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.   

French Liberalism, Historiography New and Old

In this month’s Modern Intellectual History is a review essay from Michael Behrent on the recent historiography of French liberalism. This is a service to the profession: describing, evaluating, condensing, and extrapolating from a substantial body of recent work. The historiography of French liberalism has often in the past generation looked in two directions. First, it argued against the idea of its own Sonderweg vis-à-vis English liberalism, supposedly the ideal-type. Second it had to grapple with liberalism’s relation to republicanism, which is of course an older and, especially in France, more significant political idiom. As for the first, it seems that even American historians are finally ready to stop regarding continental Europe as presenting various detours from the one true path hewn by the UK. As for the second, Behrent suggests that it is the very illiberalism of much of French political culture that makes French liberals in particular so interesting.

Rather than summarizing Behrent’s summaries, I want to extract the broader perspective taken, he argues, by this new historiography. The landmarks in the background here include François Furet, Lucien Jaume, and Pierre Rosanvallon. The works at issue include (but are not limited to) the Geenens and Rosenblatt edited volume, Aurelian Craiutu’s multivolume project on moderation, Helena Rosenblatt and Steven Vincent’s different approaches to Benjamin Constant, and Emmanuelle Paulet-Grandguillot on the legacies of Rousseau in Sismondi and Constant—indeed the central figure here is very much Constant, not, say, Tocqueville. Behrent writes that “these works endeavor not so much to return French political thought to some indefinable liberal fold as to show that understanding how liberals contended with the peculiarities of French history can enrich and broaden our understanding of liberalism—to see it not merely as a doctrine, but as an emotional and moral disposition, a form of political judgment, and a specific political style” (449). According to Behrent, this recent scholarship seeks “to probe some of the constitutive dilemmas of liberal thought from a historically informed perspective.”

In that spirit, he offers three broad questions. Let me take them out of order. Behrent’s final question: “can the history of French liberalism—and liberalism tout court—be approached as a history of emotions, sentiments, and passions?” (476). My own tendency here would be to reframe this question as one about the liberal subject (reading Gossman’s wonderful Basel book has pushed me to think more widely about this). This is a little like Isaiah Berlin’s suggestion that at the heart of all political theories there is a theory of the human being, an anthropology. Asking after that leads in the direction of intellectual history rather than a sort of prosopo-psycho-biography of elites. But certainly the point, Constant’s point, that we are impassioned subjects but that we are nonetheless free is a relevant one that gets at some fundamental questions—are we free in our reason, or in our passion (Adolphe)? To whom would that distinction even make sense? Is that distinction, in fact, central to freedom as an idea in the modern world? Or only the European 19th century? Here is a historical question! 

Behrent’s first question concerns—following Bobbio’s famous analysis—the relationship between liberalism and democracy. These books “lend credence to the view that liberalism’s pedigree is largely independent of democracy’s—or, to the extent that they are related, liberalism must be seen as a reaction to the problems democracy raises” (473). Ultimately, with Spitz, Behrent wants to see in French liberalism an axiomatic democracy. Thus “liberalism has a democratic lining,” because without genuine democracy, individual freedom is empty. This is after all partly Constant’s argument in the famous essay on the liberty of the ancients and moderns—you must have both of these, even if you cannot expect or compel all moderns to be politically involved as all citizens were in the ancient world. But it is also—and here I would push back against Behrent’s characterization—especially in the French case very much about the Republic. Spitz, certainly, sees it in this way. Without the political action of the Republic, no liberalism. This is compatible with a much more negative view of liberalism than Behrent really allows into court, for instance Domenico Losurdo’s, in which cutting out a portion of the population as less-than-equal is essential to liberalism’s assertion of individual rights. Is talk of democracy supposed to preclude that reading? I don’t think it can. Behrent also points—this is the middle question—to the hoary opposition of of political to economic liberalisms. I have been convinced by J.T. Levy (and Marx!) that this is not a useful way of dividing the field, and it’s true that in France it is an especially muddy distinction. The economic, especially, was always on its face political (all the way back to Turgot’s ill-fated attempts at market liberalization).

Let me turn now to a venerable history of nineteenth century French political thought, one written by the British historian Roger Soltau (about whom I know very little, in fact). All proportion maintained, his view of French liberalism is an interesting contrast with the one in Behrent’s review essay. In his chapters on the end-of-century crisis of liberalism, he argues that, indeed, liberals ceased to defend any kind of meaningful “philosophy of freedom,” and hence had no real politics. They sank to defending bourgeois (not middle class) interests. This was indeed a relation of opposition, rather than necessity, between liberalism and democracy—the latter was certain to bring socialism, after all. So this was a problem, but there were also two areas of fundamental bad faith (not Soltau’s term) for French liberals—questions in which the bourgeoisie wasn’t even able to think clearly about its own interests. Soltau looks to one of the most unrepentant “economic” liberals of the age, Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, to show how even the liberals were blinded by nationalism. In the name of national defense, the state had to be allowed anything. Similarly, beholden perhaps too much to the Republic, liberals were unwilling to challenge frankly illiberal anticlerical policies. As Soltau puts it, “If modern French Liberalism has proved so weak both before Jacobinism and Traditionalism...it is surely because its freedom of judgment was inhibited, as it were, on...the position of the Church in France and that of France in Europe” (304). The religious question at issue here isn't the same as it was for Constant--and the reflexive nationalism is also not the same as Jennifer Pitts' Turn to Empire (although neither is without relation). It is the freedom of judgment—the courage of thought—that he sees on the part of Charles Renouvier on both these issues that most impresses Soltau. Renouvier the neo-Kantian is, indeed, the only living representative of “the philosophy of freedom” that he sees in later 19th century France.

Why go back to a book written perhaps ninety years ago? (Other than, as in this case, almost pure serendipity?). For one thing because it seems to me that, although we may disagree about many of Soltau’s judgments, it would still be worth thinking about French liberalism and anticlericalism and nationalism—the places where, “its freedom of judgment was inhibited,” which are often telling. For another because, if we can see in Behrent’s analysis the pervasive influence of Furet, in Soltau we see (very much on the surface) that of Henry Michel, a historian of French political thought and a great advocate of Renouvier. And we can see Soltau working, as it were alongside another interwar historian of liberalism, Guido de Ruggiero (who looked to Croce's idealist liberalism). The latter, like Soltau, believed that, for complicated reasons, on a European level toward the end of the 19th century liberalism had ceased to be a genuine philosophy of freedom and had become merely the ideological cover of an increasingly unhappy bourgeoisie. This is no longer a popular opinion--why not? Both Soltau and Ruggiero were manifestly looking over their shoulders (Ruggiero literally) at fascists and “Bolshevists.” Historians of liberalism today ought to think hard about their—our—own investment in the object (whatever that object turns out to be).

My Brilliant Friend

“My return to Naples was like having a defective umbrella that suddenly closes over your head in a gust of wind.” (chapter 116)

This wonderful, arresting metaphor comes at the beginning of a short chapter near the end of Story of a New Name, the second volume of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. So far I have only read these first two. I’ll pick up the third soon, and perhaps even finish it in time to be impatient about the arrival of the translation of the fourth. Here I’ll make no attempt at plot summary (and won’t be shy about spoilers). I’ve read very little of the material which has appeared about these books so far. Rothman’s piece asking "Ferrante or Knausgaard?", which I read after I was already well into the first volume, left me with absolutely no desire to read the latter, but unsatisfied of course with the description of the former.

The umbrella metaphor is effective, and in several ways. The umbrella—a banal shelter—turns against the one holding it. This marks it at once as “defective,” but of course it is in the nature of umbrellas to open and close. Like this object, the narrator Lenù, if not the narrative, is defined by oscillation. She is now transcendentally happy, now plunged into depression. Open and closed. In part this is an effect of the childhood and adolescence that is the subject of the first two volumes of the novel, but the oscillation is nearly oppressive, and I cannot imagine that it will do more than stretch out a little as Lenù ages. I also stumble over the mix of temporal orders. Ferrante plays with this: “now that we were seventeen the substance of time no longer seemed fluid but had assumed a gluelike consistency and churned around us like a yellow cream in a confectioner’s machine.” The return to Naples is discrete, a punctual moment. But the comparison is not. The punctual return is not compared to another simple punctual event, but to the having of an umbrella like that. And this temporal structure is not without parallel in the book itself—the just-mentioned oscillation, of course, but also the various slowly-changing backdrops against which the events of the novel take place. This means, most immediately, “the neighborhood” in Naples, the menacing backdrop of poverty and the camorra.

Of course this background is not unchanging. Indeed the most obvious themes of the novel are woven into the larger story of the Italian postwar. Lenù and Lila grow up literally in the wreckage of fascist Italy, which is always present, if poorly understood and rarely discussed by the adults. There is ambient violence--unexploded wartime ordinance both real and metaphorical. As the characters grow up, Italy is going through the postwar boom, the years of modernization. Parents who grew up without running water will see their children demand televisions. Lenù, Lila, and practically all their acquaintances are poor, provincial—their parents aren’t illiterate, for the most part, but their parents were. Lenù will get out, go to university, other characters will educate themselves and be educated in various ways.

Writing and language therefore hold a special place here. Do you speak in dialect? Do you speak Italian? Lenù’s return to Naples, described in the quote above, is marked by the famous linguistic in-between-ness of one who has escaped, or is trying to escape, her origins through education. She never entirely lost her Neapolitan accent at school in Pisa, but she no longer sounds right to her friends and family either. From the very beginning the two friends read and were enchanted not just by words, not just by writing, but by the cultural object that is a printed book. It seemed important, magical, a marker of success and power. The novel begins, of course, with Lenu’s decision to write, to record as much as she can about the existence of Lila—a sort of counter to Lila’s willful disappearance. This is a sort of violence inflicted through words. And we see many examples throughout the narrative. In writing, Lila hurts Lenù, makes her feel small and a failure. Characters are constantly mixing their words together. Of course, most important are the acts of co-creation between Lenù and Lila. But there is also Lenù and Nino, Lila and Nino. Not that this is constrained to verbal reproduction. Lila’s creativity is manifest constantly, is an active force in the world of the novel, she designs shoes, and the conflict over Lila’s photograph is an important plot point, as is her her desecration/creation in reworking it, its eventual destruction. Lenù, it seems, is always struggling with the possibility, the feeling, that indeed she is nothing more than another creation of Lila’s, even if we as readers see clearly that this isn’t so.

The novel is of course actuated by a vanishing act, but it is also full of acts of wanton destruction, importantly of written words. The narrator writes, ostensibly, to prevent Lila from really disappearing, and begins the narrative proper with the primordial act of violence in which the two girls throw away one another’s most prized possessions, their dolls. The second volume is given its whole emotional tenor, is haunted, by Lenù’s shocking destruction of Lila’s private journals. Then of course that volume ends with the appearance of Lenù’s novel, the reappearance of its ur-text, the novel Lila wrote as a child, and Lila’s own destruction, in the hellish meat-packing plant, of that object. All of these texts are defined and given agency, in the novel, as much by their audience, the moral authority of culture, as by their authors. For instance Lenù’s first article so freighted with emotion and given, to no obvious response, to Nino. Lila’s childhood production had deeply moved Lenù, but for whatever reason vanished for years, unremarked upon, not encouraged, by their teacher. Lila’s text, the production of which is treated by the narrative in a cursory way, like the treatment for an illness, is apparently impulsively given to a man in response to his proposal of marriage. It, too, vanishes for a little while, only to be taken up, accepted, published, by cultural authority.

Some bonds cannot be dissolved. Some situations, some people, cannot be escaped. It seems wrong, insufficient, to say that the relationship between Lenù and Lila is at the heart of the novel. Who is the brilliant friend? This is not a relationship, the word is too vapid. On every page, we have the force-field of Lila shaping Lenù’s life—and, for the reader, for the narrator, if not for Lenù in the narrative, we can see how the lines of force run in both directions. This novel is not, I think, going to be about how, ultimately, we learn not to be cruel. It is not a liberal novel, not a Bildungsroman, not a novel about making one’s self on one’s own, not about learning to be free. 

What was liberalism?

Duncan Bell. “What is Liberalism?” Political Theory 42(6), 682-715, 2014.

It is tempting to regard liberalism as a ‘sick signifier,’ a term that may now have polemical value in certain situations, but the meaning of which is so poorly determined as to make use counter-productive. A temptation, I think, worth resisting. Bell’s useful article attempts an answer to its titular question, although the author believes that his material “calls into question the general utility of “liberalism” as a category of political analysis” (705). Bell restricts his investigation mostly to the British, and (almost—more on that below) entirely to the Anglophone, political fields. He begins with the observation, drawing on David Scott, that today we are all “conscripts of liberalism,” meaning that “the scope of the [liberal] tradition has expanded to encompass the vast majority of political positions regarded as legitimate” (689). How to respond to this over-inflation of the concept?

Acknowledging that one’s definition of a concept (especially a political one) will depend on what one is trying to do, Bell writes, “I propose the following definition (for comprehensive purposes): the liberal tradition is constituted by the sum of the arguments that have been classified as liberal, and recognised as such by other self-proclaimed liberals, across time and space” (689-690). This technique accomplishes several things. It restricts us, first, to the 19^th century. Second, it is a way of accounting at least partially for the polemical uses of the term. Third, it is important that history, in the sense of conceptual continuity and change, is built into this approach. Traditions can only be, as Bell writes, “constituted by the accumulation of arguments over time” (691). Bell has sensible things to say about the difficulties of adjudicating at the edges of this, as well as about the importance of differentiating between liberal speakers and liberal arguments.  

The historical content of Bell’s argument—although the article is rich and many of its notes are ones I should follow up—is easily summed up. In the 19^th century, liberalism was not among the most important of political terms. Together with socialism and conservatism, it was taken to be a product of the ‘era of revolutions’—the French especially—and to be broadly synonymous with democracy. So, Bell gives us James Fitzjames Stephen in 1862: “As generally used . . . “liberal” and “liberalism” . . . denote in politics, and to some extent in literature and philosophy, the party which wishes to alter existing institutions with the view of increasing popular power. In short, they are not greatly remote in meaning from the words “democracy” and “democratic.”” (694). John Locke appeared essentially nowhere in these discussions. Herbert Spencer, the enormously popular social scientist and surely a liberal, mentions Locke hardly at all.

Today, we are all sure that Locke is, perhaps not the very beginning of liberalism, but its defining thinker. Bell argues that “Locke became a liberal during the twentieth century” (698). Beginning at the end of the 19^th century, but especially during the “crisis of liberalism” and its utter failure in the 1930s, scholars pushed the origins of liberalism back into the early modern period. Bell makes this “retrojection” the first chronological and discursive element constituting the new, hegemonic, idea of liberalism. The second and more important, beginning during the 1930s and accelerating through the war, was “the emergence and proliferation of the idea of “liberal democracy.” As representative forms of political order came under sustained fire, intellectuals propagated an all-encompassing narrative that simultaneously pushed the

historical origins of liberalism back in time while vastly expanding its spatial reach. For the first time, it was widely presented as either the most authentic ideological tradition of the West (a pre-1945 storyline) or its constitutive ideology (a view popular after 1945)” (699). In this new postwar dispensation, liberalism was “centered on individual freedom in the context of constitutional government” (699). And this was really a postwar understanding, one which Bell signals as defined by complex disciplinary histories in “the context of a transfer of scholarly authority from Britain to the United States” (701). “As a global conflict over the proper meaning of democracy raged, the modifier “liberal” simultaneously encompassed diverse representative parliamentary systems while differentiating them from others claiming the democratic title, above all Italy, Germany, and the Soviet Union” (703). In short, Lockean liberalism, which is the historical story underpinning the combat concept of ‘liberal democracy,’ are Cold War anti-totalitarian relics still exerting unreasonable influence particularly in political theory departments.

Bell’s article is, as I’ve said, rich and valuable. I wish I’d read it some time ago. The story is not a surprising one for me, although I am not especially familiar with the British context on which he focuses. I’ve already cited his point that the transformation he describes is defined by a transfer of scholarly ‘weight’ from Britain to the US. He also mentions the importance of émigré scholars in building the history of ideas as a discipline in the US. (As an aside, I hadn’t realized that the Journal of the History of Ideas took CIA money), as well as the translation from Italian of Guido De Ruggiero’s fascist-era History of European Liberalism. Now, I have sympathy with the need to make linguistic and even national restrictions for practical reasons, and even for certain methodological ones. But it seems to m pretty clear—and of course Bell wouldn’t deny this—that the larger story here is a European or larger one.

This moves in two directions. The first is that, it seems to me, we would get very different responses depending on which national or linguistic tradition we started with. For instance in Germany, I think the postwar would find us looking not back to Locke, but perhaps back to Protestant theology of one kind or another. This would not be a liberalism of property, but one of personality (although equally anticommunist). In France we would see a very different sequence. We would not find the consolidation of ‘liberal democracy’ in the 1930s-50s. We would see a ‘liberal republicanism’ well before the First World War, which might look back to 1789, although also further back, and which would balance democratic claims with claims to fundamental individual rights (as in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen) in a way not so different from ‘liberal democracy.’ The second is that, as I continue to think, the international sphere is more than the sum of its parts. (I would hate to have to say precisely how). All of this, moreover, leaves aside arguments about the essentially imperial origins of modern liberalism (for instance, at least as I understand it, in Andrew Sartori’s most recent book, which I haven’t yet read).

SFHS 2015. Part Two of Two.

Here is the promised second post on the SFHS. I’ve delayed long enough that these papers aren’t really fresh in my mind any longer, but I want to get this off my plate. Apologies for any misrepresentations! I’ll say only that these papers deserve a more thoroughgoing treatment than I’m able to give them here.   

Saturday morning, at a little after 8:30, the panel “Beyond Determinism: Rethinking the Philosophy of History and Political Economy in Postwar France” got underway. Presenters included, in order, Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, Alexander Arnold, and Aner Barzilay, with comment from Michael Behrent. All three papers were excellent and, at least for me, educational. Behrent’s comment was exemplary—at least what I heard of it. Since I had to leave part way through I won’t have anything to say about it here.   

Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins (hereafter: DSJ) delivered a paper on Raymond Aron entitled (I think) “Liberal Dictatorship, Aron’s Critique of Hayek’s Concept of Liberty,” drawn from his dissertation in progress on Aron. DSJ framed his project broadly as rescuing Aron from the historiographical box of ‘lonely liberal critic of Marxism.’ Aron was more than just a critic of Marxism, and engaged in a fruitful way with many different intellectuals (as it happens I posted some notes on one of DSJ’s earlier papers about Aron and Schmitt here). In particular, Aron leveled his critical fire at various forms of ideology that found material support in the United States—development theory, realist IR, etc—that made universalizing claims something like Marxism. DSJ’s goal in this particular paper is to argue against the understanding of Aron as a neo-liberal, as someone who walked the now-famous road to Mont Pelerin, who was influenced by Hayek especially after a wartime stay in London. It isn’t so, DSJ says.

DSJ develops his critique of the neo-liberal Aron first by criticizing or “mitigating” the moment of sociability, the networks, that have been pointed to in linking Aron to neo-liberalism. The heart of the paper, though, is an archival record of a talk Aron gave in 1955 at a conference in Milan (sponsored by the CCF, and in their archive). The context of this talk was Aron’s new prominence as the author of The Opium of the Intellectuals and especially the “end of ideology” thesis found in its last chapter. This is great material, and  DSJ contextualizes the debate in an exemplary way—this, really, is the paper. The point for DSJ’s larger argument is that Aron describes Hayekian liberalism as ideological in the same way as Marxism—indeed he apparently said there that “at the end of the day, what the liberalism of Hayek constitutes is inverted Marxism.” Economic inevitability ruled both vision of the future, although they pointed in different directions. Hayek would require, as in the title of the talk, a “liberal dictator” to get his system off the ground. Well, Rousseau needed his legislator, so perhaps this isn’t so unreasonable. I’d be interested, in light of this discussion, to go back and re-read Aron’s “États democratiques et états totalitaires” (June 1939).

As is sometimes the case with this sort of argument, by the end I wondered how anyone could possibly have ever thought of Aron as a neoliberal. Perhaps this was clarified in the Q&A. My guess would be that this label is as much an artifact of the polemical theater of French intellectual politics as anything else. DSJ did not spend very much time establishing the definition of neoliberalism according to which Aron would be one, and it seems to me that in fact Aron was a liberal, not a neoliberal. DSJ makes the case (I think convincingly) that a key difference between him and Hayek was that the latter never really accepted the legitimacy of democracy, while Aron did. Having spent some time reading Élie Halévy, Aron now sounds to me more and more like his student, or, conversely, as though Halévy really was Aron’s maître-penseur. The talk mentioned above was, after all, delivered on the heels of an extremely pessimistic survey of the field by Halévy. Perhaps we can say that Aron’s liberalism was, at first, anti-totalitarian, but that he learned to shed this fear as Hayek did not? In any case, a great presentation from DSJ.

Next up was Alexander Arnold, whose dissertation concerns postwar (up to 80s) French political economy, and who spoke about Rosanvallon and economic determinism. This paper was also great, the product of lots of reading of Rosanvallon. I myself make use of Rosanvallon’s work, but I read him first as a historian (the book on Guizot, for instance)—so this paper was particularly interesting for me. Essentially, Arnold reconstructs Rosanvallon’s political economy as he developed it over the course of the 1970s, in his writings as an autogestionnaire. An important climax is the critique of Marx offered in Le capitalisme utopique. I’m not certain that I’m reconstructing Arnold’s reading correctly here, but the idea seems to be that Rosanvallon believes we should read classical political economy as philosophy, not really as a description of economic reality. At its base is an utopique description of the subject, for instance. Nonetheless, Adam Smith—and here, can this really be what Rosanvallon thinks? It’s been some time since I looked at that book—allows us for the first time to philosophically grasp both the institution and the continuity of society. But this is not a description of the world. Marx, however, took the writings of liberal political economy for such a description, and his critique is principally a critique of that economic (in fact philosophical) writing, not of the real economy. “There is enormous distance between concrete society and the discourse of political economy.” Capitalism, in reality, should be understood in a minimal way, which allows for the construction of democratic—autogestionnaire—alternatives, or really reforms.  

This account of political economy, Arnold argues, or really this inattention to it, left Rosanvallon and the deuxième gauche more generally unprepared to meet the challenges of austerity that emerged in the Mitterand years. My central question here is not so much about the reconstruction of Rosanvallon—although I would be interested to see this story extended into his much deeper engagement with the French liberal tradition as the 80s wore on—but about this ‘response.’ Who has been able to meet these challenges? As far as I can tell no one really offers a really compelling account of what is to be done (at least no one who isn’t on the side of austerity). The best Marxisant analyses I’ve seen are rather grim. So what does Arnold want Rosanvallon to have done? To have occupied a more intransigent oppositional position? I’m not sure. In any case, to have avoided advocating “d’apprentissage collectif d’austérité...”

I’m leaving out here a number of things: especially Arnold’s nuanced discussion of the merits of Rosanvallon’s self-description of autogestion as ‘realist,’ and Daniel Lindberg’s criticisms of this; and then the larger framing of the paper in the history of liberalism, and adjudication between the political and the economic aspects of this. I look forward to reading more.

Finally, there was Aner Barzilay, whose talk was “Foucault and Deleuze’s Hidden Debate about Nietzsche” [paraphrase!], and whose dissertation is on Foucault’s Nietzsche. The larger project is to emphasize the continuities on the level of philosophy in Foucault’s oeuvre. This is in reaction to an over-emphasis on the late lectures and on Foucault as a theorist of something called ‘neoliberalism.’ The larger context is above all the question of the transcendental and the subject—trying to keep the two apart. Nietzsche is the most important reference for Foucault, the actuator of the whole project. Barsilay’s talk here is a reconstruction of a (largely implied) dialogue between Foucault and Deleuze, and it is built around Barzilay’s archival discovery of a 1977 note from Deleuze to Foucault discussing just these issues. The exchange and the moment are fascinating. This period, and the political break between the two philosophers, has now received a certain amount of attention. So it is remarkable and much to be appreciated that Barzilay can still bring something new to that table.

I cannot do justice to Barzilay’s talk, so I won’t try to report its details. Delicate questions regarding the nature of the transcendental, the plaisir/desire distinction, and power as Kantian schematization of the subject, were all dissected. Neither Deleuze nor Foucault is to be taken lightly, and Barzilay approaches at a level of textual involvement but also abstraction that makes summary difficult. Again, I’d like to read. 

I agree broadly that we should take Foucault’s earlier work more seriously when thinking about the later lectures. The problem of the subject—historical, transcendental, prison, etc—is indeed clearly a central one for Foucault (and the career-long circling around Kant is unsurprising). I’m less convinced by the centrality of Nietzsche for Foucault generally, but I think this is mostly because I’m skeptical that there’s much of a ‘there’—what did Nietzsche mean, really? To what extent did Foucault take what he needed to take from this corpus? The reference seems constantly to be to the Genealogy, which isn’t the same thing as Nietzsche. But, after all, the point of the larger project is presumably to argue this point. My larger concern with the paper is, I’m sure, not really justified, but here it goes. This paper is, almost, saying: ‘hey, I know you think that the late Foucault is about investigating the actual conditions in which living human beings are made to suffer, but no, in fact it’s about the far more important question of avoiding the transcendental subject!’ I suppose what I want from Barzilay is an account of how the political thought of this newly continuous philosopher-Foucault looks different, or should be appreciated differently, from the less-continuous version of Foucault against which Barzilay is arguing.

I think this is a legitimate question (despite everything) because all three of these papers were about attempts to grapple with the nature of the State. [I'd have liked, also, to hear more explicitly about the question of determinism--although perhaps the originally-planned fourth paper would have helped with this focus]. This common problem was of course clear. Barzilay mentioned, at the end of his talk—and I’ve lost track of in precisely what register, and would like to know—that to refer to the state is to bring a knife to the gunfight of modern politics. There is also Foucault’s famous remark from the lectures about cutting off the head of the State, as well as that of the King. But at issue between Aron and Hayek was interpretation of the nature of the State; and Rosanvallon’s political economy seems also to have turned on the capacity of a subject—a State? A syndicat?—to intervene in the economy. Now, this was self-consciously a panel of intellectual historians, so it is a little pedantic to call on them to be more contextual. And probably Michael Behrent did (some version of) that in his comment. Certainly his work on Foucault and the Foucaultians makes me think him likely to have done so. But how to create this context? Here the panel turns back on itself—intellectual history often does—because, I think, the central question is how we, here today, understand the changing nature of state power in the face of economic imperatives in the postwar world. This is after all the problem all the subjects discussed by the panel were interested in.

That closing is not too coherent, and not too clear, but perhaps I’ll manage to follow it up with an eventual post on essays from the no-longer-so-new Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History (2014).

Aron and Schmitt

The new issue of MIH contains a number of interesting pieces. I want to offer now only a brief remark on the basis of one of them: Steinmetz-Jenkins’ essay on Raymond Aron and Carl Schmitt, the full title of which is “Why Did Raymond Aron Write that Carl Schmitt Was Not A Nazi? An Alternative Genealogy of French Liberalism.” In brief, Steinmetz-Jenkins wants to show how, over the course of the 1970s and especially in reaction to 1968, Aron became much closer to Schmitt, borrowing many of his key concepts and framings. The essay is actuated by a remarkable pair of opposing quotes. First, Aron in 1941 referring to Schmitt as “one of the official theorists of National Socialism,” and second Aron in his 1983 Mémoires, “Carl Schmitt never belonged to the National Socialist party. A man of high culture, he could not be a Hitlerian and never was.” Steinmetz-Jenkins’ essay is quite rich and worth the time of anyone interested in the revival of ‘liberalism’ in France since the 1970s.

A few points only. First of all, one should probably put a “recent” or “contemporary” into the subtitle before “French Liberalism.” The work in question is very much post 1968, and especially aimed rather damning, in the conclusion, at Pierre Manent. Second, I think the essay demonstrates a moderately interesting issue in this sort of intellectual history. The two statements quoted are not merely expressing opposed views about the worth of Schmitt’s work, or even his merits as a human being. Rather, at issue is at least in part a matter of fact. Was Schmitt a member of the Nazi party? As Steinmetz-Jenkins shows, at one point in his life, Aron believed (knew!) that he had been, and a rather committed one at that. By the end of his life, in contrast, Aron wrote that Schmitt had not been. Now, Steinmetz-Jenkins shows pretty clearly why Aron’s view of Schmitt might have changed, and even entertains—although I think in the end rejects—the idea that Aron came to believe he had been mistaken earlier in this matter of fact. But what I find missing here—what there is not really room for in this sort of closely-argued, I might venture ‘philological’ sort of intellectual history, a kind of scholarship that appeals to me very much—is psychology. What about an increasingly out of touch, even bitter, older person who is choosing to remember things one way rather than another? What about simple error? Aron, surely a precise and rigorous thinker, is not an ideal candidate for this sort of thing, but I am interested in the way that the mode of intellectual history pursued here rules out this kind of argument.

Third, finally, and at least to me most interesting is the opposition Aron presents in the later quote. One cannot be, cannot have been, both a man of great culture and a Nazi. This is a logical contradiction. Now, this is one line in a late-written memoir. It is not a statement in the philosophy of history. I hesitate to call it symptomatic. Nonetheless, here is surely a nice example of French liberal rationalism. Culture is incompatible with a nihilistic, bad materialist, violence worshiping political ideology. Spirit and matter cannot both be at work. So, anyway, in light of my own thinking about earlier rationalist French liberalism, I would read that line.

A full citation for the article: Steinmetz-Jenkins, Daniel. “Why Did Raymond Aron Write that Carl Schmitt Was Not A Nazi? An Alternative Genealogy of French Liberalism.” Modern Intellectual History, 11, 3 (2014), pp. 549-574.