What is Liberalism?
A few new publications to mention this week. I have a new journal article in French History related to my ongoing book project on the Enlightenment. It’s in a special issue in honor of the great historian Colin Jones, and it’s called, riffing off one of his own most famous essay titles, “Bourgeois Enlightenment Revivified.” I also have a review, in the online publication H-France, of Antoine Lilti’s wonderful inaugural lecture at the Collège de France on, yes, the Enlightenment.
But the piece that has gotten the most attention is a long essay in Liberties assessing and forcefully criticizing the work of one of the most interesting and influential intellectuals currently writing: Yale’s Samuel Moyn. Moyn has since posted a long, gracious Twitter thread responding to me. He raises many issues, but a crucial one is the nature of “liberalism,” and its historical transformations. In the thread, Moyn defends his contention that before the Cold War, liberalism was (to quote his book) “emancipatory and futuristic,” but that fearful “Cold War liberals” stripped it of these qualities and reshaped it in narrowly individualistic terms in the decades after World War II. In the thread, he writes: “If you assume Cold War liberalism is liberalism, and that alternative versions past and future are negations of it, you miss the point of my book, which is that actually the reverse is true.” In other words, there is such a thing as liberalism: a coherent set of ideas and programs (an ideology, if you will) that had a robust and productive presence in the world until the “Cold War liberals” deprived it of its most appealing features, but that deserves to be revitalized. I have missed the point by accepting the stripped-down, impoverished version as true liberalism, and the older version (as well as the version hopefully yet to come) as false.
Like everything Moyn writes, the thread is eloquent and thought-provoking. But I would disagree with the idea that liberalism has ever existed as the fully coherent phenomenon he describes. While I called liberalism “a philosophy and a politics of its own,” I also emphasized its “inchoate” and often “contradictory” nature. And while I offered a defense of positions taken by the six thinkers Moyn profiles in his book, I also disagreed with the way he himself characterizes these positions. And do these positions represent the true essence of liberalism? Despite my sympathy for them, my final answer would be no, because I don’t think liberalism has ever really had a single true essence. It is a philosophy and politics that contains many strands, more than a few of which are in tension or even contradiction with each other. In this column, I’ll try to explain why I think so, and then come back to the question of the political differences between Moyn and myself.
“Liberal” and “liberalism” are by any account two of the most contested and confusing words in the modern political lexicon. Even today, in the United States “liberalism” generally denotes something that might be described as a weak version of Western European social democracy, while in Western Europe, it often means something closer to free market conservatism. The historian Helena Rosenblatt, in her indispensable 2018 book The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton University Press) stresses that the debates and the confusion go very far back. The label “liberal” emerged in Europe in the wake of the French Revolution, and at first described a political program which, while respectful of individual rights, was also elitist and paternalistic, concerned with how to construct a stable “government of the best.” But disagreements were already legion, and Rosenblatt tellingly quotes that quintessential liberal thinker, John Stuart Mill, on the subject: “the libéraux comprise every shade of political opinion.”
Samuel Moyn argues that pre-Cold War liberalism embraced important elements of socialism. It’s a key part of his argument that that liberalism was originally emancipatory and futuristic. And many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century liberals certainly fit into the pattern he describes. Mill was one. Another was the British writer Leonard Hobhouse, whom Rosenblatt quotes as follows: “True socialism serves to complete rather than to destroy the leading Liberal ideals.” But many other liberals had quite different positions: notably Alexis de Tocqueville, whom Moyn describes in his Twitter thread as his (presumably, liberal) “guru.” “What characterizes all socialists,” Tocqueville declared in one of his parliamentary speeches, “is a persistent, varied, relentless effort to mutilate, truncate, and impede human liberty in every way possible.” That’s not exactly an embrace. Tocqueville could write with nostalgia of the era when his aristocratic ancestors lorded it over the French peasantry, and he viewed democracy as an irresistible, awe-inspiring, but also potentially dangerous force. Individual rights played a relatively small part in his vision of ‘liberty.” In short, his was a very different strand of liberalism from John Stuart Mill’s.
Helena Rosenblatt’s work might seem to fit in well with Moyn’s. She argues that the idea of “classical liberalism,” helpfully defined by Isaac Kramnick as a “modern, self-interested, competitive, individualistic ideology emphasizing private rights,” is a very late invention. It was born in the twentieth century, in her account, in large part in reaction to Communist totalitarianism, and she highlights in particular the work of Isaiah Berlin, one of Moyn’s exemplary “Cold War liberals.” She adds that once the idea was constructed, intellectual historians set about producing a deceptive genealogy for it: “Founding fathers of liberalism were discovered,” John Locke first and foremost. But unlike Moyn, Rosenblatt puts the emphasis on debate and difference, noting, for instance, the strongly anti-democratic views of many early liberals, as opposed to twentieth-century ones. Her “lost history” is not an attempt at a “true history.” (Incidentally, I discussed many of these issues, and Rosenblatt’s book, a few years ago in a long review essay for The New York Review of Books).
One simple reason I don’t think any such “true history” can be written is the obvious one that political ideas and political programs do not exist in a vacuum. Different political, social, economic, and cultural contexts call forth different responses and approaches. The period of the Cold War, in which the modern welfare state was in the ascendant, labor unions were strong, a serious degree of economic equality seemed assured, the Soviet threat remained real, and Communism was unleashing new horrors in China and Cambodia, called for a very different liberal program than the period of the Great Depression, on the one hand, or our own day, on the other. There is a reason why the liberal Leonard Hobhouse, writing in 1904, had such a different attitude towards “socialism” from the liberal Isaiah Berlin, writing many blood-soaked decades later.
Outside of the world of historians, a more important question than “what was liberalism” is “what should liberalism be”? Is there a set of ideas and programs that builds on the multifarious strands that have been called “liberal” to confront the challenges we are facing today? Here, in some respects, Samuel Moyn and I are probably not as far apart as our debate might suggest. As he hints in his Twitter thread (“two could play at the biographical game”), my own political sympathies have gone back and forth over the years, and I make no claims to complete consistency (for one thing, the circumstances have changed). Although I was long associated with the old New Republic magazine, I disagreed strongly with most of my editorial board colleagues there over the Iraq War, which I opposed. There was a great deal in Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns that appealed to me, especially when it came to issues of economic inequality, corporate power, labor unions and reproductive rights. As I wrote in an earlier Liberties essay, I’m horrified by the way different forces in American life are working to curtail the democratic political process, whether in the name of technocratic expertise, or the wisdom of markets, or (for Trumpian populists) “real Americans.” Moyn would add the courts to this list—I’d at least partially disagree on that one (although not on the issue of banning Donald Trump from the ballot—there I agree with his brilliantly argued New York Times column on the subject). I would add much of the progressive left, for its well-intentioned but rigidly absolutist stances on cultural issues on which millions of Americans, in good faith, hold different positions—I presume that here Moyn would disagree (although, ironically, to enforce its stances in the face of red state legislation, the left has again and again had recourse to… the courts). In his Twitter thread, Moyn chides me for “not noting the mistakes of the center, historic and recent, in forestalling the very outcome he demands.” I suspect I would agree with him as to many of these mistakes. But that wasn’t the subject of my essay.
But how do we get where we want to go? How do we devise a liberal program with these goals and values that has a chance of becoming reality? And how do we protect the country against the populist-authoritarian threat which too many on the progressive left are still failing to take as seriously as they should? Here, some pretty fundamental differences remain, grounded in very different visions of the liberal past. I stand by what I wrote in my essay.
Yes, it was a shot in the dark. Pls send your other review, and then I will get to the book itself. Dan
Your criticism makes sense to me. Perhaps SM is trying to appeal to those--Critical Theory people notably--who reject all forms of "liberalism." If you think about how modern European intellectual history is often taught at elite universities--with the focus on critical theory since Marx and the negation of all liberalisms. Is it possible SM is trying to bring radicals toward the center by sacrificing some modes of liberalism in order to consecrate others from a far left perspective?