Populism, Intolerance, and Two Concepts of Liberty

The Critical Review Foundation requests funding to enable us to produce special issues of the scholarly journal Critical Review on the topics of populism, toleration, and Isaiah Berlin's famous essay on "Two Concepts of Liberty." These special issues should contribute illuminating new insights that challenge conventional analyses of populism and intolerance. Revisiting Berlin's "Two Concepts of Liberty," meanwhile, will allow our contributors to address the upsurge of radical thought in fresh ways. At present, scholarship on all three themes has acquired a crust of conventional wisdom that we hope to challenge. Thus, the three special issues published by the Critical Review Foundation will promote unconventional answers to the questions of why populist politics and intolerance are gaining ground in the modern world, and why radicalism is making a comeback. The likely outcome is a challenge to intellectual complacency about these three important themes that, we hope, will promote a more sophisticated understanding of all three of them among Critical Review's audience of political theorists and, more broadly, students and future scholars.