August 26, 1938: Austria was under Nazi rule, and Czechoslovakia was feared to be next. The world was on the brink of a new war. In Paris, a room full of famed economists met to discuss the future of liberalism, the ideology that had shaped the West for the previous hundred years. Held in Europe and attended mostly by Europeans, it was at the behest of an American journalist.Walter Lippman was a co-founder of the New Republic magazine and widely seen as the intellectual bedrock of the New Deal. “Liberal” as an adjective was only beginning to refer to the soft social democratic reformism of Roosevelt, and Lippman was feted as the augur of a new era. However, his ideological underpinning continued to evolve, as he identified less with the Progressives and more with

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