Liverpool Salon Presents – Dreams of Order

Dreams of Order

The Athenaeum club, Reading Room, Thursday 26th January 2023, 6.30-8.00 pm

Join the Liverpool Salon for the second in a series of conversations that take utopia and dystopia as themes for exploring the possibilities of building other, and better, societies, while reflecting on the shortcomings of our own.

Writing in 1939, E.H. Carr laid the blame for the “abrupt descent from the visionary hopes of the first post-war decade to the grim despair of the second” on the utopian illusions that a liberal world order of prosperity and progress would usher in a new era of international cooperation and world peace.

Has history repeated itself in the post-Cold War period, which pronounced the ‘end of history’ and the dawn of a new post-political world in 1989? Blindly believing that an infinitely expanding market could be the foundation of an interconnected world order, have liberal utopians once more been sleepwalking into a dystopian future?

Confirmed speakers:

Philip Cunliffe, senior lecturer in international conflict, author, The New Twenty Years’ Crisis 1999-2019: A critique of international relations; co-host, @Bungacast podcast

Cheryl Hudson, lecturer in US political history, University of Liverpool. Former director of the academic programme at the Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford.