Character and Ideology: The Case of Cold War Liberalism

This essay reexamines liberalism as a body of thought and as a lived political commitment, arguing for a more differentiated understanding of both the history of liberalism and its ethos, or character. Throughout its history, liberalism has been animated by a dialectic of hope and skepticism, and its particular forms of pessimism, or sober realism, derive from a keen awareness of those forces and conditions that threaten the realization of liberal ambitions, and that remind us of reason’s limits. Taking the case of Cold War liberalism as a central instance of what we might term a bleak liberalism, the essays argues that historically liberalism dwells as much in the existential register of crisis and repair as it does in the normative regions of principle and procedure. To begin to recognize the shaping tensions of liberalism can prompt new ways of thinking not only about the liberal ethos, but also about the liberal aesthetic.