Instead of starting solely from the claims of self-identified liberals, this paper investigates past and present critiques of liberalism to grasp what liberalism might be. The first part engages with the earliest practices of criticising “liberalism” that developed until the mid-1870s. The second part provides an in-depth analysis of very recent critiques of liberalism by Victor Orbán, Vladimir Putin, and Aleksandr Dugin. As all these critiques of liberalism, irrespective of the self-identification of the speaker and just like positive applications of the term, invariably make strategic use of liberal ideals and follow the same discursive rules of demarcation and universalisation, this paper argues for conceptualising liberalism as an encompassing language game that constitutes the discursive environment of modernity. Showing how even the most ardent critics cannot escape this discursive environment is a way of upholding liberalism’s universality even after the „end of history“ has ended.