how and why of liberalism’s arrival at its current understandings of threat. It explains how the concept of human security expanded to encompass the drive to secure humanity at both the local and global levels. It explores the social construction of the late liberal subject for whom emergence is both an individual attribute and a continuous potential security challenge. The text discusses how the events of 9/11 brought back the problem of evil (p. 101) and the ways in which the Kantian concept of “radical evil” informs the current liberal preoccupations with securing the moral regeneration and development of humanity (p. 132). The critique culminates in an analysis of the new liberal leviathan and its imperialistic regime of biopower that is driven to ameliorate all global problems by drawing them within its “remit of global security discourses and practices” (p. 157). Thus, the circle is complete and the liberal terror is clearly revealed in its all-encompassing sense of its own divinely ordained raison d’etre.

One of the most significant contributions of Evan’s analysis is its expansive theorizing of the biopolitical basis of liberalism. His trenchant critique expands upon Michel Foucault’s biopolitical triangulation of the connections among territory, population, and security to encompass the broader political question of freedom and its relationship to human development and progress. Evans offers us a critical pathway for examining the ways in which liberal conceptualizations of freedom carry within them the potential for liberalism’s own self-destruction (p. 57) and the totalitarian impulses that are unleashed when this fear of freedom is transposed to the level of the planetary. He shifts our focus to the ways in which liberalism has always tried to circumscribe and produce the optimal conditions for freedom, and yet herein lies the existential source of liberalism’s own self-created terror. He builds upon Foucault’s conceptualization of security as an apparatus and pushes us to consider why liberal regimes have become so terrified by the prospect of the threats posed by life at the micro level, as well as those that could conceivably engulf our entire life-world (p. 67). In so doing, he creates a conceptual framework that enables us to understand what strikes such terror in the heart of liberal rule.

The events of 9/11 feed into a liberal form of humanism that, having jettisoned its faith in a divine entity, cannot resist assuming its providential rule. Evans’s reading of Kant reveals a nuanced understanding of the powerful ways in which Kantian thought haunts late liberalism. He exposes the onto-theological underpinnings of liberalism and traces their provenance to the Kantian concept of radical evil (p. 111). This is a most significant and engaging argument because it locates the moral imperative to improve life within the broader framework of the Kantian enlightenment project of immanent critique. Thus, the biological imperative to protect life revels its Janus-faced tendencies. On the one hand, as Evans reveals in the “divine economy of life,” the moral imperative to “save life” is ultimately tied to its moral regeneration (p. 114), but it is the capacity for critical, immanent thought, coupled with the potential for material emergence within the life-world we all inhabit, that terrorizes liberalism. Thus, his reading of Kant explains why liberalism requires “an innate concept of dangerous imperfection to condition the possibility for a universal mission [of salvation]” (p. 118).

My reservations about this text include Evan’s all-encompassing case against late liberalism that would seem to erode the ground for the author’s own prescriptions. He makes strong assertions that we are “in a state of terror normality” (p. 34), that we “fear fear itself” (p. 32), and that the biopolitical imperative constitutes “the real historically consistent singularity to liberal rule” (p. 55). Furthermore, the author identifies how the liberal subject has been produced to “endure the permanent emergency of its own emergence” (p. 83), with the result that “our desire to securitize everything has rendered all things potentially terrifying” (p. 88). And he laments the creation of this new liberal leviathan for which “global security therefore inevitably becomes a liberal regime of bio-power as the catastrophic imaginary becomes ‘all-inclusive’” (p. 141). He regards liberalism as a universalizing juggernaut exploiting and producing fear and terror, and yet it is this very presumption of singularity (p. 98) that troubles this reader. Liberalism has never been singular, and historically it has been rent with competing and contradictory principles and political commitments. I propose that it is this recognition of internal contradictions that could serve as the basis for contestation and resistance of this new liberal leviathan, but Evans erodes that ground in order to convince the reader of liberalism’s all-consuming will to planetary rule.

The author says little about the historical adaptability of liberalism, and yet the very characteristics of late liberal subjectivity, a postdialectical figure who creates their own prospects and embraces risk (p. 82), reveal how what once were regarded as celebratory attributes by poststructural thinkers, such as Richard Ashley and R.B.J. Walker, have now been reframed as the liberal subject’s source of threat and terror. If the liberal subject is so thoroughly terrorized by the emergent character of its own life (p. 90) and there is no longer any clear sense of inside/outside within this biopolitically driven formulation of liberal rationality (p. 81), then one cannot help but wonder about the potential for the emergence of resistance. Perhaps an admission of the less than totalizing effects of liberalism and its penchant for adaptability might indeed serve to sustain his call for a “new political imaginary” (p. 199) that would provide us with the “reasons to start believing in this world” (p. 200). But as things stand, Evans’s desire for “a truly exceptional politics that demands the impossible” would seem ill suited to confronting this new leviathan. His attachments to a privileged space of “the political” (p. 40), where power and politics can realign (p. 98) to disrupt the biopolitical imperative, is hinted at but never fully developed. His attachments to the political constitute the standard reply to such bleak and foreboding critiques of liberalism, but one cannot help seriously doubting our chances for (re)creating a sense of joie de vivre.