A Liberal Among The Magyars | Danube Politics

Alexandre Lefebvre is a Canadian who lives in Sydney.

A professor of political philosophy at the University of Sydney, he is the author of five books. 

Most recently, Liberalism as a Way of Life , published in 2024, argued that liberalism functions not just as a political system but as an all-encompassing worldview shaping values, psychology, and ethics in Western democracies. 

Today, though, Alex is sleeping with the enemy. 

He is in Hungary, home of the post-liberal in the wild. And the site of Viktor Orbán’s oft-misinterpreted remark about building 'illiberal democracy'. 

He has come here on a kind of pilgrimage, and a kind of anthropological journey. Jane Goodall to the rightist wonk classes. 

For the past month, he has been working with the Danube Institute, interviewing and investigating, reading and speaking, poking and prodding, in search of the soul of this new turn in political philosophy. 

Budapest is just the first stop on a multi-country tour, looking at governments who, in very different ways, reject the old orthodoxies of the transactional liberal conception of citizenship, state and place. 

What he finds will form the basis of a new book, whose contents might be summed up in the title of his recent lecture here: From Statecraft To Soulcraft. 

In his Noema essay of the same title, Alex puts it like this: 

⁠Who are the most articulate and thoughtful representatives of regimes from around the world that are threatening to dethrone liberalism from the political, social, economic and cultural preeminence it has enjoyed for roughly the past 75 years? If it were up to me, I’d send invitations to Aleksandr Dugin of Russia, the philosopher who has been called “Putin’s Brain”; Wang Huning, the shrewd ideologue who has led Beijing for some 40 years; Steve Bannon of the United States, who, whatever his faults, has channeled Trumpism like no one else; Mohan Bhagwat, head of India’s Hindu nationalist movement; Rached Ghannouchi of Tunisia for an Islamist perspective; and finally Viktor Orbán, who is currently the Prime Minister of Hungary and apparently relishes rowdy gatherings. ⁠

This week, he is our guest here at the Danube Institute, and we want to know about the cracks in liberalism he points to, the question of whether they can be repaired, or whether the whole thing will simply need to be replaced.