After Liberalism Read online

  A frequently heard adage is that history tells less about what really happened than what each generation imagines about the past.41 This certainly applies to contemporary conceptions of liberalism, in which free trade, political internationalism, and the welfare state are all seen as parts of a composite whole. But these associations have been neither natural nor inevitable. In the nineteenth century most continental liberals were also nationalists and only opportunistically free traders. In England free trade ideas arose mostly among democrats, not mainstream liberals, and among the Philosophical Radicals to whom the French historian Elie Halévy devoted a famous monograph in the 1920s.42 In twentieth-century America free traders have included both nationalists-isola-tionalists and vigorous internationalists. In 1940 opponents of American intervention in the Second World War, led by William Borah and Hamilton Fish, thought that the removal of tariff barriers would bring peoples together without military force. Those on the other side of the intervention issue, such as Cordell Hull and Henry Stimson, called for American action against imperial Japan to create an international order favorable to free trade.43 In recent debates over the North American Free Trade Agreement and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the same difficulty arose about determining the true representatives of the liberal tradition. Those who invoked free trade were mostly very qualified supporters of a market economy, while much of the opposition on the “Old Right” came from free market critics of the welfare state. In the case of presidential hopeful Patrick Buchanan, opposition to unprotected industries went together with attacks on the welfare state, except when it was protecting American jobs.44

  The impetus toward liberal internationalism may be determined less by an economic outlook than by a commitment to a particular vision. Once liberalism came to signify the march of Progress and the advance of social policy, it could also be made to mandate a civilizing mission. That explicitly progressive mission explains why European imperialism attracted many on the left, including Karl Marx, the militantly secularist French Radicals of the 1880s, and English Fabian socialists twenty years later. Western imperialists were seen to be the midwives of modernity, who would bring the non-Western world into the new age of science, materialism, and equal rights.45

  The history of twentieth-century liberalism in any case refutes a critical judgment first put forth by the German legal theorist Carl Schmitt in the 1920s. According to Schmitt, liberals have no real sense of political life or of the intensity of political struggles. They dream instead of “depoliticized” world markets based on economic exchange and legal norms. Liberals view all rights as universal or universally extendable, because they ignore cultural and national differences—or hope they will go away. The same Schmittian refrain has come from the Left, in Theodore Lowi’s The End of Liberalism (1969). According to Lowi, a distinguished academician who favors well-coordinated social policy, “Liberal government cannot plan. Planning requires the authoritative use of authority,” but liberals, who apply “pluralist principles,” cannot “overcome the separatist tendencies and self-defeating proclivities of independent functions in government. In short, they are economic negotiators instead of political leaders.”46 In the twentieth century this view of liberalism as “the opposite of the political” has become less and less true. By now successive crusades have taken place, from the presidency of Woodrow Wilson on, to make the world safe for liberalism and democracy. Liberal democracy has become an “armed doctrine” (to use the colorful phrase of Edmund Burke) as well as a human right, and both sides of the American party spectrum have called for the use of force and public money to bring its blessing to other peoples. As Laurence Whitehead explains with regard to this ideological imperative: “One feature distinguishing the United States from all previously dominant or hegemonic powers is a persistent and self-proclaimed commitment to the promotion of democracy as an integral element of its foreign policy and its long-standing confidence that all ‘good things,’ U.S. influence and security, economic freedom, political liberty, and representative government, go together.”47

  Equally significant, American liberals have insisted at least since the thirties that social and moral improvement requires educational efforts at home and abroad. Letting people go their own way will not suffice to make them open-minded or civic-spirited. The foundations for a planned society go back in Europe to the eighteenth century, and the idea of managed progress provided inspiration for Comte and other social scientists in the mid-nineteenth century. In the United States, Lester Frank Ward (1841–1913), a father of academic sociology and a devotee of Comte, advocated the creation of a “telic and dynamic society” that would pursue rational collective ends. Sociological reformers hoped to implant these ends in all citizens.48 Ward’s concept of “realistic education” influenced heavily Thorstein Veblen, Dewey, and other early-twentieth-century American reformers. Such figures found in public education a training ground for an enlightened democratic citizenry—one that might be cleansed of unseemly religious beliefs, among other flaws. That the projects devised by European social scientists reached America was not surprising, given the cultural ties between the two continents. More interesting was the fact that these lucubrations should come to be seen as liberal. For Hayek, who wrote a diatribe entitled The Counter Revolution of Science (1955), this self-description of sociological reformers as “liberals” was patently false. “Totalitarians” such as Comte and his disciples, he said, pretended to believe in freedom and scientific method while respecting neither.49

  But Mill, whom Hayek did admire for his utilitarian thinking, praised Comte and tried to apply the latter’s sociology in the 1840s. A hundred years later it would be widely believed that liberal societies could only survive if they intensively trained their young in liberal values. More accurately put, American social reformers presented a view, which came to prevail, that public officials should preach “liberal democracy.” In the mid-thirties Dewey hoped that churches could be encouraged to do the same. To build a new society based on experimental method and communal values, it was not enough to depend on public educators. Dewey hoped to enlist religious leaders in winning acceptance for “human values that are prized and need to be cherished, values that are satisfied and rectified by all human concerns and arrangements.” Churches could do this by supplementing the work of public servants. They could “show a more active interest in social affairs, take a definite stand upon social questions as war, economic injustice, political corruption,” and, above all, “stimulate action for a divine kingdom on earth.”50

  Other liberals of the period emphasized the fascist threat in making a case for democratic values. The most instructive case in point was Karl Loewenstein in his earnest essay of 1937, “Militant Democracy and Fundamental Rights.” Though Loewenstein stops short of proposing national indoctrination in his preferred political values, he ends his warnings about the fascist danger to democracies with these pregnant observations: “In order to overcome the danger of Europe’s going fascist, it would be necessary to remove the causes, that is, to change the mental state of this age of the masses and of rationalized emotion. New ‘psycho-technical methods’ must be found to ‘regularize’ the fluctuations between rationalism and mysticism.”51

  Loewenstein’s hope that therapeutic methods could be devised to make liberal democracy fascism-resistant would become apparent among postwar militant democrats. In this respect the authors and disseminators of The Authoritarian Personality and more recent advocates of sensitivity education have not initiated anything that was not already dormant in interwar liberalism. Nor do the recent fears expressed by liberals in regard to the populist masses represent a departure from the interwar liberal devotion to the people. Finer’s attempt to appear more democratic than Hayek was simply a ploy. His defense of the people was made in the course of praising their acceptance of public administration and social planning. It is hard to imagine that he would praise their wisdom if they rejected what he calls, euphemistically, “guidanc
e.” Loewenstein is entirely candid on this point. “Democracy,” he insists, “has to be refined. It should be—at least for the transitional stage until a better social adjustment to the conditions of the technological age has been accomplished—the application of disciplined authority by liberal-minded men, for the ultimate end of liberal government: human dignity and freedom.”52

  LIBERAL CONTINUITIES AND DISCONTINUITIES

  The developmental picture of liberalism here being offered is not intended to be a rogues’ gallery. Much of the movement from the old liberalism to the steadily newer occurred because of circumstances common to the industrialized West since the nineteenth century. Urbanization, struggles for universalizing the franchise and for broader distribution of material wealth, and the growing identification of popular government with public administration have all contributed to the reconstitution of political identities. Political taxonomies, like parties, have had to change to keep abreast of social and institutional developments. Less obvious but equally significant, however, has been the shaping of political discourse, a process that has influenced structural changes in the way it has presented and prescribed them. For example, it is not irrelevant to the pace or even the nature of major political changes in the United States that social reforms have been presented as liberal, thereby bestowing upon them the appearance of continuing something hallowed over time. In Liberalism and its Challenges, Truman biographer Alonzo L. Hamby equates liberalism with all social welfare programs introduced by the federal government since the presidency of Woodrow Wilson. Though Hamby dissents from post-sixties liberal ventures into affirmative action and minority set-asides, he treats all governmental social planning since the teens as liberal manifestations.53 What he leaves unexplained is how this accumulation of social programs, all bearing the same label, is related to what used to pass for liberalism in the nineteenth century.

  Those who have undertaken to address this question have typically cobbled together presentations of an unchanging and temporally unbounded liberal essence. Though there are multiple variations on this theme, at least three have recurred with some regularity. One is the ascription to Americans of an invariable liberal identity that inevitably permeates all of their political and other activities. Viewed as embodiments of something resembling the Calvinist notion of irresistible grace, Americans are seen to have a liberal status no matter what they do. The political philosopher Leo Strauss and his numerous epigones insist that America was founded as a Lockean nation; thereafter it has stood unchangingly for individual rights to life and property. Strauss’s student Thomas Pangle further maintains that the American character was permanently shaped by the country’s founding ideas, which were materialistic, utilitarian, and individualistic.54 The European Catholic traditionalist and exuberant critic of American life Thomas Molnar also speaks of an immutable American character. Molnar argues that the United States was founded as a Protestant commercial republic, and all of its subsequent political and moral problems are traceable to that circumstance.55 In a kinder spirit Louis Hartz and Lionel Trilling have written on America’s permanent liberal culture as reflected in arts and letters.56 Trilling went so far as to locate the evidence of that culture within a particular imagination and within a temperament that he claimed to find in the national literature.

  A second attempt to find liberal continuity is to equate it with characteristically modern assumptions about society and the nature of reality. These assumptions are thought to be particularly persuasive in our time, as alternative ones have lost their hold on the popular imagination. The liberal worldview is alleged to be contractual, individualistic, and secularist. It was supposedly implicit in the attitudes of an earlier age. It found expression among eighteenth-century rationalists, but its full unfolding is taking place only now. A German intellectual historian, Hans Blumenberg, pushes the unfolding liberal heritage even further back in time. In Die Legitimita¨t der Neuzeit and in numerous essays, Blumenberg has looked for an operative secular humanist outlook from the age of Copernicus onward.57 The search for a scientific view of causation during the Renaissance, he explains, reflects attitudes about knowledge and its uses which were typical of rationalist modernity. The detachment of this modernity from older authorities, Blumenberg maintains, began earlier than is often imagined. Looking at the the American side of this modernity, political theorist William Galston makes the point that “liberalism contains within itself the resources it seeks to declare and defend a conception of the good and virtuous life that is in no way truncated.”58 Galston does not deny that liberals may draw some conceptual support from both classical and religious authors, but he is also adamant that liberals do not require these sources for the “content and depth” of their beliefs. He attributes to the spread of liberal openness and rationality a number of characteristics that he believes are embodied in contemporary America: social peace, the rule of law, receptiveness to diversity, a tendency toward inclusiveness, minimum decency, affluence, scope for development, and approximate justice (without achieving full distributive justice), openness to truth, and regard for privacy. According to Galston, we have become the showcase for all these desirable things, and to the extent that they exist, they prove the power of our liberal beliefs, which are not “neutral” but supportive of liberal institutions.59

  A third approach to presenting a consistent and vital liberal tradition is through reenactment. At the popular level this involves periodic celebrations of past liberal achievements. In the last twenty years Americans have experienced many such rites, from commemorating the Declaration of Independence to expressing gratitude for “two hundred years of a living Bill of Rights” (as a billboard that I passed daily on the way to work used to read). Reenactment also takes a second, more reflective form: engaging in a liberal founding act to justify the transformation of liberalism into social planning. The appeal to a continuous, cognitive refounding of civil society in John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971) illustrates this kind of reenactment. Rawls, who is both a socialist and a Lockean, provides a contractual theory of society in which property rights are subordinated to “fairness.” Rawls tries to conceptualize a society that would be acceptable to all on the basis of justice. Justice, he tells us, is reducible to two principles, to which all of us would give our assent if placed in an “original position” behind a “veil of ignorance.” Rawls notes that “the idea of an original position is to set up a fair procedure so that only principles agreed to will be just.” None of us in this state would be allowed to have a concrete identity: “If a knowledge of particulars is allowed then the outcome is biased by arbitrary contingencies.” This “notion of the original position” would force the participants to “choose principles the consequences of which they are prepared to live with whatever generation they turn out to belong to.”60 In a situation in which all are forced to draw their fortunes from the same bag, we would likely arrive, according to Rawls, at the same two principles of justice: “Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with similar liberty for others,” and “Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both a) reasonably expected to be to everyone’s advantage, and b) attached to positions and offices open to all.”61

  Despite Rawls’s insistence that his own priorities do not violate the first principle of justice, his concern for the second principle, that is, for the “distribution of income and wealth and to the design of organization that makes use of differences in authority and responsibility,” overshadows his discussion of justice. He sets down conditions intended to shape its application: Inequalities are permissible only if everyone’s position is improved. Moreover, “Unless there is a distribution that makes both persons better off, an equal distribution is to be preferred.” Finally, “Inequality is permissible only if by lowering it we make the working class even worse off.”62 Presumably those who think about justice without the burden of particular identities would create and apply such maxims. Behi
nd the veil of ignorance they would be forced to imagine themselves as have-nots and would therefore demand a socialist public policy.

  Though various approaches to demonstrating liberal continuity have been undertaken, none is believable in the end. For none tells us much about the political life it sets out to describe. All of them lack the “temporal relativity” or historicity that Dewey thought that classical liberals left out of their social views. It is hard to imagine that the present American managerial state is the instantiation of a liberal character descended from the country’s founders. Other cultural circumstances must be taken into account to explain our political development. It is equally questionable whether some “disposition” discernible among learned mid-nineteenth-century New Englanders provides the key to understanding our political life in the 1990s. By now America’s inhabitants have changed in so many ways that Victorians would have trouble recognizing in them their own successors. Authorial journeys into the past may be instructive, but their value is limited. They do not reveal secrets about today’s far more heterogeneous—that is, less traditionally Protestant and less classically liberal—American society. Invocations of an immutable American liberal identity deny what centuries of change have wrought.