Triumph and Twilights of One Great Teaching
The article attempts to identify and analyze the most important factors of the crisis of values, ideas, principles of the liberalism that underlie political democracy. It is shown that liberalism and political democracy themselves represent answers to the challenges created by the transition of countries and peoples of the West from the Middle Ages to the New Time in the 16th-18th centuries. Being oriented toward a radical break with the past, they laid ideological and political foundation for the Great Transformation, in the process of which the new capitalist rationalistic civilization based on such values as human rights and freedoms, market economy and rule of law replaced forms of the medieval state system. It is emphasized that they originated in a relatively narrow group of peoples of the Euro-Atlantic world and played a huge role in their economic, technological and social progress. At the same time, the thesis is put forward that liberalism and democracy being historical phenomena are subject to the laws of origin, triumph, gradual decline natural for human communities. Its validity is evidenced by the tendencies and processes that liberalism and political democracy have experienced over the past two-three decades when they reached the highest limit of their development, and in the eyes of the intellectual and political establishment of the West acquired the status of the ultimate Truth. The article shows the factors that contributed to absolutization and emasculation of the values of human rights and freedoms as well as of other related ideas and attitudes, as understood by founding fathers of liberalism and great reformers of the 20th century. The main focus is on substantiating the thesis about possible completion of the liberal order domination era in the states of the Euro-Atlantic region at the country and global level. On that ground, it is concluded that we are witnessing the onset of a new era characterized by tectonic shifts in the existential basis of life with global reach, an existential shift that is equally large, perhaps even superior in its consequences to the Great Transformation that the Western world survived with the transition from the Middle Ages to the New Time.