Liberalism, Disfigured

It is perhaps a safe bet that at present liberalism and liberal are more often than not taken as pejoratives in academic discourse, particularly in theory cultures. As Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities and English at Brown University, Amanda Anderson is sharply aware that the affiliation liberal in literary studies and the humanities can today be as risky a critical investment as humanist: not least because of the perceived difficulty of conceiving a liberalism outside of neoliberalism, liberalism is often presumed to be a retrograde, theoretically naive, even "bankrupt mode of critical political thought" (bl, 45), thoroughly debunked by the last half century of deconstructive, poststructuralist, and radical critique. Bleak Liberalism turns the tables on such critical divestments from liberalism. For Anderson, the present bankruptcy of the concept of liberalism in academic discourse—as well as in intellectual and literary history—discloses a deficit not so much in liberal thinking as in radical critique. By radical critique Anderson refers less to an explicit political affiliation or ideology than to the critical-theoretical tendencies that largely determine the norms of critical inquiry due to the pervasive influence of Marxist, deconstructive, and poststructuralist thought. Bleak Liberalism argues that liberalism (and what Anderson will call the "liberal character," "liberal aesthetic," and "liberal critique") is much more complex, aesthetically and existentially dense, and negative than current critical frameworks admit and that it has its own critique of neoliberalism. Anderson refers to the critically robust form of liberalism that her study recovers as "bleak liberalism," which she argues embodies not an exceptional version of liberalism but a set of acute negative insights always already fueling the internal dynamics of liberal thought. If her reclamation of a liberalism that is neither naively optimistic nor assuredly progressivist doubles as a critique of the limits of current radical critical-theoretical frameworks, Bleak Liberalism rejects the premise of pitting liberal and radical critiques against each other in any zero-sum power struggle. On the contrary, Anderson values radical political theory as one form of critical thought among others and as an ally against neoliberalism and illiberal "alt-right ideology."¹ Bleak Liberalism seeks to recover liberalism's aesthetics, dialectical negativity, and criticality not only to reestablish the legitimacy of liberal critique but also to make room for more critically pluralistic theory cultures, intellectual histories, and forms of argument than current critical frameworks can acknowledge.

While the introduction and the first chapter of Anderson's study are largely devoted to theorizing bleak liberalism, the subsequent four chapters pivot more explicitly toward literary studies to explore the liberal aesthetic and the liberal critique in nineteenth-and twentieth-century novels that reconstruct debates between liberal and radical thought in intellectual and literary history. Anderson, who began her career as a Victorianist, still specializes in Victorian as well as in modernist novels and critical theory; her previous work, The Way We Argue Now (2005), a major study of argumentative tendencies in theory cultures in the humanities, prepared her well for the highly ambitious project of Bleak Liberalism. Classifying the latter primarily in literary studies or literary criticism seems inadequate: Anderson's body of work makes significant original contributions to aesthetic and political theory, and her current study is no exception. In Bleak Liberalism, however, her aesthetic and political thought becomes even more dialectically mediated: it is next to impossible (and artificial) to cleanly separate Anderson's theorizations of bleak liberalism in the study's introduction and opening chapter from her interventions into literary studies, because the complex interactions between the liberal aesthetic and liberal critique are constitutive of (and immanent to) what she understands as bleak liberalism.

The sheer ideational density and complexly negative, disjunctive, yet accretive thinking of Bleak Liberalism make it almost as challenging to fit into a linear narrative as all the turns of thought in Theodor Adorno's Aesthetic Theory. Much like Adorno, Anderson sees this difficulty as a critical feature of the aesthetic rather than as a bug. Analogies to Adorno are in fact quite useful...