Editorial Note, Jul-Aug, 2018

We take Akeel Bilgrami’s Asghar Ali Engineer Memorial Lecture for 2018 as the lead article of the current issue of Social Scientist. He gives three instances of what he calls the ‘limits’ of liberalism, namely, its acute discomfort with any ‘deep commitment’, its rejection of any concept of ‘positive liberty’, and its treatment of the current upsurge of ‘populism’ all over the world merely as a manifestation of unreason. With these he underscores a basic characteristic of liberalism, which is its refusal to essay any radical critique of capitalism and its feeling of anxiousness when anyone else undertakes such a critique and seeks to act upon it.