The ideas of liberalism’s greatest thinkers

LIBERALS are in the market for new ideas. For roughly 30 years, they ran the world. Starting in the early 1980s, free markets, globalisation and individual freedoms flourished. Liberalism—in this broad classical sense, rather than the narrow American left-of-centre one—saw off communism as well as social conservatism. Then, in the crash of 2008, it all fell apart.As this week’s Books and Arts section explains, the financial crisis unleashed economic austerity and the rise of populism. Liberals, in charge of government and the banks, got the blame. They have been paralysed ever since.