Scolding American Liberalism

For a long time American academics have lived with a curious contradiction. While many have maintained a liberal commitment toward contemporary politics, in looking at the past they have been steadily critical of the failures of those same politics. Liberalism, in much of the work of twentieth-century American historians, has been characterized as imperfect and half-hearted, a philosophy of compromise incommensurate to the great social problems it is repeatedly engaged to solve. Its heart may be in the right place, but its actions fall short of the measure. In this literature on American liberalism I think there has been a tendency to express the frustrated passions of the contemporary political world, to make up for a lack of clear choice in the present by seeing the past with precision. As the dominant political model of the twentieth century, liberalism, and its failings, sometimes appear to explain all of the shortcomings of the era.

While the mainstream of liberal thought in the United States has always had its powerful advocates among American academics and continues to have today, an interesting argument has developed recently around the adequacy of thought articulated by its leading creators. Several important books measure the attainments of John Dewey’s philosophy, for example: Robert Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (1991), Alan Ryan, John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism (1995), John Patrick Diggins, The Promise of Pragmatism (1994), and various works by Richard Rorty. These works join a distinguished literature of works on liberalism including Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (1991), and James Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory (1986). Add to this the continuing rich work on William James and Charles Saunders Peirce by James Livingston, Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution (1994), George Cotkin, William James, Public Philosopher (1994), and Joseph Brent, Charles Sanders Peirce (1993), and we have begun to assemble a dialogue of considerable distinction.

Just why we are having this extended debate about the philosophic founders of modern liberal thought helps to explain the appearance of three newly published doctoral dissertations that carry the argument even further and, I think, question even more deeply the whole liberal endeavor. Of course, it would be wrong to overemphasize the suddenness of this conversation; the argument over the meaning of liberalism is, after all, one of its defining features—as any politics of moderation would probably be. But in the case of the three books under consideration here, there is a tone of dismissal, as if to say that a new generation of historians will look upon liberalism, not as their philosophy, either in the past or the present, but as something whose energy and relevance appear to be waning.

To some degree, of course, these books repeat charges made before about the modern liberal tradition: it is elitist; its philosophic arguments are weak; it is (at times) insufficiently attentive to the difficult problems of free speech and civil liberties. But the element of dismissal here is stronger, the argument of irrelevance has become bolder. And the source of this critique comes from neither of the places one might expect. It does not flow from the contemporary conservative attack on liberalism mounted by the political Right. And it is almost entirely innocent of the traces of postmodern theory that has also sustained a broad assault on the common-sense materialism that lies at the heart of pragmatic liberalism.

Judy Kutulas’s The Long War explores the rise of anticommunist liberalism and the demise of radical progressivism in the 1930s. It...