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[/audioplayer]As a graduate student in the Harvard Department of Government in the late 1980s, I became slightly jaded about the number of visiting academics who warned about the imminent demise of the West. The thrust of their arguments was nearly always the same. The secular liberal values we cherish, such as the separation of church and state and freedom of speech, won’t survive in the face of growing religious animosity unless they’re rooted in something more intellectually and spiritually compelling than capitalist individualism. They were talking about Islamic fundamentalism, obviously, though sometimes they threw in Christian fundamentalism to seem even-handed.
These political scientists were, without exception, left of centre and their critique of classical liberalism was usually accompanied by a call for some version of socialism or communitarianism.
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