Liberalism against Itself
REVIEW ESSAY
Liberalism against Itself:
Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times
by Samuel Moyn
Yale University Press, 2023, 240 pages
Samuel Moyn’s latest book, Liberalism against Itself, begins and ends by invoking my 2018 book, Why Liberalism Failed. Moyn employs my book as a bookend in order to refute its thesis: “liberalism failed because it has succeeded.” Moyn seeks to counter, in effect, “liberalism has failed until now because it hasn’t really been tried.”
In spite of a fundamentally opposite view of how to understand the current travails of the liberal order, Moyn and I, and our respective books, share a good deal in common. We both regard the powerful ascendancy of “right liberalism”—often mislabeled “conservatism”—as a baleful result of a particular historical circumstance, namely, the Cold War. We both regard the consequent rise of “neoliberalism,” in both its inegalitarian economic form and its militaristic international posture, as having borne tragic consequences for the United States and the world. And we share the view that “Cold War liberalism” has led to a lamentable narrowing of the horizons of political possibility, informed by an overly pessimistic view of human potential for achieving political practices of shared common good through the legitimate auspices of public authority. We further share a criticism of Cold War liberalism’s simplistic rendering of the Western canon, between the good realist liberals (and their predecessors) and all the other “baddies,” including everyone from Plato to Rousseau. By equating political ideals rightfully pursued through politics with ideological utopianism, Cold War liberalism has woefully disserved the citizenry of the United States and beyond.
At key points, however, Moyn and I (and our respective books) part ways. For Moyn, genuine liberalism is progressivist, no solely an outgrowth of Anglo-American classical liberalism, but a tradition with more expansive roots in Rousseauian, Hegelian, and Marxist soil that valorizes human and political “perfectibility.” While this strand was, in many respects, originally a critique of liberalism, it is embraced and promoted by Moyn as having an “emancipatory” dimension, and thus ultimately “liberal” given its “liberatory” aspirations. But in commending this alternative tradition of liberal thought, Moyn shares a key assumption of the “Cold War liberals”: the progressive tradition is held both by Cold War liberals, and by Moyn himself, as the opposite of the Anglo-American “classical” (or updated Cold War) variant. Here, I disagree with Moyn as much as with the architects of Cold War liberalism. Rather than seeing the two liberal strands as “opposites,” I maintain that the “progressive” liberal tradition is an inevitable result of the former “classical” liberal tradition. Moyn wants to rehabilitate what he regards as “good” liberalism; I see right and left liberalism as inextricably connected, and would prefer to bury them both.
Our approaches part ways in another important respect. Because of the political ascendancy of Cold War liberalism, Moyn believes that liberalism’s current crisis arises from the unfortunate priorities of a “uniparty,” a centrist neoliberalism that has been shared by everyone from Clinton to Obama, from Bush I to Bush II. Moyn laments that this neoliberal ascendancy has forestalled the development of a genuine “emancipatory” Left in the United States. For a professor at Yale University—the Law School no less!—to claim that there is no radical Left movement in America today leads one to suspect that Moyn should occasionally glance up from the books he has been studying. He might notice all around him the rise of a radical, progressive Left that has aggressively remade academic, political, cultural, and even corporate institutions in the name of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” He can spare only the briefest mention of the emergence of this progressive agenda—labeled “wokeness” by both its proponents and detractors—that has, in fact, become a dominant project in the elite corridors of power throughout the West, notably including his own institution of Yale University. Having spent nearly two hundred tightly argued pages lamenting the absence of a progressive, perfectionist, “emancipatory” project by left-liberals, it’s rather remarkable that Moyn has so little to say about this very vocal, powerful, and (arguably) successful progressive and emancipatory project. Isn’t this a highly potent form of exactly the kind of progressive liberalism that he is claiming doesn’t exist in the West today, one that would appear to be hiding in plain view from a learned professor at Yale?
The Cold War Liberals
But before reaching a conclusion, let’s begin with preliminaries. Samuel Moyn is Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University. His book—Liberalism Against Itself—is the published version of the Carlyle Lectures at the University of Oxford, which he delivered in early 2022. Those lectures were first given under the title “The Cold War and the Canon of Liberalism.” Its original title is helpful in situating the argument as a whole, indicating that he views the liberal project largely advanced by the construction, and destruction, of a particular canon of thinkers and ideas.
Moyn’s thesis is laid out concisely in the introduction and the short concluding chapter of the book. Cold War liberalism, in his view, represented a betrayal of liberalism’s potential—even its most genuine expression—from within the inner sanctum of liberalism itself, and by a cast of thinkers who built and then acted as the resolute defenders of that space. Betraying pre–Cold War liberalism—represented by a “continental” strand of progressivism in both America and Britain—these architects of Cold War liberalism eschewed its progressive promise in the name of a realism demanded by the challenge posed by the utopianism of the Soviet Union, in particular, and the specter of totalitarianism in general. Moyn calls for giving a “second look” to the lost promise of pre–Cold War progressivism, namely its commitment to “perfectionism,” which encouraged a “controversial public commitment to the highest life.” Far from the neutered “realism” of the liberalism that emerged during the Cold War, Moyn calls on liberals today to return to the pre–Cold War liberalism which “counseled creative and empowered free action as the highest prize for individuals, groups, and humanity.”
The bulk of the book consists of six chapters that explore “representative men and women”—each originally a single lecture, but, as a composite, an assemblage intended to disclose the various visages of the tamed liberalism that Moyn decries, as well as outlining a curated history of its construction. Each chapter is a rewarding read, weaving together a set of fascinating individual vignettes with distinctive and informative readings of their works—some well-known, others largely unknown or forgotten. The six thinkers discussed by Moyn, with the addition of my own short label indicating what I take to be the assigned role of each, are as follows:
(1) Judith Shklar—The Disillusioned Utopian
(2) Isaiah Berlin—Liberal Anti-Romantic
(3) Karl Popper—Liberal Anti-Progressive
(4) Gertrude Himmelfarb—The Jewish Augustinian
(5) Hannah Arendt—The Eurocentrist
(6) Lionel Trilling—The Freudian Liberal
Off the bat, it’s an eclectic mix. Some among its number are indisputably leading architects of “Cold War liberalism”: Berlin, Popper, Trilling. Others are selected for specific ulterior reasons.
Shklar, who plays a central role in Moyn’s narrative, is selected as something of the apostate, noteworthy not for her more famous essay “The Liberalism of Fear,” which is in many ways a perfect encapsulation of “Cold War liberalism,” but for her largely unread (but immensely rewarding) first book, After Utopia. Moyn poses “early” Shklar against “late” Shklar, arguing that early on she recognized, perhaps more clearly than anyone since, what had been lost by the truncation of liberalism, and yet seems to have forgotten what she once knew later in life.
Himmelfarb is selected as the Jew who curiously adopted a form of Augustinian realism. She was neither a main architect of “Cold War liberalism” (though a significant foot soldier), nor as influential in the field of “Christian realism” as a figure such as Reinhold Niebuhr (who receives only passing mention). Himmelfarb’s inclusion appears to reflect Moyn’s desire to show just how far some Jewish intellectuals would go in developing Cold War liberalism, even to the point of adapting a foreign faith in the effort to narrow liberalism’s horizon.
Most controversially, in my view, Arendt is adopted not because she was an architect of Cold War liberalism per se—after all, she was not a liberal—but because, according to Moyn, she reveals the deeper currents of nationalism and racism that run below the surface of Jewish Cold War liberals, most revealingly in their Zionism. Arendt did share many presuppositions of Cold War liberals—including a condemnation of the utopianism of the French Revolution—but more important to Moyn is Arendt’s both stated and unstated preference for “class-free liberty” of a chastened liberalism over “blood-dimmed equality” pursued through decolonizing revolutions. The former liberty would be assigned to America and Europe, and the latter, tracing its roots to the French and Russian revolutions, to the violence of decolonizing nations in Africa, the Middle East, and Central and South America. For Moyn, this is a damning stance, whatever Arendt’s influence over a generation of left-progressive intellectuals.
Moyn selects each of these thinkers because of their role in redefining the Western canon, as his original lecture title emphasized. What Moyn laments above all is their shared project of demoting the utopian, historicist, and progressive strand of Enlightenment thought. Common to a number of Moyn’s portraits, Rousseau was the subject of focused denunciation because of his introduction of a historicist, progressive redescription of human history, along with his intolerance toward unjust inequality. For Moyn, Rousseau constitutes the promising, progressive philosophical strand of liberalism that would go on to influence thinkers ranging from Kant to Hegel to Marx. For those who sought to differentiate a form of chastened liberalism from the philosophical tradition that influenced the Russian Revolution, the Soviet Union, and attendant global attractions to communism, the canon was rewritten to exclude these thinkers from honored platforms in the pantheon—thereby forming an “anti-canon.” Here, Berlin and Popper loom large, particularly in their efforts to curate a liberal tradition that would insulate it against “monism” in either a modern utopian or premodern religious variant. And while Shklar was among the first to take note of this expulsion of liberalism’s utopian strand, she would eventually become one of its champions, albeit more in the background through the influence of her “liberalism of fear” over a generation of liberal academics, including such widely read thinkers as John Rawls and Richard Rorty.
Moyn’s additional selection criterion was that each thinker was Jewish. This leads to otherwise puzzling exclusions, such as Reinhold Niebuhr, Hans Morganthau, Eric Voegelin, and Samuel Huntington. But it also makes one wonder why he excluded so important, influential, and central a figure as Leo Strauss, an exclusion deserving an entire separate essay of explanation. The main stated reason for this limiting criterion, Moyn claims, is that their Zionism informed their embrace of “realism” and a strong distaste particularly for emancipatory Marxist philosophy that was apt to be deployed in the form of decolonialist revolutionary claims as a threat to the state of Israel. An unstated reason seems at least in part to be disappointment in his coreligionists for too easily shucking off Judaism’s historical affinity to leftist political idealism and even radicalism.
Progress and Return
Moyn is correct that the Cold War liberals under examination sought to redefine the canon, and that they have been largely successful in doing so. Courses on Marx used to be a commonplace on college campuses in the 1960s and ’70s, and have largely disappeared from the curriculum. While Marx-toting scholars still exist in various corners of academe, they were largely replaced by redistributionist left-liberals, many of whom adoringly adopted Rawls as their intellectual knight as the Left made its peace with capitalism during the Cold War. Moyn notes how easily Rawls’s tepid “difference principle” fit into the straightened political views of the Left in the 1980s and beyond: having cut off its idealistic branch, they embraced a redefined Lockean construct, believing that we could all agree on modest social welfare policies based on a radically individualistic philosophical basis. Preceding and during the time I taught at Princeton University in the 1990s until midway through the 2000s, nearly every tenured political theorist hired was some form of Rawlsian, and at least half the dissertations featured Rawls. Rawls became the court philosopher of a left-liberal regime at exactly the moment that the welfare state was dying.
Yet for all of the criticism we might rightly direct at the ruling-class uniparty shaped by Cold War liberalism, Moyn spends not a moment considering whether the impetus to avoid the political utopianism of the Rousseau-Kant-Hegel-Marx tradition was, at least in some ways, entirely justified. Moyn implies throughout his book that thinkers such as Berlin, Popper, Arendt, and even Shklar were motivated by less-than-noble intentions—often blinkered, at times fearful, racist, and, most damning, conservative impulses. In a revealing moment, while discussing Popper, Moyn decries efforts to consign the Rousseauian-Hegelian-Marxist strain of progressivism to the dustbin of history:
Accepting the narratives of their enemies [e.g., Soviet communists and their sympathizers] and anxious about being outpaced, liberals repudiated root and branch what had once been the essential part of their tradition. They concurred [with those enemies] that Marxism was the philosophy of history, and having turned their backs on it, they enthusiastically dug the grave of historicism.
To Moyn, this move was liberalism’s sin: its abandonment of idealism under the sway of defensible claims by communists of the philosophical influence of the progressivist liberal strand (Rousseau-Hegel-Marx) on the Soviet Communist regime that was perpetrating inconceivable horrors. Moyn condemns what instead became liberalism’s adoption of an alternative, often pre-liberal tradition of “anti-utopian realism,” including acknowledgement of “Augustinian sin.” Having recognized the historical context for liberals’ rejection of the progressivist tradition, Moyn can hardly spare a moment’s sympathy with the impulse—however truncated—to supply a realist dimension to politics while eschewing the philosophical tradition that was tied so intimately to the barbarity in their midst. Moyn regards the turn to forms of “realism” as a betrayal of liberalism, rather than—more generously, accounting for what its architects were witnessing—altogether comprehensible and even admirable efforts to acknowledge liberalism’s temptations, its excesses, and even its sins.
Moyn misses few opportunities to criticize his fellow Jews for their attractions to realist Christianity. His choice to elevate Gertrude Himmelfarb to a status equivalent to major figures like Berlin, Popper, and Arendt has less to do with any dubious ascription of significant influence in the formation of Cold War liberalism (her husband, Irving Kristol, has more of a claim in that regard), and nearly everything to do with her largely overlooked early work on the liberal Catholic thinker, Lord Acton. Himmelfarb, guided by her mentor Herbert Butterfield, turned to the ideas of Acton in her youthful efforts to construct a “conservative liberalism.” The attraction of Acton lay in his simultaneous embrace of an Augustinian vision of sin as the basis of his liberalism, combined with his more contemporary liberal Catholic rejection of “authoritarian ultramontism”—that is, a politics guided by the teachings of Catholic Christianity. Acton offered to Himmelfarb (and to subsequent Cold War liberals, such as those working at the institute named for Acton) a truncated political liberalism—informed by fears of the devil within—and a truncated Christianity—Augustinian realism minus Aristotelian-influenced Thomism (or even Augustine’s own commendation of “Christian princes”).
For Moyn, this turn was revealing: “Was Cold War liberalism—given its inventors—a Jewish phenomenon? The fashion for Acton suggests that it was not. Even when Jews were central to its construction, Cold War liberal political theory was much more characteristically Christian, with results that no one more than the youthful Shklar bitterly criticized.” A steady undercurrent in the book seeks to establish that Cold War liberalism was extensively, if not mainly, due to Jewish liberals’ abandonment of the radicalism available through their own tradition, in favor of a truncated liberalism informed by adoption of Christian sources.
Yet for all his distaste for Augustinian-inflected liberalism, it is a comparably truncated Christianity that Moyn seeks to take the place of this “realist” alternative. Moyn recognizes that his preferred canon—one lionizing such thinkers as Rousseau, Hegel, and Marx—was decisively shaped by liberal Christianity—one that would be rendered in secularized terms, but was nevertheless indelibly shaped by a Christian belief in a salvific trajectory of history. “Nineteenth-century seers of progress . . . [such as Hegel] regularly stressed the Christian lineages of their commitment to meaning in history. They understood that perfectibility and progress were legacies of an old tradition of Christian reform.” While Moyn wishes for this tradition to be purified of its Christian lineaments, and rendered completely secular, he recognizes that the belief that there is a “right side of history” finally reflects a faith commitment whose roots lie in a Christianity that he implicitly approves. Moyn advances the liberal division of Christianity into an either/or: either one must choose between Augustinian “realism” or Hegelian “idealism.” Ironically, his stance mirrors that of Himmelfarb, holding that, for the liberal, a politically useful Christianity is always a truncated Christianity. In one form, Cold War liberals embrace a liberalized “Augustinian realism” at the expense of Christianity’s robust endorsement of a politics oriented to the common good—its Aristotelian and Thomistic inheritance. No less truncated is Moyn’s preferred liberal Christianity, millenarian and even eschatological in its longings, but untempered by recognition of original sin and a distance between the cities of God and Man.
Herein lies the crux of a main disagreement between Moyn’s position (and that of Cold War liberals) and my own: Moyn believes that “good” liberalism can be separated from “bad” liberalism. His preferred liberalism lies potentially ahead of us, if only courageous thinkers and their epigones can throw off the pessimism of Christian-inflected Cold War liberalism. By contrast, I see in both the liberalism that Moyn condemns—its purportedly Augustinian version—and the one he endorses—the Christianized historicism of Hegel and his devotees, Dewey, Croly, and Rauschenbusch—a recipe for ceaseless oscillation between the injustice born of “Cold War liberal” pessimism and the political cruelty born of progressive-liberal hubris. What he believes to be separable as “good” and “bad” liberalism are in fact two sides of truncated Christianity that have informed the two forms of liberalism—a pessimism born of underestimating the human capacity for good, and a hubristic overestimation of human perfectibility. The liberalism that Moyn decries gave rise to the one he prefers: the crabbed understanding of human nature in Hobbes and Locke’s state of nature inspired Rousseau’s more perfectionist version. Rousseau was not wrong that the political fruits of the original “liberalism of fear” not only failed to inspire aspirations toward the ideal in politics, but encouraged quiescence toward extensive economic injustice. Yet the liberalism that Moyn prefers gave way, in turn, to the one he decries, even though he can’t acknowledge the justified reason for its return: the limitless and unsupportable belief in human plasticity of progressive liberalism, and its tendency to result in the horrors of political regimes committed to molding human plasticity, inevitably provoked reactions insisting on greater realism and a renewed cycle of truncated Augustinianism. And the latest “liberalism of fear” not only failed to inspire but encouraged quiescence toward extensive economic injustice. The problem with Moyn’s various “representative thinkers,” as well as those he would prefer, is not too much Christianity, but too little—or, better put, the fact that both “sides” lack the fullness of Christian anthropology, one that brings together what liberalism has put asunder.
Utopia and Reality
Moyn’s blinkered focus on tendentiously selected exemplars seems finally to lead to a studied avoidance of the ways our actual political reality contradicts his assessment of where we are. In the first instance, he altogether misses how “Cold War liberalism” adopted its own form of utopianism, particularly in its foreign policy. Secondly, and most remarkably, by presenting us with a highly curated set of thinkers, he altogether ignores—whether by puzzling neglect or worrying intention—the flourishing of progressive liberal utopianism very much in our and in his own midst. That he may not like its current form is of no moment; Rousseauian, Hegelian, and Marxist perfectionism is alive and well in contemporary America, indeed, with particular ferocity on the very campus where Moyn teaches.
Again, I reiterate my earlier point that Moyn is insufficiently appreciative of the reasons that “Cold War liberalism” developed in the first instance. Repeatedly, he imputes to these thinkers a wide array of motivations—including racism—rather than allowing for the possibility that their stated reasons for an embrace of “realist” liberalism were, in fact, plausibly valid: they rightly discerned that historicist strands of progressivist thought played a decisive role in shaping the vicious communist regimes of the twentieth century. These claims are not without contemporary relevance: Moyn is quick to insinuate that the motivation of racism underlies the suspicion of thinkers such as Arendt toward the revolutionary and violent tendencies of “decolonialist” philosophy and its politics. Yet, in light of vast numbers of public protests and campus activists in recent days positively celebrating the brutal killings, rapes, and abductions of Jews by Hamas, suspicions that left-progressivism could easily accommodate horrific violence committed in the name of decolonization, and comporting with a vision of History’s trajectory, do not appear entirely unfounded. These events should give pause to the dismissive charges which Moyn levels against Arendt, among others.
Recognition of the legitimate motivations of “Cold War liberals” might also have encouraged a wider aperture of how, even in its purported “realism,” their liberalism nevertheless contained a utopian dimension, albeit of a particular kind. Both “realist” and “utopian” liberalism share the underlying belief that the purpose and aim of human beings is to be free, free especially from any unchosen bonds, obligations, and duties. They are thus both proponents of a “universal and homogenous” state, even if they disagree over the means of attaining it. “Realist” liberals, then, are no less prone to advancing the universal ideal of “emancipation” than “utopian” liberals, an ambition that was on full display in the lead-up to the war in Iraq. The wedding of “realism” and liberal utopianism was at the heart of the second inaugural of George W. Bush, culminating in a call to eliminate tyranny from the world:
America’s vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one. From the day of our Founding, we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has rights, and dignity, and matchless value, because they bear the image of the Maker of Heaven and earth. Across the generations we have proclaimed the imperative of self-government, because no one is fit to be a master, and no one deserves to be a slave. Advancing these ideals is the mission that created our Nation. It is the honorable achievement of our fathers. Now it is the urgent requirement of our nation’s security, and the calling of our time. So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.
Assuming that Moyn would classify George W. Bush (and his advisers, including the son of Gertrude Himmelfarb, Bill Kristol) as an heir to the tradition of “Cold War liberalism,” what to make of its evident tendency toward a utopianism not dissimilar to the one for which Moyn pines? Moyn may dislike, and disagree with, the particular “Cold War liberal” aspiration of emancipation that lie behind the war in Iraq, but it shared a common feature with all forms of liberalism: freedom from the past, revolutionary liberation from all perceived arbitrary political rule, overturning of social custom and tradition, all with an aim to achieving the realization of the sovereign self.
This silence, however, is overwhelmed by one even more deafening: Moyn spends the length of a book decrying the absence of a utopian political Left, while saying almost nothing about the widespread existence of a left-progressive emancipatory movement born of the very philosophical strands that he claims were abandoned by liberals. Again, Moyn may not like the particular formulation and political expression of the contemporary Rousseauian-Hegelian-Marxist strand—as developed through the Frankfurt School, French deconstructionism, decolonialist theory, Marxist-inspired feminism such as that of Simone de Beauvoir and Shulamith Firestone, theorists of universal sexual “emancipation” such as Wilhelm Reich and Michel Foucault, and a raft of contemporary theorists of identity who have bathed in this stew. The rise of “woke” politics flows from this concatenation of progressive liberalism, and now predominates the worldview of Western elites, including (and especially) at such elite educational institutions as Harvard, Princeton, and Moyn’s own campus.
In the briefest passage in the closing pages of the book, Moyn bemoans the rise of this progressive movement as “hostage to excessively libertarian frameworks,” without explaining or worrying about the ways that a “libertarian framework” is ultimately at odds with his calls and hopes for “emancipatory” liberalism. Might this liberalism, in fact, be the valid and inexorable expression of the historicist philosophical tradition that Moyn claims has ceased to hold sway? Indeed, might he be fundamentally wrong that the form of “Cold War liberalism” that he describes is the dominant form of liberalism today. Having been largely swept away from within elite institutions—and no longer reigning at the New York Times or General Motors or in the Pentagon—arguably an older liberalism has made way for its more radical successor, one advanced by “woke” activists in all these institutions. This more radical, “emancipatory” liberalism is today aided by corporations and universities and the media, all seeking together to advance the global emancipation of radically free individuals enjoying unfettered free choice? More than a brief mention is needed to explain how this form of liberalism isn’t exactly the realization of Moyn’s preferred liberal utopianism.
Moyn’s overarching lament is ultimately less about the defeat of “progressive liberalism” by “realist liberalism,” but a plaintive regret that liberalism in both its forms has undone what he really cares about—solidarity, commitment, and the common good. While he claims at the start and at the conclusion of his book to disagree with me, readers might be forgiven if, by the end of the book, they are tempted to conclude that Moyn simply can’t bring himself to say out loud that I’m right: liberalism has succeeded, and because of that, Moyn actually—and rightly—wishes for something else.