Category: book reviews

I’ve been following this conversation about liberalism that has developed over the past few years because, like many people, I was caught off guard by the rise of far right populism and extremist politics. Freedom House has documented an overall decline in democracy around the world for the past 18 years now and this trend is confirmed by other metrics such as those of the V-Dem project and the polity scores. Why is the world giving up on liberalism/liberal democracy? I wanted to know (still want to know) so I read Deneen’s book Why Liberalism Failed and various academic articles that spin off on all sorts of different aspects of the problem from the rise of social media to the question of post-truth and plain old propaganda. Many of these things were very helpful in understanding why this trend is happening and they are maybe more helpful than books like this that try to take the big picture view and talk about liberalism as a whole theoretical tradition. As much as I enjoy that stuff, I think it could reasonably be argued that once we zoom out that far, it’s actually less helpful to understanding what’s going on because it becomes just a philosophical debate. Most people are not thinking deeply about the tenants of liberalism or neoliberalism and all the different variations therein and then deciding to vote or not vote or vote for a populist demagogue accordingly. It really does all come down to things like social media, narratives, and propaganda.

That said, I appreciate this book for reminding us about this whole school of thought, or theoretical tradition that comes down to us from the Enlightenment –liberalism. It’s such an old tradition that we’ve lived with so long it’s like an old t-shirt that’s been washed and stretched out so many times it barely resembles its original shape. The term has been so used and abused over the years until now it seems to encompass almost everything and almost nothing. Does it mean democracy or capitalism? Yes! Does it mean freedom or regulation? Yes! Freedom for individuals or freedom for markets? Yes! The book is helpful for explaining a bit about how liberalism evolved over the years. i.e. why “neoliberalism” a thing that seems so contrary to everything else in liberalism is a thing.

I appreciate Moyn’s overall argument in this book —that liberalism has gotten away from what it once meant. G. John Ikenberry made a similar argument in a 2018 article called “The end of the liberal international order?” Ikenberry called for a return to the embedded economy of the New Deal –the idea that the market should work for society and human needs should come first, not the other way around. (In other words: anti-neoliberalism). Moyn’s book is less specific on the recommendations part but that’s okay with me because, like I said, its value lies in its explanation of how the concept of liberalism evolved during the second half of the 20th century.

The book got me curious to read Judith Shklar, since Moyn said she’s kind of his guide for the book. Indeed, now that I’ve read Shklar’s After Utopia I can see how this book by Moyn is kind of newer version of it. Shklar’s book was written back in 1956. I wasn’t familiar with things like “Christian fatalism,” that she references, but I did understand what she meant by “the romantics” –anti-intellectualism, a preference for emotion-rather-than-reason, a rejection of standardization and “the mass society” etc. That’s plenty familiar to us now, but back in the mid-1950s Shklar had yet to meet the first hippie. I bet she wasn’t at all surprised by the 1960s counter-culture. We seem to be entering a similar era now: people are suspicious of science and any and all authority figures. Politicos use micro-targeted ads to appeal to the emotions of individuals rather than to reason and no one but no one is talking anymore about what’s best for the community overall. People think politics is all about what benefits them personally rather than what would make society as a whole better off. So it’s no wonder people are bemoaning the end of liberalism and wanting to understand why this is happening.

This class of people that Moyn calls “Cold War liberals” are people who, like Shklar, were writing about liberalism during the Cold War. Of the ones Moyn talks about I’ve read Karl Popper, Isaiah Berlin and Hannah Arendt. I liked and appreciated both Popper’s and Berlin’s arguments, Popper’s 1945 book The Open Society and Berlin’s famous essay from the 1950s on the two kinds of freedom (positive and negative). I think for their time, both were useful criticisms about the dangers of totalitarianism. Stalin’s purges of the 1930s and the Soviet version of the Great Terror were recent history and Mao’s Cultural Revolution that left millions dead was just around the corner. There was something extremely repressive in these regimes that *claimed* to be based upon Marx’s ideas but Shklar argues that criticisms that blame such engineered humanitarian disasters on the ideas/ideologies in whose name they were committed is a form of “intellectual determinism.” She all but mocks those who, in the 1930s, drew a direct line from Rousseau to Hitler(!)… or even Jacobinism. But so what? Can the ideas of liberalism be perverted to nefarious ends by power hungry people? Sure, but that doesn’t make those ideas any less valid. Corrupt humans can corrupt any idea for nefarious ends but this is not the main argument of the book.

The main argument of both books is that something crucial in liberalism has been lost and we need to get it back. What is this thing? For Shklar, and I think for Moyn too, when they talk about the loss of liberalism, the thing they are lamenting is the loss of a sense of collective agency to create a better world. That’s what Shklar means anyway when she talks about the end of political theory. Liberals no longer sit around dreaming about how to create the ideal society anymore. Moyn means something like increasing equality and liberty for an ever-wider number of people (i.e. progressive politics that favors socially progressive policies). Fair enough. I can buy both arguments.

What I said earlier about Moyn essentially re-writing Shklar’s book was not exactly true. The two books are very different; it’s just that you can see a lot of Shklar in Moyn but Shklar’s book is a critique of theoretical approaches or states of mind (romanticism and Christian fatalism) whereas Moyn’s book is more like critiques of specific liberals of the 20th century. It’s not the same critique for everyone though. Take his critique of Hannah Arendt, for example. He doesn’t accuse Arendt of blaming liberalism for totalitarianism. Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem and Origins of Totalitarianism will always remain classics because they show us how easily dictatorships can form in the modern world. There’s nothing in them that blames liberalism for totalitarianism. Instead Moyn makes a post-colonial critique of her later works “On violence” and “On Revolution” in which she denounces the violent overthrow of colonialist powers in the third world by various independence movements. I haven’t read those particular books by Arendt but I imagine this criticism is likely spot-on.

Overall I liked this book by Samuel Moyn and think it is worth your time. It’s a great contribution to the on-going debate about whether liberalism is dead or not.

I recently re-read Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. I think I read it in high school but while I remembered the beginning vividly, I couldn’t remember the end. It came up during a recent conversation with a fellow enthusiast of 19th century literature so I spent a couple of days ensconced in the desolate moors of Yorkshire and I learned some surprising things, mainly, that it’s not primarily a love story! Only in the most superficial sense is it about the love between Cathy and Heathcliff. Most of the novel is about Heathcliff’s revenge on those who wronged him as a child. I can certainly identify with what it feels like to be a child brought into a home where it isn’t wanted and how the resentments of other family members can warp those relationships for life, but I was never  fixated on revenge. One of the joys and purposes of fiction is to allow us to explore what if scenarios. What if I had been obsessed with revenge as Heathcliff is? How might that have gone? Short answer: not well! Heathcliff’s is not a happy ending and, when you finish the novel you realize his love for Cathy is completely overshadowed by his all-consuming hatred of everyone around him. It even extends to Cathy herself in their last encounter. This is not a love story; it’s a hate story!

Bronte does an excellent job of capturing the naiveté of youth. Other characters grow out of theirs, but not Heathcliff. Isabella, for instance, has a great quote when she’s talking with Hindley, another target of Heathcliff’s wrath, about how “treachery, and violence, are spears pointed at both ends –they wound those who resort to them, worth than their enemies.” Heathcliff never gains this much maturity and in this, I don’t think he’s unusual. Lots of people remain emotionally stunted their entire lives. I’ve known old men who have the same level of emotional maturity as fourteen-year-olds. Think of Donald Trump, another example of a petulant child in a grown man’s body, harboring petty jealousies and throwing temper tantrums. When such men are given power over others the amount of damage they can inflict on the world can be immeasurable.

But you know what? –spoiler alert!– in the end, it didn’t matter. The kids were alright. Catherine and Hareton, Nelly tells us “contrived in the end to reach it” –the point of loving and holding one another in esteem.  Heathcliff did manage to inherit everything. But that’s all he got and, in the end, I think he found out the money was worthless. He had no love.

It reminded me of what the goddess Philosophy says about how we call things by the wrong names. In The Consolation of Philosophy Boethius writes “we give the wrong names to things, and if you examine carefully what each thing is in itself then you find that the label is false. Wealth is not really wealth, and power is not really power, just as honor turns out not to really be honor.” (Boethius was a great fan of ancient Greek philosophers and Socrates makes this argument in more than one of Plato’s dialogues.) Heathcliff did manage to take his vengeance out on those who wronged him. He was “successful” in that respect. But was he really? The final picture of Heathcliff is one of despair and madness. This is not vengeance. This is not success. And Wuthering Heights is no love story. It’s a story about the futility of revenge and how much damage small, petty men can do to those around them when they are given power.

It’s a good book to read when one such man sits in the White House.

I think this is the most inspiring book I’ve read so far this year, very thought-provoking and what a neat way to describe John Rawls’ work! Makes me kinda want to go back and re-read that guy, but you don’t need to be familiar with Rawls’ A Theory of Justice or Political Liberalism to get a lot out of Lefebvre’s book (btw, for English-speakers, apparently that ‘b’ in Lefebvre is silent so I’ll spell it phonetically in this review). It all hinges on the idea that instead of being liberal plus some other group identity (say, religious), Lefevre says you can be liberal “all the way down.” In a world where so many are rejecting institutionalized religion, this actually makes the most sense and we should think of it as an option. Lefevre argues that our society is steeped in liberal values (despite not living up to those values much of the time, a fact which only reinforces his point: that we get so outraged about injustice is itself indication that we really value justice). Liberalism is, Lefevre says, our “background culture.”

That’s the first part of the argument. The second part (the so-called “self-help” part) is about how to actually do that, that is, if you’re going to fully embrace liberalism and liberal values, that means you have to actually work towards achieving a more fair and just world. In other words, don’t be a hypocrite (and we’re all hypocrites in this sense). When we tolerate injustice, we’re not being good liberals. We can learn and practice being better, just like learning how to swim. Lefevre is great at metaphors. (There’s a reason the picture on the cover is of people swimming!)

I’m not sure what I think about the fact that I now know (from reading a political theory book of all things!) what the most popular type of pornography is, but there is that factoid in this book too! (I won’t spoil it for you but personally I had no idea! lol) Lefevre uses lots of examples from popular culture to make his points. Some may enjoy that more than others. I don’t mind.

Two points: One, this book pairs well with Jason Stanley’s book How Propaganda Works and also with Adam Gopnik’s A thousand small sanctities. Two, for those interested in political theory, there’s an extra reward in reading the subtext here: political theory should be normative. That is its purpose: to figure out how to live. This is how the ancients thought about philosophy and it’s very different from the way modern thinkers think about it. Most recently, in the past hundred years or so since the rise of behavioralism in political science there has been an attempt to make our field more “science-y” and “objective” “descriptive rather than prescriptive.” It led many people to despair in the 1950s about the death of political theory. Nowadays people talk about the death of liberalism in much the same way. I think they are talking about the same thing (when the latter aren’t confusing liberalism with US hegemony): it is the loss of what Sheldon Wolin calls “vision” for the future, an imagining of how to make our world better. Humans need this sort of thing and we’ve thrown it away. Lefevre is telling us liberalism can help with this problem, if we embrace it. I agree.

Needless to say, this book, like others before it, is taking on the laudable Sisyphean task of trying to define liberalism, a word which seems to encompass so many things (sometimes contradictory things) that no one seems to know what it means anymore. I think it succeeds. Lefebvre gives us a more concrete way to think about what liberalism is, using Rawls as a springboard. It’s not just an intellectual treatise on liberalism, it’s a sort of roadmap for how to live. I enjoyed this book and highly recommend it for anyone who feels disillusioned with modern life.

Nice, short summary of the basic principles of liberalism from the POV of a British gentleman in 1911. Hobhouse describes liberalism as being more often associated with what it is against rather than what it is for. Liberalism is “a protest” or criticism against “religious, political, economic, social, and ethical” authoritarian orders (p. 14). He says the business of liberalism, “seems to be not so much to build up as to pull down, to remove obstacles which block human progress rather than to point the positive goal of endeavour or fashion the fabric of civilization” (p. 15). This could lead to laissez-faire and it does, but, Hobhouse argues it doesn’t stop there, ultimately because liberalism recognizes not just the natural rights of the individual in isolation but the individual as part of society.

Hobhouse sees liberalism as a restraint not just on the power of the state but on anything that interferes with the rights of individuals, including and especially inequality. The liberal state should act to restrain illiberal forces in society which would violate individual rights because “in the absence of drastic legislative protection, [the state alone] could do something to redress the inequality between employer and employed… true freedom postulates substantial equality between the parties” (p. 47). He sees no inherent contradiction between liberalism and socialism, but he devotes a chapter to describing illiberal socialism.

Of course there are some limitations given that he’s a white man writing in 1911. He’s not sure people of color have the capacity to govern themselves, and his listing of “liberal states” includes the British colonies as colonies, but he does seem to imply that he approves of women’s suffrage (although he doesn’t make that explicit). Overall, I appreciated his above description of what liberalism is and what it requires (active participation by all “intelligent adults” on at least some level) in a society which is committed to protecting everyone’s freedom as much as possible.

This is a perfect novel. It’s not only a good story with great complicated compelling characters it really tells us a lot about the way race impacts our relationships with one another, and how that changes in time and place. I’m white and grew up in a small town in the South in the late 70s and 80s and the portrayal of small town white culture in that era is painfully accurate: the overt yet casual racism, the way we saw black people as so foreign and different, dangerous yet cool. We were desegregated but still worlds apart. It’s changing but so slowly it’s almost imperceptible.

Senna’s characters are so well developed, multilayered and complicated but they’re also universal. In my own life’s journey I have met all these characters: white people doing anti-racism work, radical intellectuals who seem to forget about the humanity of their subjects, activists who get carried away by dogma and do the same and liberals who don’t practice what they preach. The almost palpable way this impacts the lives of these two sisters is incredibly moving and unforgettable.

All the above are reasons why a book becomes a classic, it stands out as not just a good read but an important piece of art with something to say about the human experience. I hope it’s on lots of high school reading lists. It’s certainly going to be for me part of my personal cannon of great literature.