Liberal Pasts and Liberal Futures in Germany and Austria

Modern liberalism, born in the 18th century European Enlightenment, experienced its most spectacular historical eclipse in Hitler's Greater Germany between 1933 and 1945. Nowhere did liberalism's future look more bleak than in the post-war wreckage of Germany and Austria in 1945. Today, however, social-liberal structures govern the limits of the possible in German-speaking Europe, albeit in an often uneasy, hybridized relationship with neo-corporatist social arrangements. Contemporary historiography and social theory reflect a new and more sympathetic appreciation of the richness of the German and Austrian liberal traditions within the framework of such currently fashionable concepts as modernization, political culture, the public sphere, and civil society, and within the context of the comparative political and cultural study of Germany, Austria, Great Britain, France, and the United States.