Considerations on Western Liberalism

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 19^th 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 20^th 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 19^th 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 21^st 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.   

Halévy, liberty against democracy

Daniel Halévy’s 1931 Décadence de la liberté begins with the confession or boast that the author has only voted once in his life (in 1919). It ends with a funny story about Orientals. The emperor decides that a particular man will be executed by the best, most skilled executioner there is. This marvelous man arrives, the condemned man kneels and watches the executioner flourish his sword. Very impressive, he says, but will it look so beautiful when my head is cut off? Then, of course, his head falls off, having been sliced off without even his noticing. Perhaps we with our discussions of liberté are like that condemned man, still speculating although the stroke has already fallen and liberté is already dead. How, Halévy wants to know, did we come to such a pass?

Why is worth considering, more than a century after some of these texts were written, how an elitist liberal of Halévy’s stripe—that is, a “pétanist historian” (136)—confronted and diagnosed the new mass politics of the 1920s? There are two things happening in Décadence. The first is Halévy’s approach to the 19^th and 20^th centuries as a historian – how to make sense of them? Then there is the question of liberty, of its failure in the 20^th century, which itself is related to this larger problem of understanding. Fundamentally, for Halévy, there are those who should understand and those who should obey – the 19^th century’s mistake was to commit itself to democracy, which denies this fundamental truth. Authentic liberté, for Halévy, is not democratizable. And yet Halévy sought always to maintain contacts with the left, or at least a certain version of it. Those of us in the 21^st century who are committed both to the value of specialized academic research or expertise and to democratic politics ought to take very seriously the kinds of dilemmas into which Halévy runs.

The book is a product of the 1920s and of Halévy’s longstanding attempt to make sense of the Third Republic. The first of the four chapters, “Vox populi,” was written in 1923, in advance of the elections of 1924. The avowal that Halévy doesn’t vote is followed there by an analysis of the significance and meaning of the major elections that shaped the history of the Third Republic. The aim is to show that, in those cases where it is possible to see the results of the elections as expressing a clear will on the part of the people, that is a sovereign decision – for instance a rejection of the pursuit of empire in Africa and Asia (38-40) – that decision was never respected. There are elections, and then there are those who actually make decisions, but one mustn’t confuse the two. In fact, Halévy argues, there is a pattern to elections, to the distribution of voters, so that we can see elections simply as the reflection or evidence of a social fact (not Halévy’s language). Thus, for instance, although Poincaré is elected after the war as a conservative darling, if we look at the Chamber from which he drew his support, in fact we find (by Halévy’s reconning) 224 conservatives to 370 republicans: “nous connaissons cette proportion, elle existait exactement la même dans la Chambre de 1876” (71, and see 45). Elections are not sovereign actions, they are, Halévy feels, morally degrading and useful only, apparently, to distract the masses and offer a sort of cover for the real forces in French society. Of course the meaninglessness of electoral results leaves us with a problem: “Si l’Etat se disperse, que fera l’historien? Une même gêne atteinte l’action et la recherche” (19). Here is the central problem of the book.  

The middle two chapters examine what Halévy regards as the real forces in French society and politics. Much verbiage must be stripped away to get at this material foundation – in a monarchy the writers must flatter one person, in a democracy they must flatter everyone – but it is not inaccessible to research. In “De re Gallica” Halévy takes his readers on a tour of the genuine achievements of the Third Republic, identifying in each case the – état? corporation? – cité, finally he decides, behind each one (122ff). “Corporation contre corporation, voilà la réalité” (106). The immense new apparatus of social legislation, the primary and secondary schools, but also the universities, the empire – each one has its own real substrate. People, not ideas, although in each case people dominated by a certain way of thinking. Halévy wants to be not a materialist historian, but a realistic one: “L’histoire est moin matérialiste, elle est plus romanesque que nous le pensons aujourd’hui. Le francais électeur était hostile à l'aventure coloniale ; mais le francais lecteur de journal la suivait avec faveur. Dans la politique si ennuyeuse de la Troisième République, elle seule n'était pas ennuyeuse » (113).

The fascinating third chapter, “Clio aux enfers” turns its attention to the police. Halévy is interested in this first of all because he is interested in the occult forces that in fact govern politics, and the police are almost definitionally occult. Those in opposition may always criticize the way those in power use the police, but all governments, once in power, love the police. And it is a deep channel, we might say, through which despotism can enter into the regular practices of government. Halévy says that he has himself witnessed police agents provocateurs at work (in 1893), trying to gin up a riot useful to the government. And Halévy expresses skepticism about the number of suicides that take place in jail cells – from colonel Henry during the Dreyfus Affair to the more recent past. Second because, from the perspective of the late 1920s, he is interested in places from which popular authority might derive – in short, if there is to be a dictator in France, where will it come from? Perhaps the police. Perhaps specifically Jean Chiappe, who is popular, who knows himself to be popular? Halévy, it’s important to remember, is after all a defender of liberté, but one who rejects its identification with the practices of parliamentary democracy: “La France est trop pénétrée, trop imbibé aussi, d’idées et de préjugés démocratiques pour qu’un fascisme y puisse réussir. Pourtant le malaise existe, et la recherche et le désir d’une réaction autoritaire » (187). He’s interested in the fascist solution because, indeed, he accepts that there is a profound problem to which it may be the answer. As distrustful as he is of the police – what ought to be a service, become a power – still it is worth considering as a solution to the problem of the masses. 

Where are the beginnings of liberalism? Do we see them already in Montesquieu or Locke, that is in the 17^th or 18^th century, or do we understand liberalism rather as fundamentally a response to the new problems posed by the French Revolution – that is when the word emerged, but perhaps the thing itself is older? Halévy speaks of course of liberté rather than liberalism. For him the 18^th century was the century of freedom, where the forms of life available were most varied, even if this freedom was limited to a relatively small part of the population. He quotes d’Alembert from the Encyclopédie to the effect that the world obeys laws that can be understood, and that freedom is to be found through understanding the real laws that really govern the world. This is about physics, but it’s a lucid statement of a fundamental Enlightenment politics. The great gambit of the 19^th century, he thinks, was the extension of liberté of understanding to the whole of the people. Parliament, Halévy suggests, is a basically 18^th century institution – a group of educated men will sit together and by talking matters out arrive at a satisfactory solution. Inasmuch as we should see most of 19^th century French history as a Restoration, this extends deep into the century. Again Halévy says that anyone in the chamber of 1825 would feel at home in that of 1875 – he would see the sons of men he knew well, and even a few familiar faces (Adolphe Thiers, mainly).   

By 1925, we are in another world. Parliament is no longer supposed to understand. The central metaphor of this chapter is that parliament is like an electrical system, but through which social obligations flow. It works fine at moderate levels, but when emergencies arrive, “les plombs saute” – the breakers flip, and a dictatorship is required. This is not Schmittian decisionism, although one must imagine that Schmitt read Halévy and perhaps Halévy read Schmitt.   

Generally, people are no longer supposed to understand, only to obey. This is a tendency Halévy identifies everywhere in his contemporary society. Parliament of course is no longer a place for understanding and debate, to suggest that is what deputies do is a joke (205ff). The newspapers – that other great institution oof 19^th century liberal civilization – are also no longer plausibly described as tools for understanding. Halévy traces the consequences of the discovery, during the Dreyfus Affair, that papers would do better if they simply ignored what was happening politically and focused on the fait divers, together with the usefulness to the powerful and wealthy of owning papers: “L’ancienne presse fourniessait de réflexions et de documents une élite libérale ; la nouvelle fournit de lecture, de papier, un publique qui se laisse faire » -- the presse d’information today conveys its facts with colorful pictures and as few words as possible, like a book for small children just learning to read (216). The substrate of liberal society no longer exists.  And new technologies only make things worse. Radio and film are new media that, far from emancipating or democratizing knowledge, are simply and obviously in need of careful control by authority. The contrast here is with the theater which, despite the many attempts of the French state to control it in the 19^th century, is essentially impossible to censor because so much of the meaning of the thing inheres not in the words themselves but arrives in the moment of performance, as a sort of aleatory bargain or wager between the audience and the performers (225-27).

There is a sort of technical obligation to simply carrying out the instructions one receives. This isn’t like the mysteries of the ancient world, it is simple obscurity. The factory worker does not stand in awe before the work he is obliged to do without understanding it, his hands simply have to obey. The engineer may seem to be more in charge, but here too much of what he does, Halévy says, is governed by formula from mathematical physics that he does not really understand (233). And in just the same way, high finance appears as outside of all discussion. The settlement of 1919 was not worked out by politicians, rather it was presented as fiat by the financiers: “les décisions de la Haute Banque, comme celles de la science, ne se discutent pas » (236). Human being, man himself, Halévy says, is simply overcome by all this. The dream of understanding and control – which really is of ancient Greek vintage as well as finding expression among the encyclopedistes – is snuffed out. And, Halévy writes, “L’homme qui avait espéré d’être libre, se trouve dépossédé. L’émancipation est manquée, toutes les classes de l’ancienne humanité tombent ensemble, prises aux rets d’un vainqueur invisible” (233). It is difficult not to see here a different and a conservative version of the sort of critique of modern society under capitalism that one finds in The Dialectic of Enlightenment, but with some important differences. First of all, of course, there is the question of the invisibility of this new tyrant. It is clearly, one wants to say, capitalism. But Halévy himself would say that this is not adequate, this is to conjure up an enemy that one cannot really explain, which acts everywhere and isn’t in any one particular place.

Another difference between later critical theorists and Halévy is that he writes in 1930, before the war, before the definitive arrival of Nazism. He is of course intensely interested in the new tyrannies – as his brother Elie called them – which for him are the Soviets and the Fascists. Halévy accepts or at least airs the suggestion that, in France, one possible nucleus of fascism would be the revolutionary syndicalists, especially the more aggressively antidemocratic among them. But he thinks the French are basically too libertarian, and too democratic, to turn in this direction. Halévy accepts the idea, which he presents as coming from a newspaper report – that the success of the National Socialists in Germany is due not really to any of the specific things they say or do, but generally to their capacity to convince people that they will allow Germans to take back control of their country. They name and promise to destroy what had previously seemed a series of more or less anonymous tyrants. This is a return of sovereignty – which, after all, even Halévy understands, is a fantasy – but a powerful one.

Halévy has his own fantasy of sovereignty. This we can see in the line, quoted above: “Si l’Etat se disperse, que fera l’historien? Une même gêne atteinte l’action et la recherche” (19). This is a fantasy not of political autonomy, but rather of a natural object for a history of politics. Halévy as a historian wants to be able to explain, and he wants to be able to explain not a natural process (that would be too materialist) but a human one, which can only mean a process of rational purposive action. Yet is there such a thing in the political realm? As a member of the literati he wants to be able not only to express himself, but to do so in a way that will carry some weight. He wants his own rational discourse to matter in the political realm. He wants to escape the cités that he identifies as French political life into mere inter-corporate competition. He would not be satisfied with the sort of shallow influence that he achieved (172-73) with his late work on the acceleration of history. The natural historical object that he wants is a political realm in which his speech would be effective.  

My own suggestion is that this dissatisfaction ought to be a warning to those historians who today wish to assert their own expertise in public as expertise that ought to be compelling in itself. Halévy ultimately managed his own dissatisfaction by simply rejecting democracy in either its revolutionary or its liberal parliamentary forms. This is a standing temptation and therefore a reason to attend, in the mode of self-reflection, to anti-democratic liberalisms of the past.