Across Western democracies, one finds many who casually dismiss liberalism as a self-justifying ideology for economic “winners” or colonialism. But with conservatives openly fantasizing about imposing their moral orthodoxy on the whole society, liberalism’s critics should be careful what they wish for.
PRINCETON – Ever since the double shock of 2016 – when British voters decided to pull their country out of the European Union, and Americans elected Donald Trump as their president – we have been told that liberalism is in crisis. But which liberalism? Are we talking about a set of ideals, or about institutions such as the much-criticized “liberal global order,” or only about recent policies pursued in a number of Western countries, which may or may not have anything to do with a political philosophy plausibly labeled liberalism?
We can ask similar questions about the word “crisis.” Are authors in what has become a “crisis-of-liberalism” cottage industry referring to a life-or-death moment, as in the original Greek meaning, or to something more mundane, such as policy failures?
Recent books chart possible answers. Patrick J. Deneen, a political theorist at the University of Notre Dame, heartily welcomes the crisis and hopes that it will lead to liberalism’s ideological and practical demise. He thinks it should be replaced with something entirely different, and he wants his book to serve as a manual for a new “elite” – a “party of order” – to bring about “regime change” and vanquish the “party of progress.”
For the gifted polemicist Samuel Moyn, a historian and law professor at Yale, liberalism has lost its way in the world of ideas and as a practical approach to politics, and its decline began much earlier than conventional diagnoses suggest. For Moyn, the issue is not merely one of 1990s triumphalism suffering a populist comeuppance. Rather, he thinks liberals started betraying their ideals in the early Cold War years. To fashion a more confident liberalism for today would require recentering the aspiration for a life of free self-creation.
The German philosopher Elif Özmen is more sanguine. She contends that liberalism has remained a coherent proposition throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Though it has certainly exhibited blind spots, these can be remedied by drawing on resources from within the liberal tradition itself. Liberals, she insists, must resist any temptation to give up on the universality of their ideals; instead, they should reassert the validity of the “liberal trio” of individualism, freedom, and equality. This last point seems especially pertinent for younger leftist critics who casually assume that liberalism is just a zombie centrism that remains hopelessly compromised by its past associations with capitalism and colonialism.
Liberalism’s Assassins
Deneen shot to prominence with his 2018 tract Why Liberalism Failed. Promoted by self-declared centrists and recommended by none other than Barack Obama, it seemed to be one of those books that is far more cited than actually read. With many still reeling from Trump’s election, it served as a perfect prop for public performances of liberal contrition, alongside more personal accounts like J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy.
At a time when democracy is under threat, there is an urgent need for incisive, informed analysis of the issues and questions driving the news – just what PS has always provided. Subscribe now and save $50 on a new subscription.
Subscribe Now
The latter became handy as a guidebook for “Trump Safaris,” as liberals ventured into the exotic hinterlands where supposedly rooted “Somewheres” were feeling deeply alienated from all those condescending cosmopolitan “Anywheres.” (Coined by the British journalist David Goodhart, this facile contrast between those bound to a place and those who can plop their laptop down anywhere was eagerly adopted by liberals trying to make sense of our supposed “age of populism.”)
By contrast, Deneen’s book was more of a guide to the anti-liberal mind. His most daring, but wildly implausible, claim was that virtually any problem today can be attributed not to liberalism’s failure, but to its triumph.
With its pernicious individualist ideology – antithetical to stable communities, genuine morality, and also the environment – Deneen sees liberalism as a common thread uniting otherwise opposing factions. Democrats and Republicans are just the progressive and libertarian (or market-crazed) wings of the liberalism that started with John Locke. Faced with this apparent total domination, Deneen could only throw up his hands and recommend retreating into small communities devoted to anti-liberal ways of life.
Half a decade on, Deneen’s prescription has changed. He is now heartened by the supposed global populist revolt and the success of anti-liberal regimes ruthlessly using public power to enforce their own understanding of proper morality. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s regime – with its natalist policies and public endorsement of Christianity – is regularly held up as a model. Among other things, Deneen and fellow “integralists” apparently want to revisit the question of why state and church should be separated at all.
Conservative Revolution
In Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future, Deneen recites the same rap sheet. Liberalism, in its “progressive” and “classical” varieties, is supposedly all-powerful, leaving American cities decaying and mired in “a dull ennui and psychic despair,” while the countryside suffers ever more “deaths of despair.” If there is any update to his earlier account, it is that the nominally left- and right-wing factions’ collusion now extends to “Woke Capitalism,” a project in which a nefarious managerial-cum-technocratic class has weaponized identity politics “to control the underclass.”
Like other US merchants of moral panic, Deneen does not shy away from describing contemporary life as “totalitarian.” The liberal regime may be “exhausted,” but it keeps making more totalizing claims on its citizens, destroying whatever is left of social stability in the name of liberation.
When people are mad as hell and not going to take it anymore, it’s time for a conservative revolution, brought about by a new elite. Dispensing with pesky sociological complexities, Deneen declares that all polities are, and will forever be, divided between the few and the many, with the latter finding contentment in “stability” and “continuity.” Offering no empirical evidence whatsoever, he simply asserts that this is “what most ordinary people instinctively seek,” alongside a “sense of gratitude for the past and obligation toward the future.”
Like a good Leninist, though, Deneen does not believe that the “unwashed masses” are capable of a “peaceful but vigorous overthrow of a corrupt and corrupting liberal ruling class” (one can only wonder what a non-vigorous overthrow looks like). The people may abhor the unholy alliance of “classical liberals,” “progressive liberals,” and “Marxists” who – despite obvious differences – all share an “ideal of transformative progress.” But the people, on their own, can register only inarticulate and inchoate resentment. They need a new elite to tear off “the Botox-smoothed meritocratic mask” of the liberal “smart set,” and to chart the way toward a genuine conservatism (as opposed to the counterfeit one of the Republican Party’s donor class).
According to Deneen, the history of political thought suggests two ways for the few and the many to interact. On one hand, Machiavelli shows that they can check and balance each other, allowing for a free way of life by preventing one side from achieving permanent dominance. On the other hand, Aristotle suggests that instead of a balance of power, a polity needs a “mixed constitution” and “blending” – something like a large “middle class” resulting from elites and plebs comingling (perhaps by reverting to the good old days when the boss would marry his secretary). Ideally, the polity as a whole would then pursue a vision of “common-good conservatism,” a theory propounded by Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule (a more sophisticated advocate for the new anti-liberalism than Deneen, though no less ardent in his enthusiasm for Orbán’s kleptocratic autocracy.)
After opting for “blending,” Deneen spends many more pages explaining why the masses need a truly “aligned” elite to protect them from both progressives and their own worst instincts. He contrasts this scenario with the current situation, in which the few and the many bring out the worst in each other. While the Botoxed “Anywheres” look down on the great unwashed from business-class seats, the latter – “the people,” in Deneen’s telling – appear curiously passive.
Rarely has an author written so patronizingly about the “ordinary people” whose lives and “decencies” he supposedly values. In Deneen’s telling, the everyday folks who prefer “continuity” and live in organic communities are not even up to the job of passing on their own heritage. For that, they need “an elite” to serve as “defender of the cultural traditions that are mostly a development of bottom-up practices.”
Because the people are so helpless and hopeless, the situation demands not merely a “populist revolt” but the entrenchment of an “aristopopulist regime” that will tutor the commoners. The people, according to Deneen, need “a better aristocracy brought about by a muscular populism, and then in turn, an elevation of the people by a better aristocracy.”
Who needs to hear this? Perhaps Regime Change will be a useful manifesto for other self-declared populist right-wingers who have renounced neoliberalism in favor of state-enforced conservative morality. But this group does not really require sitting through more hoary lectures on timeless lessons from Aristotle; rather, it desperately needs a political party based on a genuine social movement.
After all, the Republicans remain in the grip of donors who are far more interested in tax cuts than in shortcuts to regime change. Similarly, the Tea Party, which eventually spawned Trumpism, was an expression of the “classical liberalism” that Deneen so fervently disavows (“Keep your government hands off my Medicare!”). Powerful right-wing think tanks persist with the dogma that “government is the problem.” And if “the people” themselves read Deneen’s treatise, they are likely to be turned off by what one critic has rightly called his “breathtaking” condescension.
Roll Back the Tape
Moyn agrees with Deneen that the liberal project is all about liberation, but thinks that liberals themselves abandoned this ideal. In his short but engaging Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times, he argues that influential liberals betrayed liberalism’s central promise when they responded to the terrifying conditions of the Cold War by lowering their political-cum-moral expectations and committing to attitudes and ideas best categorized as simply conservative.
According to Moyn, liberalism’s confident creed, with its ideal of creative self-fashioning, mutated into what the late Harvard political theorist Judith Shklar called a “liberalism of fear.” The aim of politics was not to pursue the most just, but to avoid the worst (cruelty, in Shklar’s telling).
The state, in principle, was to be feared, because it could pave the way to a new totalitarianism. Far from exhibiting an underlying pattern that might offer hope for human emancipation, history had no meaning. All philosophies of history (or “History”) were to be rejected, lest they give license to sacrificing individuals in the present for the sake of some far-off utopia.
This account may be simplified, but it is not a caricature. There really was a strand of thought that can plausibly be described as Cold War liberalism, and it exhibited some of the traits that Moyn eloquently deplores. Among them were a distrust of democracy and political mass mobilization (which evoked dark memories in thinkers with direct experience of totalitarianism); a negative conception of liberty (freedom from the state), rather than a positive one (the freedom to pursue one’s potential, which may require state resources); and a tendency to view life as inevitably tragic (a departure from the earlier liberal faith in progress).
Philosophically, Cold War liberalism’s tragic leaning was born of value pluralism: since not all good things in life can be realized at the same time, there is no escaping the necessity of hard choices. Two of Moyn’s protagonists, the philosophers Isaiah Berlin and Karl Popper, shared this view. But others in his cast of characters make for an odd fit, and some can hardly be called liberals at all. Hannah Arendt, for example, was a fierce critic of liberalism, and the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb (Bill Kristol’s mother) was a prominent neoconservative.
Moreover, had Moyn included an arch-Cold War liberal like French philosopher Raymond Aron, he would have found it difficult, if not impossible, to sustain his argument that Cold War liberals all somehow turned against the Enlightenment, that they felt unmitigated hostility toward Karl Marx, or that they all had exactly the same relationship to Zionism. It is a problem when a book excludes evidence that contradicts its main claims, though Moyn’s account of how traditions evolve does offer a hint as to why he might have done so. What matters, he suggests, is not just canonizations but also “recanonizations” that reconstitute the gallery of “angels” and “demons.” Add enough demons, and a tradition might well end up discredited.
The book does not discuss ideas in any great detail. A fascinating chapter on the American literary critic Lionel Trilling exhibits both Moyn’s subtlety as an intellectual historian and his ability to appreciate the psychological complexities of Cold War liberal positions. For the most part, though, readers are swiftly ushered on to observations about the consequences of ideas. For example, Moyn makes the quasi-empirical claim that Cold War liberals’ willingness to leave the welfare state “undefended” against neoliberals had “catastrophic,” “fateful,” and “egregious” results.
But is this really what happened? One could come away from the book with the impression that we would be living in a completely different world if only someone like Berlin had given a big public lecture on the threat posed by neoliberalism (a term that would not have made a lot of sense to many people at the time). This would have to have happened by 1969 or so, because come 1971, the battle for a proper social liberalism seems to have already been lost. After all, that was the year the American liberal philosopher John Rawls published his magnum opus, A Theory of Justice, which offered a defense of the supposedly undefended welfare state.
Though Moyn rightly criticizes the many contemporary liberals who, in their despair over Trump’s election, fell back on something like a minimalist Cold War version of the creed, he shares their assumption that everything is about liberalism and what liberal elites do or don’t do. Yet, as the Rawls example shows, maybe – just maybe – it’s not always all about liberals and the choices they’ve made.
To be fair, Moyn has many sensible and bracing things to say about liberals’ mistakes since the Cold War ended. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, liberal intellectuals were too eager to compromise with neoliberals in the name of asserting an “adults-in-the-room” centrism; or, worse, in condoning torture (because tragic choices are inevitable).
Back to Basics
Can the authentic liberalism that Cold War liberals supposedly betrayed be recovered? The question is partly empirical, and partly philosophical. Moyn describes the older liberalism as “perfectionist” and “progressivist”: it professed a faith in history as a “forum of opportunity.” As a practical matter, that attitude seems a hard sell in 2024. But, on a more fundamental level, it is not obvious that liberals need to believe that history is giving them a boost in order to advocate for their positions.
By “perfectionist,” Moyn means that the liberal project once offered a substantive notion of the good life, one centered on “creative and empowered free action.” Yet while that seems an attractive proposition, it might not be everyone’s preference. Liberals pushing for such a substantive vision violate what Özmen defends as liberalism’s commitment to neutrality and impartiality. In Was ist Liberalismus?(What Is Liberalism?), her engaging and tightly argued restatement of basic liberal principles, she defends these values as indispensable for allowing individuals to pursue their own ideals of what constitutes a life well lived.
No substantive notion of the common good – be it religious or secular – could ever meet liberalism’s fundamental requirement that the political order be justified to all those living under it. This proviso is avoidable if your starting point is Deneen’s: you simply decree the good of the collective. But, owing to liberalism’s irreducible individualism, it must insist on the primacy of all individuals’ equal freedom – secured by law – to fashion lives in their own way (which may or may not lead to something conforming to conventional morality, or something “creative,” for that matter).
Adamant about the objective validity of this conception of political order, Özmen faults theorists who have reduced liberalism to one form of life that just so happens to have emerged in some countries in the past few centuries or so. Among her targets here are the later Rawls, after he had moved away from emphasizing a liberalism with universal aspirations, and the philosopher Richard Rorty, who viewed “bourgeois liberalism” as a supremely attractive, but ultimately contingent set of beliefs.
To be sure, liberalism is not a metaphysical truth; but nor is it just some accident of history and culture, Özmen argues. It simply is the case that no other conception of political order could ever be justified to every individual living under it. Liberalism achieves this consent by not being neutral when it comes to neutrality – by defending an order that allows individuals to do their own thing. This principle is required to uphold any commitment to freedom, which, one must add, includes the freedom not to live a life of creative agency.
Özmen has little to say about specific policy challenges; but that might partly be the point. Far too many “crisis” diagnoses mix up particulars, such as nefarious economic arrangements, with more fundamental moral commitments, when the latter have little to do with the former. As Moyn, too, would argue, the logic of neoliberalism is not somehow inscribed in liberalism as such.
“If in doubt, for liberalism!” is Özmen’s concluding recommendation, which can sound like the kind of minimalist, disenchanted liberalism that Moyn thinks aims too low. Yet with its philosophical clarity and moral force, her book is a useful primer for those who would casually dismiss liberalism as a complacent ideology for economic “winners” or for cruel forms of capitalism and colonialism. With some authors proposing top-down imposition of conservative moral orthodoxy, we would do well to reassure ourselves about the alternatives.
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PRINCETON – Ever since the double shock of 2016 – when British voters decided to pull their country out of the European Union, and Americans elected Donald Trump as their president – we have been told that liberalism is in crisis. But which liberalism? Are we talking about a set of ideals, or about institutions such as the much-criticized “liberal global order,” or only about recent policies pursued in a number of Western countries, which may or may not have anything to do with a political philosophy plausibly labeled liberalism?
We can ask similar questions about the word “crisis.” Are authors in what has become a “crisis-of-liberalism” cottage industry referring to a life-or-death moment, as in the original Greek meaning, or to something more mundane, such as policy failures?
Recent books chart possible answers. Patrick J. Deneen, a political theorist at the University of Notre Dame, heartily welcomes the crisis and hopes that it will lead to liberalism’s ideological and practical demise. He thinks it should be replaced with something entirely different, and he wants his book to serve as a manual for a new “elite” – a “party of order” – to bring about “regime change” and vanquish the “party of progress.”
For the gifted polemicist Samuel Moyn, a historian and law professor at Yale, liberalism has lost its way in the world of ideas and as a practical approach to politics, and its decline began much earlier than conventional diagnoses suggest. For Moyn, the issue is not merely one of 1990s triumphalism suffering a populist comeuppance. Rather, he thinks liberals started betraying their ideals in the early Cold War years. To fashion a more confident liberalism for today would require recentering the aspiration for a life of free self-creation.
The German philosopher Elif Özmen is more sanguine. She contends that liberalism has remained a coherent proposition throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Though it has certainly exhibited blind spots, these can be remedied by drawing on resources from within the liberal tradition itself. Liberals, she insists, must resist any temptation to give up on the universality of their ideals; instead, they should reassert the validity of the “liberal trio” of individualism, freedom, and equality. This last point seems especially pertinent for younger leftist critics who casually assume that liberalism is just a zombie centrism that remains hopelessly compromised by its past associations with capitalism and colonialism.
Liberalism’s Assassins
Deneen shot to prominence with his 2018 tract Why Liberalism Failed. Promoted by self-declared centrists and recommended by none other than Barack Obama, it seemed to be one of those books that is far more cited than actually read. With many still reeling from Trump’s election, it served as a perfect prop for public performances of liberal contrition, alongside more personal accounts like J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy.
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The latter became handy as a guidebook for “Trump Safaris,” as liberals ventured into the exotic hinterlands where supposedly rooted “Somewheres” were feeling deeply alienated from all those condescending cosmopolitan “Anywheres.” (Coined by the British journalist David Goodhart, this facile contrast between those bound to a place and those who can plop their laptop down anywhere was eagerly adopted by liberals trying to make sense of our supposed “age of populism.”)
By contrast, Deneen’s book was more of a guide to the anti-liberal mind. His most daring, but wildly implausible, claim was that virtually any problem today can be attributed not to liberalism’s failure, but to its triumph.
With its pernicious individualist ideology – antithetical to stable communities, genuine morality, and also the environment – Deneen sees liberalism as a common thread uniting otherwise opposing factions. Democrats and Republicans are just the progressive and libertarian (or market-crazed) wings of the liberalism that started with John Locke. Faced with this apparent total domination, Deneen could only throw up his hands and recommend retreating into small communities devoted to anti-liberal ways of life.
Half a decade on, Deneen’s prescription has changed. He is now heartened by the supposed global populist revolt and the success of anti-liberal regimes ruthlessly using public power to enforce their own understanding of proper morality. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s regime – with its natalist policies and public endorsement of Christianity – is regularly held up as a model. Among other things, Deneen and fellow “integralists” apparently want to revisit the question of why state and church should be separated at all.
Conservative Revolution
In Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future, Deneen recites the same rap sheet. Liberalism, in its “progressive” and “classical” varieties, is supposedly all-powerful, leaving American cities decaying and mired in “a dull ennui and psychic despair,” while the countryside suffers ever more “deaths of despair.” If there is any update to his earlier account, it is that the nominally left- and right-wing factions’ collusion now extends to “Woke Capitalism,” a project in which a nefarious managerial-cum-technocratic class has weaponized identity politics “to control the underclass.”
Like other US merchants of moral panic, Deneen does not shy away from describing contemporary life as “totalitarian.” The liberal regime may be “exhausted,” but it keeps making more totalizing claims on its citizens, destroying whatever is left of social stability in the name of liberation.
When people are mad as hell and not going to take it anymore, it’s time for a conservative revolution, brought about by a new elite. Dispensing with pesky sociological complexities, Deneen declares that all polities are, and will forever be, divided between the few and the many, with the latter finding contentment in “stability” and “continuity.” Offering no empirical evidence whatsoever, he simply asserts that this is “what most ordinary people instinctively seek,” alongside a “sense of gratitude for the past and obligation toward the future.”
Like a good Leninist, though, Deneen does not believe that the “unwashed masses” are capable of a “peaceful but vigorous overthrow of a corrupt and corrupting liberal ruling class” (one can only wonder what a non-vigorous overthrow looks like). The people may abhor the unholy alliance of “classical liberals,” “progressive liberals,” and “Marxists” who – despite obvious differences – all share an “ideal of transformative progress.” But the people, on their own, can register only inarticulate and inchoate resentment. They need a new elite to tear off “the Botox-smoothed meritocratic mask” of the liberal “smart set,” and to chart the way toward a genuine conservatism (as opposed to the counterfeit one of the Republican Party’s donor class).
According to Deneen, the history of political thought suggests two ways for the few and the many to interact. On one hand, Machiavelli shows that they can check and balance each other, allowing for a free way of life by preventing one side from achieving permanent dominance. On the other hand, Aristotle suggests that instead of a balance of power, a polity needs a “mixed constitution” and “blending” – something like a large “middle class” resulting from elites and plebs comingling (perhaps by reverting to the good old days when the boss would marry his secretary). Ideally, the polity as a whole would then pursue a vision of “common-good conservatism,” a theory propounded by Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule (a more sophisticated advocate for the new anti-liberalism than Deneen, though no less ardent in his enthusiasm for Orbán’s kleptocratic autocracy.)
After opting for “blending,” Deneen spends many more pages explaining why the masses need a truly “aligned” elite to protect them from both progressives and their own worst instincts. He contrasts this scenario with the current situation, in which the few and the many bring out the worst in each other. While the Botoxed “Anywheres” look down on the great unwashed from business-class seats, the latter – “the people,” in Deneen’s telling – appear curiously passive.
Rarely has an author written so patronizingly about the “ordinary people” whose lives and “decencies” he supposedly values. In Deneen’s telling, the everyday folks who prefer “continuity” and live in organic communities are not even up to the job of passing on their own heritage. For that, they need “an elite” to serve as “defender of the cultural traditions that are mostly a development of bottom-up practices.”
Because the people are so helpless and hopeless, the situation demands not merely a “populist revolt” but the entrenchment of an “aristopopulist regime” that will tutor the commoners. The people, according to Deneen, need “a better aristocracy brought about by a muscular populism, and then in turn, an elevation of the people by a better aristocracy.”
Who needs to hear this? Perhaps Regime Change will be a useful manifesto for other self-declared populist right-wingers who have renounced neoliberalism in favor of state-enforced conservative morality. But this group does not really require sitting through more hoary lectures on timeless lessons from Aristotle; rather, it desperately needs a political party based on a genuine social movement.
After all, the Republicans remain in the grip of donors who are far more interested in tax cuts than in shortcuts to regime change. Similarly, the Tea Party, which eventually spawned Trumpism, was an expression of the “classical liberalism” that Deneen so fervently disavows (“Keep your government hands off my Medicare!”). Powerful right-wing think tanks persist with the dogma that “government is the problem.” And if “the people” themselves read Deneen’s treatise, they are likely to be turned off by what one critic has rightly called his “breathtaking” condescension.
Roll Back the Tape
Moyn agrees with Deneen that the liberal project is all about liberation, but thinks that liberals themselves abandoned this ideal. In his short but engaging Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times, he argues that influential liberals betrayed liberalism’s central promise when they responded to the terrifying conditions of the Cold War by lowering their political-cum-moral expectations and committing to attitudes and ideas best categorized as simply conservative.
According to Moyn, liberalism’s confident creed, with its ideal of creative self-fashioning, mutated into what the late Harvard political theorist Judith Shklar called a “liberalism of fear.” The aim of politics was not to pursue the most just, but to avoid the worst (cruelty, in Shklar’s telling).
The state, in principle, was to be feared, because it could pave the way to a new totalitarianism. Far from exhibiting an underlying pattern that might offer hope for human emancipation, history had no meaning. All philosophies of history (or “History”) were to be rejected, lest they give license to sacrificing individuals in the present for the sake of some far-off utopia.
This account may be simplified, but it is not a caricature. There really was a strand of thought that can plausibly be described as Cold War liberalism, and it exhibited some of the traits that Moyn eloquently deplores. Among them were a distrust of democracy and political mass mobilization (which evoked dark memories in thinkers with direct experience of totalitarianism); a negative conception of liberty (freedom from the state), rather than a positive one (the freedom to pursue one’s potential, which may require state resources); and a tendency to view life as inevitably tragic (a departure from the earlier liberal faith in progress).
Philosophically, Cold War liberalism’s tragic leaning was born of value pluralism: since not all good things in life can be realized at the same time, there is no escaping the necessity of hard choices. Two of Moyn’s protagonists, the philosophers Isaiah Berlin and Karl Popper, shared this view. But others in his cast of characters make for an odd fit, and some can hardly be called liberals at all. Hannah Arendt, for example, was a fierce critic of liberalism, and the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb (Bill Kristol’s mother) was a prominent neoconservative.
Moreover, had Moyn included an arch-Cold War liberal like French philosopher Raymond Aron, he would have found it difficult, if not impossible, to sustain his argument that Cold War liberals all somehow turned against the Enlightenment, that they felt unmitigated hostility toward Karl Marx, or that they all had exactly the same relationship to Zionism. It is a problem when a book excludes evidence that contradicts its main claims, though Moyn’s account of how traditions evolve does offer a hint as to why he might have done so. What matters, he suggests, is not just canonizations but also “recanonizations” that reconstitute the gallery of “angels” and “demons.” Add enough demons, and a tradition might well end up discredited.
The book does not discuss ideas in any great detail. A fascinating chapter on the American literary critic Lionel Trilling exhibits both Moyn’s subtlety as an intellectual historian and his ability to appreciate the psychological complexities of Cold War liberal positions. For the most part, though, readers are swiftly ushered on to observations about the consequences of ideas. For example, Moyn makes the quasi-empirical claim that Cold War liberals’ willingness to leave the welfare state “undefended” against neoliberals had “catastrophic,” “fateful,” and “egregious” results.
But is this really what happened? One could come away from the book with the impression that we would be living in a completely different world if only someone like Berlin had given a big public lecture on the threat posed by neoliberalism (a term that would not have made a lot of sense to many people at the time). This would have to have happened by 1969 or so, because come 1971, the battle for a proper social liberalism seems to have already been lost. After all, that was the year the American liberal philosopher John Rawls published his magnum opus, A Theory of Justice, which offered a defense of the supposedly undefended welfare state.
Though Moyn rightly criticizes the many contemporary liberals who, in their despair over Trump’s election, fell back on something like a minimalist Cold War version of the creed, he shares their assumption that everything is about liberalism and what liberal elites do or don’t do. Yet, as the Rawls example shows, maybe – just maybe – it’s not always all about liberals and the choices they’ve made.
To be fair, Moyn has many sensible and bracing things to say about liberals’ mistakes since the Cold War ended. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, liberal intellectuals were too eager to compromise with neoliberals in the name of asserting an “adults-in-the-room” centrism; or, worse, in condoning torture (because tragic choices are inevitable).
Back to Basics
Can the authentic liberalism that Cold War liberals supposedly betrayed be recovered? The question is partly empirical, and partly philosophical. Moyn describes the older liberalism as “perfectionist” and “progressivist”: it professed a faith in history as a “forum of opportunity.” As a practical matter, that attitude seems a hard sell in 2024. But, on a more fundamental level, it is not obvious that liberals need to believe that history is giving them a boost in order to advocate for their positions.
By “perfectionist,” Moyn means that the liberal project once offered a substantive notion of the good life, one centered on “creative and empowered free action.” Yet while that seems an attractive proposition, it might not be everyone’s preference. Liberals pushing for such a substantive vision violate what Özmen defends as liberalism’s commitment to neutrality and impartiality. In Was ist Liberalismus? (What Is Liberalism?), her engaging and tightly argued restatement of basic liberal principles, she defends these values as indispensable for allowing individuals to pursue their own ideals of what constitutes a life well lived.
No substantive notion of the common good – be it religious or secular – could ever meet liberalism’s fundamental requirement that the political order be justified to all those living under it. This proviso is avoidable if your starting point is Deneen’s: you simply decree the good of the collective. But, owing to liberalism’s irreducible individualism, it must insist on the primacy of all individuals’ equal freedom – secured by law – to fashion lives in their own way (which may or may not lead to something conforming to conventional morality, or something “creative,” for that matter).
Adamant about the objective validity of this conception of political order, Özmen faults theorists who have reduced liberalism to one form of life that just so happens to have emerged in some countries in the past few centuries or so. Among her targets here are the later Rawls, after he had moved away from emphasizing a liberalism with universal aspirations, and the philosopher Richard Rorty, who viewed “bourgeois liberalism” as a supremely attractive, but ultimately contingent set of beliefs.
To be sure, liberalism is not a metaphysical truth; but nor is it just some accident of history and culture, Özmen argues. It simply is the case that no other conception of political order could ever be justified to every individual living under it. Liberalism achieves this consent by not being neutral when it comes to neutrality – by defending an order that allows individuals to do their own thing. This principle is required to uphold any commitment to freedom, which, one must add, includes the freedom not to live a life of creative agency.
Özmen has little to say about specific policy challenges; but that might partly be the point. Far too many “crisis” diagnoses mix up particulars, such as nefarious economic arrangements, with more fundamental moral commitments, when the latter have little to do with the former. As Moyn, too, would argue, the logic of neoliberalism is not somehow inscribed in liberalism as such.
“If in doubt, for liberalism!” is Özmen’s concluding recommendation, which can sound like the kind of minimalist, disenchanted liberalism that Moyn thinks aims too low. Yet with its philosophical clarity and moral force, her book is a useful primer for those who would casually dismiss liberalism as a complacent ideology for economic “winners” or for cruel forms of capitalism and colonialism. With some authors proposing top-down imposition of conservative moral orthodoxy, we would do well to reassure ourselves about the alternatives.
Samuel Moyn, Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times, Yale University Press, 2023.
Elif Özmen, Was ist Liberalismus? (What Is Liberalism?), Suhrkamp Verlag, 2023.