Liberalism and the Cultural Studies Imagination: A Comment on John Frow

As I find much to agree with in John Frow’s essay, which is certainly flattering in devoting such careful reflection to an essay of mine, I would like here to offer not exactly an opposing view, but rather some questions and qualifications for extending his inquiry.

The first of these has to do with what is called liberalism. Frow’s essay is evidently culled from a longer piece, which might well have more to say about the subject, but in this version a strain of deep ambivalence about the liberal tradition is in evidence. He notes the semantic flexibility of the term, calling it a loose ethos rather than a philosophy. He also shows, as do many other commentators, that “[l]iberalism” is a mix of different strains of thought, with radically different implications in context. It is therefore something of a surprise when we encounter the claim that “[l]iberalism fails—constitutively, not accidentally—to think three modes of historical transformation” in the twentieth century.

Frow does not develop, in this version of his essay, the claim that the limitation is constitutive, a necessary failing of liberalism. To be frank, I must say that I don’t see how this claim could be made good, at least with respect to the first two points, both of which can be easily contradicted. There is quite sophisticated work, well within a tradition that is commonly called liberal, that describes the problems of corporate agents and concentrated capital, as well as the complex and multivalent manifestations of the state. Michael Walzer, to cite only one example, has consistently made both of these central to his work for the past twenty years, and has vigorously argued against the rejection of key aspects of the liberal tradition. Even Galbraith and Keynes could be cited as counterexamples, and some of the tenets of liberalism as Frow cites them have never been univocal. “Negative liberty,” in particular, is a red herring, in my view. As for the third allegedly constitutive blind spot of liberalism, the transformation of the citizen into a mass subject, one might even want to cite Frow himself as a counterexample. For he offers some extremely astute and sophisticated comments on the nature of politics in the context of mass culture, and yet it turns out that some of his central commitments could easily be described as compatible with, even definitional of liberalism. I find this to be the case especially in his last paragraph, where he invokes the ideals of rational debate, suspicion of power, “limited justice,” “acceptance of cultural alterity,” etc.

This might well reduce to a semantic dispute. Frow might respond that by “liberalism” he means something close to what he elsewhere calls neoliberalism (of which he has a shrewd analysis); that the failings he calls constitutive blindnesses are definitional of this narrower usage; that his comments are meant only of the version of liberalism that has been dominant in Anglo-American culture; and that the ideals that arise so passionately and compellingly in his last paragraph, though overlapping with some parts of the liberal tradition, are shared with a social-democratic one that needs to be distinguished from the regnant neoliberal tradition.

Fine. In that case, why does the essay need an enemy called liberalism? Would it not be a more powerful political strategy to lay claim to those parts of liberal thought that motivate the critique? Does it not produce a kind of political and rhetorical weakness to pretend that neoliberalism reigns unchallenged as the true expression of the liberal ethos, that similar criticisms have not long been audible within serious liberal thought? ¹

On the subject of mass culture and its implications for citizens, individuals, and politics, Frow makes a number of astute observations. He is certainly right, for example, to observe that there can be no return to a public world untroubled by the distortions of mass media, even if we thought that eighteenth-century print culture was free of contradiction (which almost no one, least of all Habermas, really thinks). He is also right when he notes...