Liberalism reinvents itself

Samuel Moyn’s books center around dramatic turns in the history of political thought. The Last Utopia argued that it was not until the 1970s that human rights became the centerpiece of our vision of international justice. In Christian Human Rights, Moyn identified an earlier turning point in the 1930s and 1940s, when Christian political actors used the language of human rights to advance their conservative agenda. The watershed moment in Liberalism Against Itself is the 1940s and 1950s. At that juncture, Moyn argues, Cold War liberals reconceptualized liberalism, leaving it in ruins.

Readers of Liberalism Against Itself will encounter the signature style that catapulted Moyn onto the map of high-profile Anglo-American historians of political thought – jazzy yet crystalline writing, a sense of rhythm, an organic structure, a flair for anecdotes that serve the argument, a knack for punch lines. Readers will also encounter the polemicist with a self-conscious political agenda, whose previous efforts have led some scholars to roll their eyes at the audacity of the arguments.

The book is an intervention in American debates about liberalism. It is partly framed as a response to Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed (2018), which Moyn describes as a “much discussed assault” in his introduction (2) and a “tract for the times” (172) in his epilogue. Moyn’s reply involves distinguishing three main types of liberalism – nineteenth-century liberalism, Cold War liberalism, and neo-liberalism – and arguing on that basis that Deneen mistakes the last two versions for the entirety.

Moyn suggests that nineteenth-century liberalism embraced both individual and collective self-emancipation. Figures such as Benjamin Constant, Tocqueville, and John Stuart Mill viewed history as a platform for the deployment of human agency. Not without hesitations, nineteenth-century liberals also came to see democracy and the state as potential allies in fostering these goals. Cold War liberals replaced this optimistic liberalism with a pessimistic one. They traded emancipation for negative freedom, non-interference, and self-restraint, while portraying historical progress and democracy as harbingers of totalitarianism. Imprisoned in their fearful reaction towards Soviet communism, Cold War liberals not only paved the way for “neoliberalism” (Moyn detects synergies between Jacob Talmon, Karl Popper, and Friedrich Hayek) but also for “neoconservatism.” Gertrude Himmelfarb’s early admiration for the limits imposed by Christian moral law, Moyn argues, anticipates her later involvement in American conservative circles. Those were the same circles that admired Lionel Trilling’s rich prose, which emphasized the need for individual self-restraint to tame beastly passions in an age of instability. Based on these distinctions, Moyn can counter Deneen’s argument by asserting that it is Cold War liberalism and its liberal successor – neoliberalism – that have failed, not liberalism per se.¹

While this narrative offers the advantages of clarity and sharpness, it also comes with costs. It compels Moyn to overstate the internal coherence of both nineteenth-century liberalism and Cold War liberalism, as well as the discontinuity between the two.

Cold War liberalisms

To create an antagonist, Moyn highlights negative aspects in each of his selected figures before arguing that the sum of these faults constitutes Cold War liberalism. The book’s chapters offer a “gallery” of portraits, but Moyn has mostly hung pictures of villains on the wall. He blames Popper’s critique of “historicism” for purging liberalism of its nineteenth-century optimism. Jacob Talmon’s Origins of Totalitarianism – “the archetypical Cold War liberal text” (51) – drew a straight line from democracy to tyranny. Hannah Arendt – not a Cold War liberal per se but a “fellow-traveler” (an intriguing concept) – is found guilty of double standards: political freedom as emancipation yes, but only for white Westerners. The author has a little more time for Judith Shklar, who detected the limits of Cold War liberalism in her early work, before, alas, embracing a liberalism of fear.

Moyn’s severe interpretations are rooted in the fact that Cold War liberals are always judged by the standard set by his interpretation of nineteenth-century liberalism. The book is frustrating in that respect. On the one hand, Moyn sometimes reconstructs with characteristic flair the hesitations and evolutions of some his figures. Yet, at strategic junctures, he reminds us that, despite these vacillations and exceptions, Cold War liberals consistently failed to uphold earlier liberal values – freedom as individual and collective self-creation, a commitment to democracy and state-sponsored social justice, and a bold vision of future progress. When Cold War liberals tick some of these boxes but not all, they are castigated for misunderstanding that genuine liberalism involves the full package. For instance, Moyn credits Isaiah Berlin with running against the grain of Cold war liberal orthodoxy by endorsing, at least in some of his texts, romantic self-creation. But he immediately adds that Berlin failed to realize that the latter could only flourish in relation to appropriate state support. “Nothing in Berlin’s defense of negative liberty guaranteed the survival, let alone served the promotion, of Romantic individuality” (60).

It is undeniable that recent treatments of Cold War liberals have had a panegyric tone, and Moyn’s stark portraits are prompted by an avowed – and understandable – desire to set the record straight.² But must we trade hagiography for demonography? In these kinds of endeavors, the selection of authors is just as decisive as the interpretation of texts. The only overlap between Liberalism Against Itself and Joshua Cherniss’s recent positive treatment of Cold War liberals is Isaiah Berlin. Cherniss’s other heroes – Raymond Aron, Niebuhr, Weber, and Camus – are absent from Moyn’s gallery. Having Aron or Talmon in the cast makes for a different movie. Even a quick glance at Aron’s 1950s writings reveals that he did endorse a non-deterministic version of historical progress and praised (liberal) democracy.³ The reasonable approach seems to recognize at least two strands of Cold War liberalism in the 1940s and 1950s. Some liberals at that time were irremediably hostile to democracy and progress. Others were amenable to both.

Nineteenth-century liberalism: continuities and transformations

Moyn straightaway concedes that the book “does not offer a full-scale depiction of the history of liberalism before the Cold War” (7). Yet his picture of nineteenth-century liberalism is so central to his argument that it is worth considering how plausible it is. There are two problems with this account. First, it downplays the differences among Constant, Tocqueville, and Mill (Moyn’s key liberal heroes). Even if we agree that self-development was one of their shared values (and overlook the fact Tocqueville was much less enthused about it than Constant and Mill), it is hard to deny that nineteenth-century liberals disagreed substantially over the social, political, and economic conditions that sustained creative individuality, as well as the kind of historical development that would favor those conditions. Second, each of these liberals harbored considerable skepticism about at least some of the values Moyn sees as constitutive of nineteenth-century liberalism.

Constant’s vision of progress, driven by perfectibility, did not anticipate the forthcoming need for state provisions or the advent of democracy. On the contrary, Constant believed that both should be kept at bay to preserve individual self-development from unwanted oppressions. Progress, in his view, was the unfolding of timeless truths that included individual rights and civil equality, but not political equality.⁴ Constant did emphasize that civic engagement (such as running for elections or writing in newspapers) would allow modern citizens to develop their faculties under what he called “representative government” (not democracy, which he associated with elections via universal male suffrage, referenda, and plebiscites, and rejected accordingly). A search in his texts for a commitment to state intervention to ensure equality of opportunities is in vain. Rather, in line with his vision of progress, he thought that laissez faire, laissez passer (his phrase) would free individual efforts from the obstacles of Ancien Regime privileges and give rise to a nation of small property holders.⁵

Tocqueville is another illustration that the nineteenth-century liberal values Moyn highlights did not always align. His foretelling of the coming of democracy was intended as a warning towards the oligarchical elite of the July Monarchy. However, it is also true that Tocqueville’s response to the social question was generally limited to warnings that public assistance encouraged idleness, combined with admonitions that workers should become self-reliant through associations and savings accumulation programs.⁶ Around 1847, he briefly considered social measures such as proportional taxation in the hope of preventing a worker’s revolution.⁷ Yet, shortly after the 1848 June days, Tocqueville backpedaled. He delivered a resounding speech against “socialism,” endorsing minimal state assistance for the poor but staunchly opposing other state-supported measures, including progressive taxation. Meanwhile, he drew a straight line between Babeuf’s “communism” and “socialism.”⁸ Reflecting his mounting anxiety about how workers’ movements would pave the way for Bonapartism, a few years later, in exile from Napoleon III’s Second Empire, Tocqueville published not a tale of democracy powerfully unfolding, but the Ancien Regime – a story about endemic state centralization in France both before, during, and after the Revolution.

More so than Tocqueville, Mill fruitfully engaged with socialism.⁹ He came to endorse workers’ cooperatives supplemented by qualified state provisions, including land reform to address the issue of undeserved inherited property. At the same time, although he recognized the advent of democracy as an inescapable historical fact, Mill consistently sought to counter the threat posed by the tyranny of the majority upon creative individuality. To preserve the influence of the intellectual elite in collective decision-making, he recommended mechanisms such as proportional representation, unequally weighted voting, and limitations on suffrage.¹⁰ Tocqueville’s case reveals that nineteenth-century liberals could celebrate both democracy and minimal state intervention. Mill’s case suggests that they could champion both state provisions and skepticism towards democracy.

If Cold War liberalism and nineteenth-century liberalism were multifaceted, and if key nineteenth-century liberals were critical of democracy and social policies, there might be more continuity between the two than Moyn allows. Nowhere is this clearer than with democracy. According to Moyn, “where earlier liberals had come to accept democratization, if cautiously and often grudgingly, Cold War liberals abhorred mass politics – including mass democracy” (4). Notice, though, that the characterization of nineteenth-century liberalism in the first part of the sentence is an understatement, while the second contains a semantic shift from democratization to “mass democracy.”

The truth is that early to mid-nineteenth-century liberals actively opposed democracy as a political regime.¹¹ Constant is a case in point. Tocqueville was an exception among liberals in the 1830s, and it bears reminding that he proposed both democratic and aristocratic answers to democratic levelling. After 1848, liberals started offering their own brand of democracy – what French liberals called “liberal democracy” and German, American, and British liberals called “representative democracy” or “modern democracy” – as an alternative to more radical brands of democracy. These included not just Bonapartist democracy (the Second Empire acted as a foil for liberals on both sides of the Atlantic), but also socialist conceptions of democracy that celebrated universal male suffrage, economic solidarity, and referenda.

Nineteenth-century liberals abhorred “mass democracy” every bit as much as Cold War liberals. In the 1940s and 1950s, Cold War liberals did not break away from earlier liberal reconciliations with democracy. Rather, they redeployed the underlying skepticism that earlier liberals entertained vis-à-vis radical forms of democracy. At that juncture, Aron and other Cold War liberals started ascribing the “totalitarian” label to what previous liberals had denounced as “socialist” or “Caesarist” conceptions of democracy (today, this ascription practice continues with liberal admonitions against “populism”). Meanwhile, someone like Aron could argue that France should embrace a liberal democracy that recognized the importance of checks and balances, party competition, and vigorous deliberation.¹² Decades later, Judith Shklar echoed Aron’s position – democracy is necessary, but it has to serve liberal ends – by insisting that,

without the institutions of representative democracy and an accessible, fair, and independent judiciary open to appeals, and in the absence of a multiplicity of politically active groups, liberalism is in jeopardy. It is the entire purpose of the liberalism of fear to prevent that outcome. It is therefore fair to say that liberalism is monogamously, faithfully, and permanently married to democracy – but it is a marriage of convenience.¹³

Liberal attitudes towards democracy reveal that the history of liberalism is best understood not as revolving around one big break but as a history of progressive adaptations and reinventions, with some enduring continuities. Faced with shifting political problems, successive generation of liberals have selected some ideas advocated by previous liberals (e.g. self-development) while divorcing them from other values (e.g. Mill’s workers’ associations) to cope with shifting political circumstances. And, at any given moment in time, including the 1940s and 1950s, there were competing brands of liberalism on offer. Moyn is right that future-oriented visions of history were scarce among liberals after World War Two. But some liberals like Aron still believed in progress, while others like Berlin chose to detach this idea from other commitments already present in earlier brands of liberalism.

This is not to say that Moyn’s preferred liberalism is a fantasy; it most resembles the social brands of liberalism that sought to reconcile self-realization with solidarity between the 1890s and the 1920s.¹⁴ There is the occasional mention in Liberalism Against Itself that this early twentieth-century liberalism was at one with nineteenth-century liberalism. However, this was not the case. Even Mill’s engagement with socialism remained a far cry from the social liberalism later advocated by Hobhouse, Léon Bourgeois, or John Dewey. In fact, one of the many reinventions in the history of liberalism occurred precisely at that fin de siècle juncture when some liberals started advocating for ambitious social policies. In France, someone like Charles Gide defended progressive taxation against many other self-titled liberals who continued to agitate the specter of the interventionist state. New labels emerged to signal this transformation: “New Liberalism” in Britain, “Solidarisme” in France, and “Progressivism” in the United States. Moyn’s argument would have been stronger if it asserted that Cold War liberals distanced themselves from aspects of this synthesis of liberalism and socialism, rather than breaking with a coherent nineteenth-century liberal tradition.

Tradition-building: angels and demons

One of the most interesting elements of Liberalism Against Itself is its discussion of canonization processes – an aspect that remains woefully absent from other recent histories of liberalism. It is indeed hard to write about the history of political thought after 1848 without mentioning the tremendous effort that liberals (and theorists of other political creeds) put into building justificatory genealogies. Duncan Bell’s “What is Liberalism?” invited us to pay attention to belated consecrations of liberal heroes such as Locke. Moyn’s vital addition is that “canons identify not just angels but also demons” (19). This emphasis allows him to develop a compelling storyline about how Cold War liberals demonized figures and movements that had inspired earlier liberal thinkers, such as Rousseau, Hegel, Romanticism, and Marx, and how they included other figures in their pantheon. Trilling’s cooptation of Freud’s insistence on self-restraint being a case in point.

As far as demons are concerned, Moyn’s thesis is convincing – one needs just to remember how enthused Germaine de Staël or Tocqueville were with Rousseau, though I believe hints of similar ostracizations are already perceptible in the second half of the nineteenth century (Constant was more cautious in his criticism of Rousseau than is often assumed, and he owed much more to him than he was willing to publicly acknowledge in a post-Terror French context). Yet, if we turn to angels, one of the problems Moyn runs into is that his Cold War liberals seemed to be as keen as he is to celebrate nineteenth-century liberals (just think of Hayek’s admiration for Tocqueville). As Moyn emphasizes, Berlin believed that T. H. Green’s welfare liberalism had to be put to the basket (80). But Berlin also enlisted Constant, Tocqueville, and Mill in his liberal canon. This apparent mismatch is coherent with the Cold War reinvention away from early twentieth-century progressive liberalism. From Berlin’s perspective, he was returning to truly liberal – that is, nineteenth-century – sources.

Moyn’s rejoinder to Berlin and other Cold War liberals is that they misinterpreted aspects of Constant, Tocqueville, and Mill. But is that so? Building a canon requires careful selections, overemphasis on perceived similarities, and omissions of differences and shifts over time. Nineteenth-century liberalism was evolving and multifaceted. Just as they repackaged doctrinal points of earlier brands of liberalism, such as distrust vis-à-vis democracy, Cold War liberals reconfigured the nineteenth-century liberal tradition to suit their purpose. Berlin created his own liberal creed by turning Constant and Mill into apostles of romantic individuality and negative freedom. Moyn’s own invented tradition combines Mill’s social policies with Constant’s celebration of self-creation and Tocqueville’s early prophecy of democratic progress. His demons are Cold War liberals like Isaiah Berlin.

Liberalism in America

In the book’s conclusion, Moyn blames American liberals like Francis Fukuyama or Stephen Holmes for rehashing the lessons of Cold War liberalism. What Moyn does not mention is that Liberalism Against Itself continues another distinctively American brand of liberalism that, for decades now, has been emphasizing the interdependence of self-realization, equality of opportunities, and democracy. In 1987, Nancy Rosenblum was already distancing herself from Shklar’s liberalism of fear by offering “another liberalism” that integrated the lessons of romanticism to celebrate creative individuality.¹⁵ This American line of argument about self-emancipation and moral values has been pursued in the 1990s and 2000s against, successively, communitarian and neo-republican critics of liberalism.¹⁶ It continues to this day, often with repeated calls that we look beyond America to find genuine liberal heroes. It is remarkable how many recent American histories of liberalism emphasize perfectionism or self-development as the hallmark of a superior, European nineteenth-century brand of liberalism that was somehow lost throughout the twentieth century.¹⁷

Bearing in mind this coexistence of two brands of American liberalism – a liberalism of fear and a liberalism of ethical self-creation – makes it harder to believe Moyn’s thesis that Cold War liberalism has erased from the American map contending versions of liberalism. More importantly, perhaps, it also casts a different light on Patrick Deneen’s pressing question – why has liberalism failed?

One of the stimulating claims of Deneen’s book was that there was no real difference between “classical liberalism” and “progressive liberalism.” Both kinds of liberalism saw individual autonomy as the goal. They only disagreed on the means to achieve it – laissez faire in the case of classical liberals, government support to ensure equality of opportunities in the case of progressive liberals. According to Deneen, the result of this common emphasis on inhibited freedom to choose has been not just the ruin of communities of shared values (which liberal critics of Deneen have easily mocked) but also, more challengingly, the destruction of nature in the name of individual self-creation combined with the rise of a “new aristocracy” of liberal high achievers that leaves ordinary citizens powerless and disgruntled.¹⁸ We do not have to embrace Deneen’s mono-causal narrative and his solution – relearning the lost art of self-governance in tightly-knit localities – to agree that some of his criticisms might apply to both brands of contemporary American liberalism.

In distinguishing Cold War liberalism from nineteenth-century liberalism (in fact early twentieth-century social liberalism), Moyn has not addressed Deneen’s challenge. Rather, he has redirected the criticism to the other liberal camp Deneen identified while still recognizing individual self-creation as the objective to strive for. Yet, branding once again some version of progressive liberalism as the answer to our times skirts the genuine conceptual problems Deneen identified. How do liberals reconcile individual self-realization – a doctrine that was theorized by the likes of Constant in reaction to Bonapartist repression in pre-industrial France – with the present need for limits in a market-economy, climate-disturbed world? How do liberals reconcile individual self-development with a thick conception of democracy, which liberals have portrayed as a threat for more than two centuries?¹⁹

To be fair, Moyn does not advocate a straight return to nineteenth-century liberalism. But if we are to invent a form of liberalism attuned to contemporary needs, it seems that nineteenth-century liberal thought should function as a foil at least as much as a source of inspiration. Perhaps reinventing liberalism would involve amending some of its earlier commitments. Emphasizing individual and collective responsibility instead of self-development would be a start (note that responsibility is distinct from what Moyn chastises as self-restraint). And so would embracing positions that liberals have tended to recoil from, including a more capacious understanding of democracy. This would be, for once, a big break from earlier versions of liberalism.

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Tom Arnold-Forster and Robin Douglass for their suggestions and comments on this essay, as well as Richard Oosterhoff for his editorial advice.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the British Academy: [Grant Number PF21\210099].

Notes on contributors

Arthur Ghins

Arthur Ghins is a British Academy postdoctoral fellow at King's College London. His work on the history of modern democracy and liberalism has appeared, among others, in The Journal of Politics, Modern Intellectual History, and Political Studies. He is currently completing his first book manuscript, titled The People's Two Powers: Public Opinion and Popular Sovereignty from Rousseau to Liberal Democracy.

Notes

1 An early reaction of his to Deneen was titled “Neo-liberalism, Not Liberalism, Failed”. The book portrays Cold War liberalism as a “hinge” (86), and states accordingly that “Cold War liberalism has failed” (7).

2 See, for example, Jan-Werner Müller, “What Cold War Liberalism Can Teach Us Today”, and his article, “Fear and Freedom”.

3 Aron, Introduction à la philosophie politique, 201–20, 240–5.

4 Constant, “De la perfectibilité de l’espèce humaine”.

5 The key text here is Constant’s Commentary on Filangieri’s Work.

6 Compare Tocqueville’s “Mémoire sur le paupérisme” and “Second mémoire sur le paupérisme”.

7 Tocqueville, “[Fragments d’une politique sociale]”.

8 Tocqueville, “Discours prononcé le 12 septembre 1848”, 1139.

9 Whether that engagement makes him a socialist is a disputed matter. See the review forum on Helen McCabe’s John Stuart Mill, Socialist in History of European Ideas 49/1 (2023).

10 Mill, “Considerations on Representative Government”, 302–45.

11 See Rosenblatt, The Lost History of Liberalism, as well as Conti and Selinger, “The Lost History of Political Liberalism”.

12 Compare Aron, “Démocratie et totalitarisme”, 1287–1301, and Aron, “Qu’est-ce que le libéralisme?”.

13 Shklar, “The Liberalism of Fear”, 37. Earlier in the essay (28), Shklar criticized Berlin’s account of “negative liberty” on the ground that it was divorced from “the social and political institutions that make personal freedom possible”.

14 It also bears striking resemblances with Pierre Rosanvallon’s later reinvention of social liberalism through the idea of autogestion. Moyn contributed to introducing Rosanvallon’s political writings to an American audience. See Jainchill and Moyn, “Pierre Rosanvallon and Revisionist Historiography”; Pierre Rosanvallon, Democracy Past and Future.

15 Rosenblum, Another Liberalism. Rosenblum followed two years later with an edited volume, Liberalism and the Moral Life, the first chapter of which was Shklar’s “The Liberalism of Fear”.

16 See, among others, Kelly, Constant, Tocqueville, and French Liberalism; Rosenblatt, Liberal Values ; Garsten, “Constant and the Religious Spirit of Liberalism”.

17 Rosenblatt, Lost History; Kahan, Freedom from Fear.

18 Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed, 43–63, 131–53.

19 In “The Liberalism of Fear”, Shklar already developed a liberal critique of Rosenblum’s liberalism of “romantic self-expression”, accusing it, alongside communitarianism, of condoning a de-politicized citizenry: “To seek emotional and personal development in the bosom of a community or in romantic self-expression is a choice open to citizens in liberal societies. Both, however, are apolitical impulses and wholly self-oriented, which at best distract us from the main task of politics when they are presented as political doctrines, and at worst can, under unfortunate circumstances, seriously damage liberal practices” (36).