In early 2004, I wrote a letter to a man I had never met. I was a German doctoral graduate planning to move to London, struggling to find work. My former English teacher had suggested I write to Lord Ralf Dahrendorf and ask if he needed research support in the House of Lords.
It seemed absurd. Dahrendorf was one of Europe’s leading public intellectuals. He had been director of the London School of Economics and Warden of St Antony’s College Oxford. Why would he respond to a random letter from Essen?
I wrote anyway.
A few lines came back by email, suggesting we meet once I reached London, which we did. Shortly afterwards, Dahrendorf had arranged an interview with the Liberal Democrats’ whips office, and I was working in Parliament.
He later connected me to Capital magazine, where I learned to write opinion pieces. Door after door opened because one man had answered a letter he had no obligation to answer.
Dahrendorf died in June 2009. In his final years, he had left the Liberal Democrats to sit as a crossbencher, independent of any party. It was a characteristic choice.
But he had done more than open Westminster’s gates. He had protected an idea: that intellectual work and practical engagement could combine without abandoning intellectual standards, that boundaries could be crossed with integrity intact.
In 2005, Dahrendorf delivered a lecture at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin that would become his intellectual testament. He called it Versuchungen der Unfreiheit, or The Temptations of Unfreedom (a longer version was published as a book the following year).
The standard question about intellectuals and totalitarianism asks why so many succumbed. Dahrendorf inverted it.
What immunised those who resisted? What distinguished Karl Popper, the philosopher of the open society, Raymond Aron, the French liberal who resisted the Marxist enthusiasms of his peers, and Isaiah Berlin, the historian of ideas, from those who accommodated totalitarianism: people like Martin Heidegger, who joined the Nazi Party, and Carl Schmitt, who became its crown jurist?
His answer centred on a figure from five centuries earlier: Erasmus of Rotterdam.
During the Reformation, when Europe demanded that every thinking person choose between Luther and the Pope, Erasmus refused. “Ich liebe die Freiheit,” Dahrendorf quoted him, “und ich will nicht und kann nicht irgendeiner Partei dienen.” I love freedom, and I will not, I cannot serve any party.
His contemporaries despised him for it. Luther called him a mere spectator of their tragedy.
Yet Erasmus maintained his independence when the price was contempt from all sides.
Dahrendorf identified four virtues that defined this temperament.
The first was courage: the willingness to defend freedom in solitude, standing alone when intellectual camps form and demand allegiance.
Equally important was the capacity to live with contradictions rather than seeking false synthesis in ideology.
He also prized the stance of the engaged observer, caring deeply about public affairs while maintaining analytical distance.
And finally, there was what he called the “leise Passion der Vernunft,” the quiet passion of reason: a commitment to evidence and argument so deep it becomes its own form of intensity.
These are disciplines, not preferences.
The totalitarian temptation offered what many craved: community, certainty, an end to the exhausting work of living with contradiction.
Communism promised paradise on earth. Fascism offered something different but equally powerful: belonging, a leader, the warmth of the marching column.
To resist required a different relationship to doubt itself.
The political philosopher Hannah Arendt, whom Dahrendorf admired, warned that where people speak of intellectual camps, “the anti-spirit usually rules.” Once you choose a camp, thinking becomes a loyalty test.
Dahrendorf delivered his lecture in January 2005. He was cautious about claiming too much contemporary relevance. Intellectuals, he noted, sometimes mistake the ephemeral for the secular, seeing revolution in every excited gathering.
Yet he also issued a warning.
The loss of what he called “ligatures,” the bonds of community, faith and tradition, had left many with an unstilled hunger for belonging. New fundamentalisms were emerging to fill the void.
His warning proved prescient.
In the two decades since, we have witnessed the return of the temptations Dahrendorf feared. Not twentieth century totalitarianism. But other developments that are both troubling and dangerous.
The rise of Donald Trump has precipitated a realignment among conservative and classical liberal intellectuals. Serious scholars, historians and legal theorists, many previously committed to constitutional principle and the rule of law, have migrated toward a politics that often rejects the procedural norms of liberal democracy.
Nobody disputes that tariffs, immigration restrictions and scepticism of foreign entanglements are legitimate positions to hold, whether one agrees with them or not. Still, the question is whether the intellectuals who have accommodated Trump have maintained their Erasmian commitments or surrendered them.
Consider what conservatives and classical liberals said they believed before 2016.
The rule of law meant that no person, including a president, stands above legal constraint.
Institutional integrity meant that the independence of courts, law enforcement and the civil service matters more than any electoral outcome.
Conservatives defended fiscal responsibility, free trade and strong alliances.
They defended central bank independence. This was a principle that had held since Paul Volcker broke inflation in the early 1980s, and conservatives had championed it.
They also believed character mattered in leaders, that truth telling was a prerequisite for democratic deliberation and that the peaceful transfer of power was sacred.
Trump has violated all of this.
He fired an FBI director in the midst of an investigation into his campaign. He attempted to overturn an election he lost, culminating in violence at the Capitol.
He weaponises the Justice Department against political opponents while claiming to end its weaponisation.
His administration opened a legal investigation into Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, nominally over his congressional testimony about building renovations. Critics saw it as a transparent attempt to intimidate an independent institution whose interest rate decisions the president dislikes.
The tariffs contradict decades of conservative economic argument. He denigrates allies and courts adversaries. The lies come with a frequency that makes fact checking nearly impossible.
Some conservatives recognised the temptation and refused it.
George Will, for decades one of America’s most prominent conservative columnists, left the Republican Party in 2016. It cost him much of his influence.
Bill Kristol watched The Weekly Standard, the magazine he founded, shut down after it refused to accommodate Trump.
Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes resigned from Fox News over its platforming of conspiracy theories about January 6th.
Charlie Sykes, a prominent conservative radio host, gave up his show rather than pretend that what was happening was normal.
Mona Charen, a syndicated columnist and former Reagan speechwriter, was booed off the stage at CPAC, the main annual gathering of American conservatives, for saying what everyone in the room knew to be true.
These figures paid real costs. They lost jobs, audiences and friendships. They found themselves politically homeless.
Were they perfect Erasmians? Perhaps not. Some may have simply switched battalions. Whether they have been sufficiently critical of the left is a fair question.
But they showed that resistance was possible. Others chose differently.
All of which raises the question of Niall Ferguson, the Stanford historian.
I first met Ferguson in 2010. Our paths have crossed many times since at conferences across Australia, New Zealand and the United States.
As recently as October 2024, I listened to him deliver a brilliant address on geopolitical competition at the CIS Consilium conference on the Gold Coast.
His analysis of the emerging axis of Russia, China, Iran and North Korea was serious work, and I wrote approvingly about it afterwards.
Ferguson can still do rigorous analysis. That makes his journey all the more puzzling.
His earlier books articulated the principles that Trumpism violates.
Colossus, published in 2004, made the case for American global engagement. America functioned as a “liberal empire” that promoted free trade, open markets and democratic governance.
The problem, in Ferguson’s view, was not that America was too imperial but that it was insufficiently committed to the role. He wanted more American engagement with the world, not less.
Civilization (2011) identified six “killer apps” that explained Western success: competition, science, property rights, medicine, the consumer society and the work ethic.
Property rights, which depend on the rule of law, were central. “North America succeeded,” he wrote, because it adopted British legal and political institutions that protected individual liberty and private property.
The Great Degeneration (2012) went further. The book argues that Western institutions are decaying and that this decay threatens everything the West has achieved.
Ferguson devoted an entire chapter to the rule of law, warning against its corruption into “the rule of lawyers.” He quoted Adam Smith on impartial justice.
By his own stated criteria, Trump represents the institutional threat Ferguson spent his career warning against.
A president who demands personal loyalty from law enforcement, treats the Justice Department as an instrument of political revenge, and attempted to remain in power despite losing an election.
This is the negation of the rule of law. Ferguson knew this once.
In January 2021, he called the Capitol riot a “banana republic coup attempt” and declared that “any politician who does not unequivocally condemn what happened should have no future in democratic politics.”
He identified Trump’s refusal to accept the election result as his “greatest weakness.”
Yet by 2025, Ferguson had become one of Trump’s most sophisticated defenders.
His commentary on Trump’s 2026 Davos appearance shows how far the journey has taken him.
Writing in The Free Press under the headline “How Trump Won Davos,” Ferguson framed Trump’s threatening performance through the Melian Dialogue from Thucydides, in which Athens tells Melos that “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”
Ferguson presented this as vindication of Trumpian realpolitik.
But a historian of Ferguson’s calibre knows how the story ends.
Athens won at Melos. The Athenians executed the men and enslaved the women and children.
The very next year, Athens launched the Sicilian Expedition, an act of imperial overreach that destroyed its fleet and army.
Within twelve years of telling Melos that might makes right, Athens had surrendered to Sparta. Its walls were demolished and its democracy gave way to oligarchy.
Thucydides wrote the Melian Dialogue not to celebrate power politics but to indict it. Ferguson stopped his classical analogy where it became inconvenient.
Or consider his response to the American operation in Venezuela.
The administration framed the Maduro capture as law enforcement. But Trump’s repeated emphasis on Venezuelan oil, and on American companies moving in, prompted critics to question whether the stated rationale was the whole story.
The author of Colossus would have asked what plan was in place to restore Venezuelan democracy. Instead, Ferguson praised the operation for being “refreshingly honest” about the oil.
He now dismisses legal accountability as “lawfare” and frames criticism of Trump as the greater threat to liberal order.
He has migrated institutionally to Hoover, Stanford and the University of Austin. These are places that reward rather than challenge his positions.
He describes Trump not as a threat to institutions but as a necessary “disrupter” of a sclerotic bureaucracy.
Here is what makes this difficult.
Ferguson’s implicit case runs roughly thus. American institutions were already degraded before Trump arrived. The administrative state had grown unaccountable. Intelligence agencies had been politicised.
The “rules-based international order” that the establishment championed had manifestly failed. On their watch, China kept rising and Russia invaded Ukraine. The people who created these failures cannot be trusted to fix them.
Disruption is necessary. If the disruptor is flawed, so be it. The alternative is managed decline.
This is not a stupid argument.
Parts of it are true. The administrative state has genuine problems. Ferguson documented them well in Doom.
Biden’s foreign policy record gave interventionists legitimate cause for despair. Afghanistan was a debacle. Deterrence failed in Ukraine and the Middle East. The liberal establishment has much to answer for.
But here is what the author of The Great Degeneration should recognise.
His own book argued that the rule of law, properly understood, is what separates dynamic societies from stagnant ones. Institutional decay happens when insiders rig the rules for themselves. The solution he prescribed was renewal of impartial justice, not its abandonment.
A leader who expects law enforcement to serve him personally is not disrupting a corrupt system. He is perfecting it.
A president who treats legal accountability as persecution, who tried to stay in power after losing an election, who uses the Justice Department against political opponents: this is the stationary state arriving by a different route.
Ferguson’s diagnosis may be partly sound. His prescription is poison.
The Erasmian point is that you can see the disease without embracing a cure that kills the patient. You can criticise the blob and refuse the strongman. Will did it. Kristol did it. The path was there.
Ferguson chose otherwise. That is what makes the case worth examining. Not that Ferguson has criticisms of the left, but that he has made peace with violations of the very principles his own books articulated.
He has joined a camp.
Ferguson now operates within a network of aligned institutions, publications and podcasts that calls itself the “heterodox” intellectual right but functions as its own orthodoxy.
When he writes about Trump, the analytical distance that once characterised his historical work disappears. He can parse great power competition with precision, yet he becomes strangely incurious about whether a president should face consequences for attempting to overturn an election.
Ferguson is not unique.
Victor Davis Hanson, the classicist whose books on ancient warfare once commanded wide respect, now devotes his columns to defending Trump against all criticism.
The Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank in California, has developed an elaborate theoretical justification for treating the American regime as already fallen, requiring emergency measures to save it.
The Notre Dame political theorist Patrick Deneen, the Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule and the Israeli philosopher Yoram Hazony have abandoned liberalism explicitly, arguing that its failures justify its replacement.
The tech billionaire Peter Thiel declared years ago that he no longer believes freedom and democracy are compatible.
Common features emerge across these trajectories. Institutional migration from mainstream academia to think tanks and media outlets where accommodation is rewarded. Personal grievance that festers into tribal loyalty.
And almost always the argument that the left represents the greater threat, justifying alliance with whatever force opposes it.
This last argument seduces because it contains a grain of truth. Illiberalism does exist on the left.
But the argument becomes a permission structure for abandoning every principle. If the enemy is sufficiently terrible, anything goes.
The Erasmian recognises this as the oldest temptation of all. The logic that led intellectuals to Stalin because they hated fascism, or to Mussolini because they feared communism.
I think often about what Dahrendorf would make of all this.
He was not naive. He knew that even Erasmians sometimes compromised.
He discussed Norberto Bobbio’s 1935 letter to Mussolini, written to secure an academic position – a liberal philosopher mouthing fascist platitudes to survive.
A dictatorship corrupts souls, Bobbio reflected later. The pressure to conform can become unbearable.
But Ferguson faces no dictatorship. No one would imprison him for criticising Trump.
The costs would be social and professional: lost friendships perhaps, fewer invitations, a smaller audience on one side of the political divide. Real costs, but not survival.
If Bobbio’s compromise under fascism was forgivable, Ferguson’s accommodation under no duress whatsoever is harder to excuse.
Dahrendorf believed the Erasmian virtues could be cultivated. Intellectual integrity was a discipline rather than a disposition. People could choose differently.
What would he say to Ferguson?
Perhaps what he might have said to any intellectual who abandoned the principles that once defined their work: that the test of an Erasmian is not whether they have enemies, but whether they can resist the warmth of having allies.
Intellectual camps offer belonging at the cost of truth. The quiet passion of reason is quiet because it does not need the roar of the crowd.
Dahrendorf lived by his own standard. He crossed between academia, politics and journalism without losing his intellectual independence. Tellingly, his autobiography was called Über Grenzen (Across borders).
Some boundary crossings enrich the traveller. Others leave him diminished. The difference, I think, lies in whether you maintain the disciplines that made your work valuable in the first place.
Ferguson’s books on institutions and civilisational fragility were valuable because they applied consistent standards and followed evidence wherever it led.
When those standards become inconvenient, when applying them would mean criticising allies rather than enemies, the temptation is to abandon them.
That temptation can be resisted.
Dahrendorf knew this and lived it. He helped a young German economist he had never met because he saw something worth encouraging: not agreement, but the possibility of intellectual seriousness.
I cannot repay that debt. But I can try to protect the same idea.