The Purpose and Method for this Website

Purpose: Contribute to the discourse about the contemporary challenges to liberalism, and about how they can be countered

Political liberalism and liberal democracy are taken for granted in our society, and in large parts of the world. However, they are also challenged by several other ideologies and ethoses of various kinds. These include authoritarian ideologies that resemble those views of governance that liberalism objected to in its early days. Now, like then, they sometimes appeal to religion in support of their stance. But today, liberalism is also confronted by new problems, such as organized crime, and clan structures that challenge the law-based society.

Another large problem is arguably of liberalism's own making. It has argued for economic freedom, including the removal of obstacles at national boundaries, both for individuals and for corporations. Like all other freedoms, these can also be misused if they are left more or less unchecked, and to a large extent it is the nation-states that have enacted the necessary restrictions. These controlling forces have been weakened in recent years, and we have seen how multinational corporations and global capital has created conditions that are incompatible with liberal and human ideals. This is a problem in itself, but it has also given arguments to those who criticize liberalism as such.

Finally, there is a problem that has been created by the development of technology, for example by information technology whereby traditional values such as freedom of expression and the freedom of the press do not work out in the same way as before. There is a need to think about them and to recover their original intentions.

With respect to the Swedish scene, the purpose of this website is to contribute to the flow of opinions, perspectives, and ideas about these issues, in particular since they are actually quite interdependent. I hope and believe that some aspects of this debate will also be of interest for readers outside Sweden.

Method: Publish articles about both liberalism and its alternatives

During the last ten years I have addressed various aspects of liberalism and its challenges, mostly in articles that have been published on the website Argument och Fakta. These articles, and the considerations that they were based on, have now resulted in a book that was published in 2022 as Värderingar, Liberalism och Islam. A major part of this book, but without the part about Islam, is now available in English, in draft form.

In order to open up to readers outside Sweden or Scandinavia, I have also switched to writing most of my articles in English. At the same time, the present website has been extended so that it is now bilingual between Swedish and English, and the marks 'sv' and 'en' can be used to switch any of its pages between the two languages. Forthcoming articles will be published on the present website, and many of them will use the book 'Values and Liberalism' as a frame of reference and as a platform.

My Approach: the Paraliberal Perspective

The book 'Values and Liberalism' conveys as coherent perspective on liberalism and on its challenges. I refer to it as the paraliberal perspective, as opposed to the traditional, ortholiberal view of liberalism. To read more about this, please click the tab 'Paraliberal' in the left-side menu or (just as well) click Paraliberal here.