OM DENNE EPISODE
On a chilly May morning in 1618, four Catholic lords regent, arrived at the Bohemian Chancellery at 8:30 am, to meet their Protestant counterparts.
The agenda was to clarify whether the four regents were responsible for persuading the Emperor to stop Protestant church construction on royal lands.
It did not go well. A fracas followed. At the end of which, two regents, plus their secretary, were defenestrated - literally thrown from a third storey window.
Miraculously, all three survived the 70-foot fall.
Millions would not be so lucky. The Thirty Years War that followed The Defenestration of Prague was one of the most destructive events in human history. By its end, a fifth of the German lands’ population was dead. Far more than the Second World War.
In all, the Reformation’s wars of religion lasted around 120 years, and shattered the peace of the continent.
Surveying the carnage, early liberal thinkers saw the new political ideology of liberalism as a solution: religious toleration, baked into the state.
Yet for every Enlightenment thinker who genuinely sought to promote plurality, there was one who was actively hostile to religion itself.
Voltaire and Rousseau preached religious toleration, but when the French revolutionaries carried their program to what they saw as its logical conclusion, they tried to institute a state-backed Cult of Reason and installed a prostitute in Notre Dame cathedral.
Today, be it on abortion, assisted suicide, or freedoms of association, the debate has turned to whether liberalism and religion are compatible with one another.
Pure liberalism - what you might call hyper-liberalism, has grown increasingly authoritarian in nature. And some are questioning whether it is itself compatible with a pluralistic society.
Liberalism has had a good two hundred years — but as the world moves past US hegemony, is it doomed to become a victim of its own contradictions?
Philip Pilkington is a Visiting Fellow at the Danube Institute, and author of The Collapse of Global Liberalism: And the Emergence of the Post Liberal World Order.
To discuss this question, he is joined by Andrew Koppelman.
Andrew is Professor of Law, Political Science and Philosophy at Northwestern University — and author of several books, including The Tough Luck Constitution; Gay Rights vs Religious Liberty: The Unnecessary Conflict; and Burning Down the House: How Libertarian Philosophy Was Corrupted by Delusion and Greed.
And by Jacob Williams, a PhD student at Oxford University, specialising in post-liberal thought.
