Recovering the Liberal Tradition

Amanda Anderson’s Bleak Liberalism challenges the academic critique of liberal thought by recovering a version of liberalism characterized by an awareness of the sociological, psychological, and historical impediments to achieving its ideals. Drawing on the work of Lionel Trilling and other bleak liberal thinkers, Anderson explores the culture of cold war criticism and revises traditional accounts of critical history. In addition, she demonstrates how detailed attention to the aesthetic properties of literature can underwrite nuanced political beliefs by theorizing a liberal aesthetic through short readings of Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, E.M. Forster, Ralph Ellison, and Doris Lessing. These readings, in turn, disclose how the novel can express a skepticism toward, and commitment to, liberalism.