The Virtues of Liberalism (review)

Historians and political theorists share a relationship not unlike that of the taciturn neighbors of rural New England folklore. Borrowing incessantly from each other, silently raiding each other’s stock of tools and concepts, they rarely stop for conversation. Their ingrown lives go on better that way.

Since the publication of Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920 (New York, 1986), Kloppenberg has turned his primary attention to mediating between these two flinty neighbors. That book offered a magisterial survey of the reformulation of philosophy and politics on pragmatic lines in turn-of-the-century Europe and the United States. In this collection of essays, all but one previously published, American political ideas, by contrast, occupy the foreground.

Several of these essays engage the artificially polarized contest between liberal and republican ideas in early America; Kloppenberg’s title essay on these lines, first published in 1987, is still vital introductory reading for newcomers to that debate. Other essays address the centrality of religious ideas in American political culture. A third cluster of essays intervenes into the debate between Rorty and Habermas about the legacy of pragmatism, in which Kloppenberg argues that Rorty’s subjective anti-foundationalism is less authentically heir to the core values of Deweyan pragmatism than is Habermas’ focus on the social conditions of democratic communication.¹

John Dewey, in fact, commands the center of Kloppenberg’s vision for American political culture. Dewey’s mediative temperament, his tolerant yet purposive understanding of politics, and his focus on the conditions of deliberative democracy are Kloppenberg’s own. Kloppenberg brings formidable resources of mind and learning to bear against those who would shrink liberalism to mere procedural neutrality, or those who would condemn it to a narrow defense of individual rights and property—a set of private stories mute in considerations of the public good. Pragmatic liberalism, Kloppenberg insists throughout, rests on its own foundation of virtue.

Others have found more passion in American political culture than Kloppenberg’s mediative readings are prone to acknowledge. But his vision of the possibilities of a historically grounded liberalism is broad, timely, and humane. Neighbors on both sides of the history and political theory divide will take profit from these learned and carefully drawn explorations across their common terrain.