The 54th session of the “Adventus Amicorum” seminar series, hosted by the Institute of Area Studies, Peking University, convened on May 30, 2025. The keynote lecture, titled “Continuity and Rupture: The Remaking of American Political Thought after World War II,” was delivered by Prof. Samuel Moyn, a leading scholar in law and intellectual history at Yale University. The session was chaired by Prof. Zhang Yongle, deputy director of the Institute and an associate professor at the Law School.

The panel of discussants included professors Anthony Carty and Song Nianshen, associate professors Duan Demin, Kong Tao, Chen Yifeng, Luo Yinan, Tian Geng, and Jie Dalai, assistant professors Sun Hongzhe, Xie Kankan, Chen Xiaohang, and Wu Jingjian.

In his introductory remarks, Prof. Zhang Yongle highlighted Moyn’s influential work, Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times, which reconsiders the role of Cold War liberalism in shaping contemporary political discourse.

Prof. Moyn began by identifying 2016 as a pivotal year, marking renewed contestation over the meaning and future of liberalism. He contended that current debates often lack historical depth, overlooking the origins and transformations of liberalism. Drawing on Helena Rosenblatt’s The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-first Century, he emphasized that the term “liberalism” emerged in early 19th-century Europe in response to the revolutionary ethos, with figures such as Benjamin Constant, Alexis de Tocqueville, and John Stuart Mill articulating visions of freedom as historically conditioned and collectively realized.

Early liberalism, Moyn argued, was perfectionist and historicist, and was rooted in the belief that institutions should foster self-realization. Over time, its adherents evolved from laissez-faire economics toward social reform, culminating in New Liberalism and progressive politics that justified redistribution and welfare state structures.

He then turned to a central theme of his book: the mid-20th-century redefinition of liberalism by a cohort of Cold War liberals. In response to totalitarianism, they emphasized state restraint over collective emancipation, diverging from 19th-century ideals. This transformation, Moyn suggested, laid the groundwork for neoliberalism and undermined liberalism’s egalitarian potential. He further contended that liberal internationalism failed to realize a genuinely emancipatory global order.

In conclusion, Moyn presented political philosophy as a discursive struggle over tradition, naming, and inheritance. The history of liberalism, he argued, should be seen as a contested field shaped by competing claims to its legacy.

The discussion that followed featured interdisciplinary engagement. Topics ranged from liberalism’s imperial entanglements and conceptual betrayals to market morality, and rhetorical misuse and cross-cultural variants. Several participants raised questions about the applicability of Moyn’s framework to non-Western contexts and alternative political imaginaries, such as republicanism.

Prof. Moyn offered detailed responses, fostering a rich exchange. Prof. Zhang Yongle closed the seminar by underscoring the timeliness and depth of the lecture, which illuminated both contemporary crises and the long arc of ideological transformation.