The search for a society in which no one need be afraid
LIBERALISM AGAINST ITSELF Cold War intellectuals and the making of our times
SAMUEL MOYN 240pp. Yale University Press. £20 (US $27.50)
FREEDOM FROM FEAR An incomplete history of liberalism
ALAN KAHAN 528pp. Princeton University Press. £38 (US $45).
WHEN THE BERLIN WALL fell in 1989, liberalism reigned triumphant. The early signs were positive: Eastern Europe liberalized, Latin American dictatorships fell, China opened up, there was the Arab spring. Today, the triumph lies in tatters. Since 2010 illiberal political forces have been rampant, starting with Viktor Orbán’s return to office in Hungary that year with his vision of “illiberal democracy”. In 2013 Xi Jinping became president of China, ushering in a period of increasingly authoritarian rule. Narendra Modi became prime minister of India in 2014 on a Hindu nationalist platform. In 2016 came Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump. In 2022 Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
What went wrong? Two recent books, coming from different perspectives, offer the same explanation: liberalism lost its moral compass. In Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War intellectuals and the making of our times Samuel Moyn argues that Cold War liberals – such as Judith Shklar, Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Hannah Arendt and Lionel Trilling – abandoned the Enlightenment ideals of emancipation and equality in favour of a more limited focus on individual liberty. Indeed, it was precisely the ideals of modernity – the Enlightenment, Romanticism and historicism – that had brought, for these liberals, the horrors of the twentieth century into existence in the first place: two world wars, totalitarianism and the risk of nuclear annihilation.
For Moyn, the liberalism of the Cold War years was a misstep: it opened the door to the worst excesses of neoliberal economics that led to the financial crisis of 2007-8 and the hawkish foreign policy of neoconservatism that led to the disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003. Now, liberalism must invent itself anew, with the emancipatory tradition it left behind.
The two key figures in Moyn’s book are the literary critic Trilling, associated with the “New York Intellectuals” and Partisan Review, a left-wing but anti-Stalinist journal, and the Harvard political theorist Shklar, whose work is enjoying a minirenaissance. It is through Trilling that Moyn sees liberalism losing its nerve and abandoning the ideal of emancipation for that of limits and constraints. In his epoch-defining The Liberal Imagination (1950), Trilling portrayed the ideal of progress as a Freudian death drive that needed to be abandoned, alongside mass democratic participation and the welfare state. Shklar plays the role of hero in Moyn’s narrative, as the first to analyse and criticize, in her book After Utop
