Illiberalism: a conceptual introduction

by Marlene Laruelle

Abstract

Illiberalism is an emerging concept in social sciences that remains to be tested by different disciplines and approaches. Here, I advance a fine-grained frame that should help to “stabilize” the concept by stating that we should 1/ look at illiberalism as an ideology and dissociate it from the literature on regime types, 2/ consider illiberalism to be in permanent situational relation to liberalism. To make that demonstration, I advance a pilot definition of illiberalism as a new ideological universe that, even if doctrinally fluid and context-based, is to some degree coherent.