Recently, a prominent political scientist told me that he tries not to use the word “liberalism” in his writing. I was confused by his announcement. This is a man who writes about liberalism all the time. This is a man who is not particularly hostile to liberalism, nor is he someone who shies away from esoteric or intellectual terms. So why, I asked him, does he avoid using the word “liberalism”?
“Because,” he answered, “nobody really knows what ‘liberalism’ means.”
In that spirit, one of James Kalb’s more fascinating charges in The Tyranny of Liberalism is for conservatives—or anyone who sits uneasily with the dominant ethos of the day—to insist on asking ourselves and others “What is liberalism?” Along with that, he argues, we should attend to a series of related questions: “How does liberalism work? What are its strengths and weaknesses? Is liberal rationality rational? Is neutrality neutral? Are we really liberals? Can we live as such? What alternatives are there?”
It’s fun—if a little bit unnerving—to see how Kalb, in this vein, plays on one of the central tenets of liberalism. The book’s final exhortations to “insistently pose the most basic questions” and engage in active public discussion sound oddly, well, liberal. Kalb argues, at some level, that the best hope for traditionalists is to embrace what George Kateb has called the liberal “atmosphere” of free thought and discussion—an atmosphere that encourages the unsettling of even our most settled conviction. In some ways, classically liberal commitments provide the ground for interrogating liberalism in its more advanced or extreme forms.
And although Kalb’s own answers to those questions about liberalism provide much of the fire to be found in this book, I take its most significant contribution to be this classical insistence on inquiry and reflection. Justifications of liberalism are nothing new in political science, and neither are critiques of the same. But too often, both protectors and detractors of liberalism—and both those writing about liberalism in theory and those writing about advanced liberalism in practice—start from a position of aggressive defense or offense. They seem to begin in the middle of a game, storming in with gloves and hackles raised, without explaining how or why the game began in the first place. Kalb does not commit that error, resulting in an argument that is as accessible as it is sophisticated, as welcoming as it is wise.
Kalb begins his own inquiry by acknowledging that liberalism is a pervasive if not omnipresent doctrine in modern Western life. And, he points out, if liberalism is so pervasive, it must somehow be persuasive—especially within the inherited legacy of the Western tradition. The liberal standard of “equal freedom,” as Kalb puts it, appeals and endures because it combines a simple ultimate ideal with a willingness to move incrementally to the achievement of that ideal. Liberalism pleases because it seems able “to achieve profoundly radical results through step-by-step methods.” It seems both revolutionary and safe. It is highly—perhaps “infinitely”—ambitious but speaks in soothing tones.
Kalb makes it easy to see the allure of liberalism, which also makes it easy to see the dangers attendant to liberalism. As Kalb describes it, the very simplicity that makes “equal freedom” an alluring standard also threatens to make it an immoderate one, a standard that too often eschews real nuances and complexities, that rings in mono rather than stereo sound. Its tendency to favor abstraction over particularity inclines liberalism to ignore certain definitive—embodied, tangible, local, inherited, specific—elements of human experience. And the administrative apparatus that at first seems to be liberalism’s practical or limiting arm has grown to such overweening proportions as to itself seem monolithic, or at least overpowering. In short, liberalism, which promotes an essentially critical outlook of the world, lacks the necessary substantive content that human life requires. It lacks adequate answers.
But despite the evident limitations of liberalism, Kalb argues, no satisfactory challenge to it has emerged. In the latter half of the book, Kalb directs his inquiries not merely at liberalism itself, but also at the conventional alternatives to liberalism: constitutionalism, neoconservatism, libertarianism, populism, and religious conservatism. All of these he finds wanting. Rightly so: all of these either have gotten stuck on single “hot-button” topics without developing more fundamental platforms, or have turned out to be thinly disguised variations on liberalism. (I am especially fond of Kalb’s succinct dismissal of libertarianism on the grounds that it is not only unrealistic but also suffers from the same theoretical faults as liberalism itself.) A serious conservative challenge to liberalism, Kalb argues, “must be at once more universal and more local,” emphasizing the tangible and associational ties that inspire true loyalty. Too, Kalb cautions conservatives against imagining that the good life can be expressed in material terms—or getting attached to those short-term, high-profile issues that ultimately are more reactive than creative.
On those terms, and given the much-discussed theoretical incoherence of both major American political parties, Kalb’s vision of a new and more self-aware conservatism is one that conceivably could appeal to serious people on both sides of the proverbial aisle. For instance, there are constituencies within both the current Democratic and Republican parties that worry about the pressure that advanced liberalism puts on family life. This worry manifests itself not only in talk about “family values,” but in concern about family-leave policies. It has become especially acute as Americans contemplate the influence of the latest technologies on children’s lives. (Take the almost unanimous concern among Americans about child predators lurking on Internet chat rooms; new technologies are almost universally unsettling to parents.) At times, reading this book, I worried that some of Kalb’s more snappy and critical asides in this book—usually directed at the American left—might alienate potential allies or undermine some of his central argument.
For if Kalb’s thesis is correct, that liberalism is the omnipresent ethos of the day—an ethos that exists across the American political spectrum—it is an ethos with tentacles extended to the left and to the right. As Kalb notes, a meaningful challenge to liberalism has to see both farther and deeper, beyond the dichotomies that we seem to see in contemporary political life, and down to the level of fundamental, or first things, about which all of us humans—even we liberals—might agree.
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