Liberalism

In Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari treats liberalism as the dominant ideology of the modern world — the operating philosophy whose collapse the book forecasts. Harari distills it into a set of parallel claims that all locate authority inside the individual: liberal politics believes the voter knows best, liberal art holds that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, liberal economics maintains that the customer is always right, liberal ethics advises that if it feels good we should go ahead and do it, and liberal education teaches us to think for ourselves “because we will find all the answers within.” Underneath these sits the liberal belief in individualism — that each person has a single indivisible essence, a free authentic self, and privileged inner access to who they really are.

Harari’s thesis is that the life sciences dismantle all three assumptions: organisms are algorithms, humans are “dividuals” rather than individuals, and an external algorithm could come to know a person better than they know themselves. On that day, he argues, “liberalism will collapse” — the voter, the customer, and the beholder get replaced by the calculation, with Google’s decision-outsourcing (“Listen, Google…”) as the concrete face of this post-liberal, Dataist authority. The book also flags the fraying alliance between liberalism and capitalism: as the masses lose economic importance, Harari questions whether the moral argument alone will keep elites valuing every human being. He notes that in the twentieth century it was the Nazi vision that was defeated by “the equally grand visions of socialism and liberalism.”

Context: Liberalism in this sense is the broad post-Enlightenment political-philosophical tradition centering individual rights, autonomy, and consent — distinct from “liberal” as a partisan label in contemporary US politics. Harari uses it as an umbrella for the shared individualist assumptions of modern democratic, market, and humanist thought.

Where this appears

• Homo Deus — the book’s central “protagonist-ideology,” whose individualist assumptions Harari argues the life sciences and Dataism will dismantle.