A Critical Reflection on the Paradigm Transformation of Liberalism in the Age of Risk

Xuewei Hou

doi:10.6918/IJOSSER.202605_9(5).0023

Authors

Xuewei Hou

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.6918/IJOSSER.202605_9(5).0023

Keywords:

Systemic existential crisis; liberalism; paradigm transformation; human coexistence and co-being; resilient freedom.

Abstract

Contemporary society is increasingly shaped by systemic risks generated within the very process of modernization. Climate change, ecological degradation, public health crises, the loss of control over technological systems, and failures of global governance no longer appear as isolated events; rather, they threaten the shared conditions of human existence and reshape the problem horizon of modern political philosophy. This article argues that such systemic existential crises expose and intensify liberalism’s internal tensions between liberty and equality, the individual and the community, and neutrality and substantive value commitments. The age of risk, however, does not require a simple rejection of liberalism. It calls instead for a paradigm transformation: from a rights-centered model based on isolated individuals toward a conception of freedom grounded in the shared conditions of existence of real individuals in coexistence and co-being, and from negative liberty toward resilient freedom. Taking Marx’s conception of humanity as “human society or associated humanity” as its methodological point of departure, this article argues that this conception itself contains three interrelated dimensions: a perspective of totality, a principle of real individuals, and a critical measure for understanding the unity of the individual and humanity. On this basis, it explores the possible direction of liberalism’s paradigm transformation in the age of risk. It concludes that liberalism can regain theoretical explanatory power and normative vitality only by rethinking individual freedom in relation to the shared conditions of human existence.

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