Bleak Liberalism by Amanda Anderson (review)

To the great benefit of Victorianist scholarship, Amanda Anderson has devoted years of research to defending what Jürgen Habermas called the “unfinished project” of Enlightenment modernity (Habermas qtd. in Amanda Anderson, The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory [Princeton University Press, 2009], 140). The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (2000) boldly argued that a criticism too engrossed in poststructuralist critiques of power had obscured practices of reflective detachment, which Victorian literature could help to revive. The Way We Argue Now (2006) called on critics to overcome their suspicion of rationalist modes of argument. A recurrent idea was that scholars since the 1980s had begun to privilege style over substance: whereas Michel Foucault’s charisma left him resistant to scrutiny, Habermas’s universalism was held to typify “plodding style, an embarrassing optimism of the intellect, and dangerous complicity with the Enlightenment” (141).

As the somber title suggests, Bleak Liberalism is not precisely a sequel. Determined to “reconstruct liberalism’s doubts about its own . . . unfinished project,” Anderson herself now distinguishes her object of study from Enlightenment optimism (22). In place of robust Kantian universalism, she upholds a liberal pragmatism shot through with tragic experience, diminished expectations, and existential concerns. Whereas the feminist Habermasian Seyla Benhabib was an inspiration for earlier work, the new study’s guiding lights are Cold War liberals including Isaiah Berlin and Lionel Trilling. A major exponent of so-called value pluralism, Berlin argued for a scaled-back liberalism that, contra Kant or Marx, withholds on positive assurances of the good life in order to privilege individual liberty. Anderson focuses on these mid-century thinkers because she believes that the “disenchantment” of erstwhile radicals in the face of a painful “historical situation” is necessary to understand a liberalism “in the existential register of crisis and repair” (24). Trilling provides the basis for “a rich tradition of liberal aesthetics,” which becomes visible once liberal challenges and complexity are recognized (46). This literary project is developed through chapters on realism, the political novel, a comparison of Trilling and Theodor Adorno, and a closing discussion of Ralph Ellison and Doris Lessing through the prism of the (so-called) realism/modernism debate.

The last twenty years have seen vigorous studies of liberalism and literature by Victorianists and others. Yet, such scholarship, Anderson contends, has yet to grasp how realist novels explore the “dynamic relation between liberalism’s focus on systemic inequities and its investment” in cultivating “temperament and character” (48). Her reading of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1852–53) shows how the oscillation between Esther Summerson’s first-person narration and the third-person narrator’s synoptic vantage point is more than the sum of its parts. Rather than simply “capturing the conditions of pervasive power,” the novel exemplifies a “distinctly liberal” effort to breach the “structuring gap between sociological and moral perspectives” (56). It is odd, however, to find Anderson obscuring this powerful insight by over-arguing the importance of Allan Woodcourt’s role as a neighborhood doctor for the poor. Her concern is that critics regard “any emphasis on the individual over against the system” as “playing into liberal ideology” and overvaluing “negative freedom” (51). Perhaps, but to make the case that Bleak House endorses the voluntary and charitable activities of medical authorities as opposed to a Central Board of Health (like that which the real-life Thomas Southwood Smith occupied) is not to disregard how modest or local reforms are “integrally related” to “morally meaningful” action (51). To the contrary, anxieties about statism and the difficulties of installing collective authority were lifelong concerns for John Stuart Mill (a “bleak” prototype), as well as Trilling (whose grappling with Cold War statism led him to the counter-liberalisms of Mill and E. M. Forster).

Anderson’s cogent reading of Middlemarch (1871–72) builds on in-depth knowledge of Victorian political philosophy and scholarship on George Eliot. Whereas Dorothea Brooke learns to relinquish far-reaching ideals, Will...