This volume's provocative title recalls a substantial early-twentieth-century literature, spawned by interwar economic instability and the ascent of seemingly thriving authoritarian systems (e.g., fascism and Stalinism), which struggled to explain the fragility of liberal political and economic ideals both at home and abroad. Taking right-wing (e.g., Carl Schmitt's Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy [1928]) as well as left-wing (e.g., Harold Laski's Democracy in Crisis [1931]) forms, that genre combined insights from the latest social scientific scholarship with perceptive and oftentimes prescient political observations. Although we now know that it too often understated liberalism's potential for reform and renewal, abandoning sound analysis for apocalyptic aperçus, that literature sometimes creatively identified liberalism's own internal contradictions as the source of what was then frequently described as “the crisis of our times.”

To his credit, Georg Sørensen circumvents the rhetorical overstatements (and poor political judgment) that plagued an earlier discourse on liberal crisis. As he astutely outlines, liberalism remains hugely influential, not only domestically but also in the global arena. Since the 1980s, liberal democracy's reach has expanded into new geographical arenas (e.g., Eastern Europe, Latin and South America), while market capitalism is hegemonic to a degree unimaginable before 1989. International institutions modeled on liberal ideas of rule-based governance (e.g., the World Trade Organization) have been strengthened, and they increasingly rest on an identifiably liberal international society where “values, such as freedom, responsibility, tolerance, social justice, and equality” (p. 47) are widely shared. In opposition to the predictions of international relations neorealism, and despite its present-day foibles, the European Union intimates the possibility of transforming “segregated modern states … into integrated postmodern states” subject to a strong supranational authority, along the lines envisioned by Kant and more recent liberal internationalists (p. 13). Nor does Sørensen exclude the possibility of prospective liberal advances.

Reminiscent of previous diagnosticians of liberal crisis, however, Sørensen worries that liberal progress may now be at a standstill. Just as many 1930's commentators acknowledged fascism's and Stalinism's (apparent) economic successes, so too do our contemporaries take note of authoritarian China's invidious economic progress, particularly when compared with the depressing economic news still coming out of the EU, Japan, and the United States. Democratic progress has apparently come to a halt in Vladimir Putin's Russia, and even in long-standing democracies, unsettling evidence of democratic decay abounds. Because of declining domestic support for robust liberal internationalism, it is no longer clear that the United States will continue to play the decisive role in advancing a liberal global order that it did during the Cold War. Even if it still wanted to do so, it faces major challenges from resurgent nonliberal forces around the world. To be sure, today's crisis is no mere replay of the 1930s; history never repeats itself. Still,“[r]ather than an increasingly liberal world, we are facing a more complex order where liberal voices are often not listened to or respected” (p. 53).

Like earlier analysts as well, Sørensen links present-day liberal fragility directly to liberalism's normative and conceptual foundations, or what he sees as an internal tension within liberalism between “imposition” and “restraint.” Liberal imposition affirms the universal validity of liberal values; it defends them by aggressive and even imperialistic means when necessary. In contrast, liberal restraint stresses “pluralism, nonintervention, respect for others, moderation, and peaceful cooperation” (p. 2). Even though Sørensen's formulations suggest an implicit preference for liberal restraint (e.g., by critically describing George W. Bush's now widely discredited foreign policy unilateralism as exemplary for liberal imposition), he argues that liberalism's two sides remain parts of the same coin. Since liberalism cannot consistently abide moral and political relativism, universalism is indispensable to liberalism. Though depicting restraint as a basis for many successful postwar global policies (e.g., decolonization, Bretton Woods), he doubts that it will prove up to the task of furthering liberalism under contemporary conditions. The book's strongest chapters (i.e., 4–6) outline not only how the contrast between imposition and restraint sheds fresh light on key debates about failed states, global political economy, and international institutions, but also why many of the quagmires faced by liberal policymakers are unlikely to get resolved given the congenital contradiction between imposition and restraint.

So liberals everywhere are worried about failed states. Yet neither liberal restraint nor imposition proffers constructive solutions. Liberal imposition obscures the centrality of indigenous preconditions to successful liberal order, along the lines rarely identifiable in failed states, while liberal restraint approaches to decolonization inadvertently engendered the horrors of failed statehood by creating new but weak and corrupt postcolonial polities. Even though restraint has been “at work in international society … for the last five decades,” the results have been mixed (p. 113). Liberal restraint also remains welded to increasingly dubious ideas about nonintervention. Too often, local despots and armed thugs appeal to it to ward off potentially legitimate humanitarian intervention. As for the global economy, Sørensen sees restraint as undergirding Bretton Woods and a range of related postwar liberal policies that permitted diverse nationally based economic policies and generous welfare states. Since the 1980s, however, liberal imposition has reigned supreme: One-size-fits-all neoliberalism, the so-called Washington Consensus, has been force-fed to both developing and developed countries, with no less mixed results. Yet economic globalization also undermines any possibility of restoring successful restraint-inspired postwar global economic policies.

How then might liberals move beyond the present impasse? Because restraint and imposition represent interconnected yet conflicting commitments, “there can be no clear blueprint for liberal countries” dealing with present challenges (p. 115). In light of its internal tensions, liberalism's response seems destined to prove messy and tension ridden. Not surprisingly, Sørensen's overall assessment ultimately seems discouraging. What we need is a “rethinking of the liberal project and the tensions and contradictions it contains” (p. 6), and although his concluding remarks offer some tentative suggestions regarding how we might do so (pp. 167–87), he leaves this task primarily to others.

Its formidable strengths notwithstanding, the argument suffers from two flaws. First, Sørensen seems to view liberalism's tension-ridden contours as a historical constant: Liberalism has always been a contradictory worldview. Yet how then can this observation provide a sufficiently precise explanation for contemporary liberalism's problems? Why has liberalism not instead suffered from a more-or-less permanent crisis, rather than a surprising and sometimes astonishing political durability, as the author rightly highlights? For that matter, even if we accept his view of liberalism as internally contradictory, it hardly seems self-evident that such conceptual difficulties will readily manifest themselves at the level of political and social reality. Both ideas and social practices (and institutions) are complicated and indeed typically tension-laden entities; the ties between them are equally untidy. Classical European monarchies arguably rested on ideas whose antithetical structure any conscientious beginning political-theory student can now quickly grasp. Nonetheless, such regimes thrived for hundreds of years. Like his interwar predecessors, Sørensen too often assumes that ideational tensions will manifest themselves pretty much directly in social practice. However, power and ideology can brace even political and social systems resting on fundamentally conflicting aspirations.

Sørensen's argument suffers from another flaw reminiscent of interwar debates about liberal crisis. Like some earlier versions of this position, his analysis of liberalism's latent contradictions seems underdeveloped. He associates liberal imposition not only with a robust universalism (and a willingness to defend it aggressively) but also with modern liberalism and its commitment to active state intervention and positive liberty, as famously analyzed by Isaiah Berlin (“Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Henry Hardy, ed., Liberty, 2002). Liberal restraint embraces pluralism and moderation; it is also interpreted as deriving from classical liberalism and its faith in robust property rights and negative liberty (pp. 41–43). The most immediate problem is that Sørensen then proceeds to group political figures and trends under one of the two competing rubrics in ways that risk undermining the divide between them. Despite their neoliberal instincts and hostility to the welfare state, for example, the Washington Consensus and Bush's foreign policies both allegedly embody liberal imposition. Meanwhile, the Keynesian welfare state is described as resting on postwar policies predicated on liberal restraint, while even dear old Immanuel Kant—as forceful a defender of a robust moral and political universalism as there ever has been—is associated with (nonuniversalistic) liberal restraint (pp. 54–55). For that matter, classical liberalism was hardly alien to aggressive liberal imposition, as Franz L. Neumann once famously observed: The liberal state has always been “as strong as the political and social situation and the interests of society demanded. It has conducted warfare and crushed strikes; with the help of strong navies it has protected its investments, with the help of strong armies it has defended and extended its boundaries” (Democratic and Authoritarian State, 1957, p. 22).

Since A Liberal World Order in Crisis is not primarily a contribution to political theory, it may be unfair to note that those of a more philosophical bent have been busily rethinking liberalism in ways that describe its seemingly conflicting traits as parts of a unified whole. In a similar spirit, Charles Taylor forcefully demonstrated many years ago that Berlin's separation of negative from positive liberty was overstated and misleading (“What's Wrong with Negative Liberty,” in Taylor, Philosophy and the Human Sciences, [1979] 1985). So there may be plausible reasons for concluding that Sørensen's view of liberalism is excessively stylized.

Even if the author offers astute observations about liberalism's contemporary vulnerabilities, he fails to draw satisfactory links to its conceptual foundations. In fairness, at various junctures his book suggests alternative explanations for liberalism's crisis, including the familiar phenomenon of liberal hypocrisy: Powerful states (e.g., the United States) regularly preach liberal virtues (e.g., free trade, the rule of law), but when push comes to shove, they neglect or even discard those virtues when they happen to threaten their own political or economic interests. Surely, one reason why many people around the world today look askance at liberalism, despite its astonishing historical achievements, is because its ideals get selectively employed as a political weapon by privileged political and economic constituencies. This is also why many will be skeptical of Sørensen's view that it remains up to the “leading democracies” to “take on the responsibility for creation of a stable world order; no one else can, or will, shoulder the task” (p. 2).

Unfortunately, it is by no means clear that the interests of the leading capitalist liberal democracies always mesh with those of socially excluded and politically disenfranchised peoples around the globe. Only when we have managed to create a sufficiently mature global society, along with robust worldwide political institutions capable of making sure that general rules and policies can be consistently enforced against the strong as well as the weak, will liberal universalism have gained a sufficiently firm footing on the global scene. Even if the prospects for such an order obviously seem dim, those of us committed to ensuring the continued flourishing of the best of the liberal political tradition should think hard about how to create it.