Modern liberalism and modern science are two sides of the same coin. Both are undergoing a crisis, intellectual as well as practical. Both need to be rescued and revised.
The Crisis of Liberalism and Science
There is a single discipline that can do so: the skeptical political philosophy that originated with Plato and Aristotle, and was recovered in the 20th century by scholars such as Eric Voegelin, Jacob Klein, and, most influentially, Leo Strauss.[1] But the current scholars of this classical philosophy are lost in minutia, fixated on the contingent lessons of a long-dead teacher, and unaware of or indifferent to their responsibility. Should this discipline awaken, it will need to move quickly to repair its estranged relationship with both the natural sciences and metaphysics. In turn, the sciences, above all physics and biology, need a reorientation that liberates them from modes of inquiry that have become dogmatisms—once productive premises that now stifle and distort empirical inquiry.
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