Samuel Moyn, Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times. Yale, 2023.
Our intellectual landscape is shaped still by the ruins of the Cold War – here moss-covered but visible, there only suggestions underground, in a few places still habitable after appropriate renovation. Sam Moyn’s new book urges us finally to have done with this ruin, but not by flattening it all or moving to an entirely new place. Rather, we need to understand what it covers over, what other possible ways of thinking have been obscured by it. “Emancipatory and futuristic before the Cold War, committed most of all to free and equal self-creation, accepting of democracy and welfare (though never enough to date) liberalism can be something other than the Cold War liberalism we have known” (7). “Liberalism had been, along with socialism, one of the two great doctrines of modern emancipation, and many of its theorists undertook to craft a framework of individual and collective progress—that their heirs must now reconstruct” (25). We can locate Moyn’s book politically by saying that it responds to the failure of the democratic party to have any ideas, especially the incapacity of its constellation of think tanks and pundits to offer any kind of positive response to Trump and all that he represents. This made Jonathan Chait very annoyed, and it is safe to say that Chait is among those who ought to feel themselves attacked here. We can also understand it as a response, in a broader sense, to the polemics launched by Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed, about which more below.
Moyn’s particular intervention is to show not just that the Cold War liberal cohort represented a narrowing and reduction of the liberal tradition, but further along just what dimensions this narrowness was inflicted, and just what equipment was jettisoned to achieve the reduction. Moyn draws on what is now a significant body of scholarship renovating the history of liberalism, some of it older but much of it from this past decade. There are meaningful differences between the story he tells and the narratives in Helena Rosenblatt’s Lost History of Liberalism, or Annelien de Dijn’s Freedom: A Unruly History – but there is also substantial agreement. In the 19th century, liberalism was not primarily focused on the limitation of government action. Rather, it was a politics of freedom in which collective life conditions for individual flourishing. We can be better than we are, and in order to become better, we need each other. Rosenblatt, de Dijn, and others see liberalism as a complex tradition, and also – to varying degrees – see it as one that links a certain kind of politics to a certain kind of self. Although, see the Conti and Selinger’s long review of Rosenblatt for an assertion of the centrality of the political. Still, all agree that the later 20th century came to misrecognize its own tradition. Moyn is building on and offering some specific and trenchant arguments about this Cold War moment.
The chapters of Liberalism Against Itself were initially given as lectures, and they retain to a strong degree this flavor. For the most part this is a good thing – Moyn moves quickly, is bold and clear, and also loves a nice turn of phrase. You can still hear the audience laughing or groaning at certain moments. There is a brief and programmatic introduction, then there are chapters on Judith Shklar, Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Hannah Arendt, and Lionel Trilling. The Arendt chapter is perhaps the most interestingly polemical, and in article form has been the subject of some push-back (most of which, it seems to me, was beside the point). I myself found the chapter on Himmelfarb the most surprising and also depressing. Many figures recur and could have their own chapters. Talmon and Hayek are maybe the most significant; Edmond Wilson perhaps the most to be regretted.
The Cold War liberals were, by and large, ready to stand shoulder to shoulder – often regretfully and sadly, of course – against projects of collective emancipation. There was one exception: Israel. There are many ways of explaining this, but its symptomatic nature is what interests Moyn. And it also is the opportunity for a striking and telling turn of phrase: “perhaps Arendt, like the Cold War liberals, wasn’t Zionist enough.” Not Zionist enough in that not sufficiently universalist in her – their – Zionism. Among Moyn’s most significant briefs against the CWLs as a whole is their “geographic morality.” Hannah Arendt, for Moyn, is useful because she is more explicit and less quiet about her preference for (in a phrase Moyn borrows from Tyler Stovall) “white freedom.” These are intellectuals who are supposed to stand for freedom, but, as he says elsewhere, they cannot imagine an international politics of freedom that is not also the extension of empire. Decolonization does not appear to them as an explosion of human freedom, only of danger. They could not approach it in any other mode. That was a catastrophic failure. One might ask how much ideas had to do with it at the time – but only if one wishes further to argue that our ideas today will make no difference either.
This connects back to debates (involving Gary Wilder and Fred Cooper) that took place a few years ago now around the significance of the nation-state form in the moment of decolonization. Moyn’s position (I believe) is that the nation-state, despite its many flaws, occlusions, and oppressive potentialities, remains a necessary and indeed the major successful form in which we humans have made our own lives better. The failures of decolonization here are not the result of excessive national sovereignty, but of cynical attacks on the not-yet-postcolonial world by the old imperial powers. If it is hard to know, sometimes, how a nation-state can resist the imperatives of global finance capital, it is yet harder to know what other political form will be more capable of it. The 19th century liberal tradition – and here we can think back to Moyn’s defense of, for instance, Mazzini – saw the nation as a space of freedom, Cold War liberalism stood finally disabused of this illusion at just the moment it left Euro-America.
Shklar, especially her early After Utopia (1957), is Moyn’s guide and inspiration in the book. She is, as he writes, “less Beatrice than Virgil” in the passage through this selection of Cold War Liberals. Certainly Moyn makes me feel very acutely that I need to sit down and read After Utopia pretty much right now. Moyn wants to read Shklar for the possibilities that she this early book contains, and he writes that Shklar’s “own maturation cut off certain trajectories she might have followed. For us, however, those trajectories remain open” (37). Which leaves us with a question – open for whom? For whom is this book written? Why try to reactivate the liberal tradition in 2023?
One answer I think is that Moyn recognizes that this is the only idiom that stands a chance of being heard by what remains of the policy making intelligentsia in the United States. ‘Liberalism’ might just mean the imaginary space within which mainstream Democratic politics takes place, but the language is one worth fighting over in order to expand the realm of what is not only possible but possible to imagine working toward. In important respects the book is an argument about the neoconservative movement that, Moyn implies, was profoundly indebted to the intellectual machinery and canons of the Cold War liberals. Himmelfarb’s husband Irving Kristol, for instance, is a case in point. At issue here are the people who convinced themselves, on the basis of Cold War reasoning, that invading Iraq in 2003 was a good idea. Similarly, although in a different vein, the neoliberals who dominated domestic policy debate since the 1990s are presented as very much occupying space opened for them by the Cold War liberals. Indeed it would be recklessly optimistic to think that neoliberalism as policy has really been finished off by Covid.
All that said, however, it is legitimate to ask what is the usefulness in 2023 of exploding the false binary of Reagan or Clinton. Moyn mentions Patrick Deneen’s 2018 Why Liberalism Failed, and we can perhaps see Moyn’s larger aim as providing an answer to this sort of conservative cultural politics. Deneen’s “liberalism” indeed is an ahistorical boogey-man – unfolding its cruel logic across the history of the United States, an unmoved mover of history. A convincing argument that Karl Popper’s reading of Hegel was badly wrong is not going to demonstrate, even though the possibility is delicious, that Deneen is himself working with a pessimistic Hegelian theory of history – never mind convince anyone who takes Deneen seriously to return to an emancipatory Hegelianism. Of course Moyn does want to defend that tradition, I think, from Deneen’s superficial reading. This is why it matters that “there are liberal resources for surpassing the limits of Cold War liberalism” (2). The first step toward this, of course, is a historical account of how this possibility fell away or – in a wonderful turn of phrase – was “deaccessioned” from the liberal tradition.
Deneen and others who might be said to be auditioning for parts in some future historian’s Politics of Cultural Despair tempt leftists to respond in a simple way: what you ascribe to liberalism is in fact the fault of capitalism. There’s much truth in that complain, but it’s to be resisted for, I think, obvious reasons. The move Moyn is making here, however, is to meet Deneen et al on something like their own ground by attempting to recover liberalism as a political project that could be a source of meaning rather than alienation and irony in the lives of actual people in the 21st century.
The recent revival of scholarship on the history of liberalism sees that there was a liberal self, as well as a liberal approach to government intervention in market relations. Moyn takes cues here partly from Amanda Anderson’s Bleak Liberalism – on which he lavishes praise, and which he castigates intellectual historians for ignoring. As Anderson wrote in 2011, speaking especially about the Cold War liberals, “it is precisely the belated and disenchanted quality of this liberalism that requires exegesis, so as to better understand it as a response to a historical situation, one that dwells in the existential register of crisis and repair as much as it does in the normative regions of principle and procedure” (Anderson 2011, 216). Trilling is the key but not unique figure for Moyn in this approach to liberalism as a specific form of self-fashioning (or, in this case, garrisoning). Describing the state of things especially after January 6, 2021, Moyn writes that “the liberal tradition had devolved into a torrent of frightened tweets and doomscrolling terror” (174). One might see a narrative of decline here – the existential angst of the Cold War was deeper, more fully felt, than our own – one might also suggest that the coordinates of this catastrophizing have changed too significantly for the comparison to be of any use. Here an analysis of capitalism as it shapes everyday life is very much in order, it will be what allows us to index these changes, and also to think consecutively about what may be possible now and here (wherever that is). That attention to the way capital structures individual experience must be matched, for political effect, to a clear understanding of the limits a somewhat different sort of capitalism puts on the actions of particular states -- goes without saying.
What Moyn wants us to find in the liberal tradition are the resources – and perhaps here it is really just the courage – to embrace collective emancipation as a meaning-making project for ourselves. Or so it seems to me the logic of his position suggests. Asking an intellectual history of a clutch of mid-century intellectuals to help us do this is, after all, a tall order. Really this book is preparatory to such a project – the architectural survey of what ruins remain undertaken before we can build something new.
