Anand Atre is an alum of the MLA Program at Johns Hopkins University.
book review
The End of Liberalism or the Hope for its Resurrection?
Review of Liberalism against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times
by Samuel Moyn
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2023. 240pp.
Paper $20.00, ISBN 9780300280128.
Hardcover $27.50, ISBN 9780300266214.
Digital $27.50, ISBN 9780300274943.
Reviewed by Anand Atre
Johns Hopkins University
Samuel Moyn’s latest book stands out as a unique and thought-provoking piece that disrupts the prevailing narratives of Cold War liberalism. Moyn’s distinctive approach delves into the psychological climate and intellectual influence that birthed the ideology. His central argument is that an excessive focus on defeating socialism and communism, coupled with an overreaction to the Soviet threat, transformed liberalism into an ideology devoid of hope for the future and embodying an ethos of damage control and survivalism. Moyn asserts that this configuration of liberalism remains the dominant one today.
Moyn elucidates several themes in Cold War liberalism, including rejecting Hegel’s and Marx’s emancipatory premises for humans, abandoning Enlightenment principles, and repudiating historicism. These convictions manifested via scapegoating Rousseau, the Enlightenment, or Romanticism as the fons et origo of totalitarianism in the twentieth century and subsequently purging those concepts from the liberal canon. As a result, Cold War liberalism casts aspersions on creative agency having any utility. Consequently, this version of liberalism focuses more on building barriers against tyranny than collective human emancipation.
Moyn opts against critiquing the thoughts of renowned Cold War sages such as Raymond Aron, Richard Hofstadter, or Arthur Schlesinger as convenient “straw men.” Instead, he showcases the intellectual formation of Cold War liberalism by examining the development and contrasting the ideas of Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Karl Popper, Judith Shklar, Jacob Talmon, and Lionel Trilling. Despite the deviations in these thinkers’ writings over time, Moyn makes a compelling case for how their thoughts evolved into Cold War liberalism. The vital commonality was cleansing liberalism of any notion of progressivism and perfectionism and presenting a significantly tempered version, one more akin to conservativism in everything but name.
In addition to dismissing the universal human liberation project, Moyn points out that these thinkers were silent on Western-supported authoritarianism that hindered the decolonization and self-determination of the Global South. Moreover, they also denied, ignored, rationalized, or downplayed the crimes committed by the U.S. and its allies during the Cold War. As such, by persisting in blaming social justice movements as a stepping stone to tyranny and prejudging progressive ideals as unavoidably producing atrocities, Moyn demonstrates how Cold War liberal thinkers were undiscerning of the harm their ideology caused and reveals the hypocrisy in their convictions.
There is an argument that pre–Cold War liberalism’s entanglement with imperialism, expansionism, racial hierarchies, and laissez-faire economics had already begun disinheriting its universal emancipatory principles. Being hermetically stuck in ethnic particularism indicates that even before the Cold War, liberalism had gradually morphed into liberalism only for White people. With this as context, the crux of Cold War liberal thought caused liberalism to morph into a strict aversion to altering the structural functionalism of the Western world to safeguard its earned liberties against the rest of the world. Instead of offering any hope for the future, Moyn adduces that the ideas expounded by Cold War liberal thinkers merely paved the way for continuing to look for more enemies, both foreign and domestic. The upshot was a nullification of human self-creativity in exchange for the ongoing applicability of Cold War liberal principles to each successor threat, including postmodern relativism and “woke tyranny.”
Moyn posits that Cold War liberal writings laid the foundations for Ronald Reagan’s dismantling of the welfare state and created conditions for neoconservatism and neoliberalism to thrive. Furthermore, Moyn declares that Western education systems continue to lionize without critically engaging with the Cold War liberal thinkers and their disciples, who dominate the Anglo-American public intellectual sphere.
The absence of intellectual humility leads Cold War liberal thinkers to continue to parrot that “all the other” alternatives are worse, which is nothing more than a reductionist rationalization and amounts to a failure to recognize or understand the damage the ideology has done and continues to do. In addition to precluding liberalism from being a liberation movement, Moyn suggests that Cold War liberalism also has horrendous consequences for local and global politics. These include the liberal tradition losing credibility in finding solutions to address rising populism or the significant challenges facing the millennials and post-millennials.
Developing Moyn’s latter point further, based on life expectancy alone, a person born today in the U.S. is expected to see the turn of the next century, which was not the case a hundred years ago. On the other hand, there is a reasonable chance that they won’t live to see the next century because of climate catastrophes or a potential nuclear holocaust, apocalypses that were unthought of a hundred years ago. Amidst this contradictory existential angst, it is worth recognizing that millennials and post-millennials are the generations with the most expected life years ahead. However, they live in societies where actors belonging to older generations make decisions that impact the younger generations’ futures, which exhibits a problem of political representation across generations. Although this problem has been with us since time immemorial, what distinguishes it for the younger generations is that the political decisions made today in the here and now could plausibly make climate catastrophes irreversible and the exemplar of the tragedy of the commons that extinguish life on earth. Consequently, rather than policies tanking up and perpetuating endless wars against enemies, millennials and post-millennials are more partial to strategies that address environmental catastrophes and policies that divert resources from militarism toward reducing economic inequalities to give themselves a chance at flourishing.
Can liberalism still offer anything of value to upcoming generations? Yes, says Moyn. He suggests that liberalism should refashion itself to regain prominence by revitalizing some nineteenth-century liberal dispositions, such as a free community of equals, creative self-making, and a willingness to embrace a public commitment to attaining the highest life. These ideas echo some of the thoughts of Benjamin Constant, John Stuart Mill, and Alexis de Tocqueville. Embracing these sentiments would necessitate moving away from the reasoning that sees progress through a dichotomous prism as deterministically impossible or inevitable. Ultimately, Moyn intimates that transforming the fear felt by Cold War Liberals into Tocquevillian “salutary fear” can inspire the use of agency to create possibilities, not certainties, for a brighter future.
Moyn’s critical engagement provides an alternative perspective on the ideas of several thinkers covered in liberal studies classes. Moreover, his erudite analysis presents fruitful lines of inquiry agents can use to concretize the forgotten tenets of liberalism into twenty-first–century actions. For the individuals who accept his critique, the hope of a refurbished optimistic liberalism encompassing creative agency could be the impetus to inspire commitments to universalizing freedom and human dignity in an increasingly divisive and polarized world.
An older generation, nurtured on a diet of Cold War liberalism, would find the desire for systemic political policy changes difficult to stomach. However, with fewer life years ahead compared with millennials and post-millennials, one could question why the older generations’ preference for the status quo should precede the younger generation’s agency.
This generational conflict evokes the schismatized perspectives in Ivan Turgenev’s 1862 novel Fathers and Sons. The conservative Fathers live their old age in sumptuous estates, whereas the progressive Sons are more forward-looking and revolutionary. Turgenev’s masterpiece shed light on the Russian people’s changing attitudes toward their nobility and even anticipated the rise of socialism in Russia, a precursor to the Russian Revolution. The Russian Civil War, which started a few months after the 1917 October Revolution, resulted in the deaths of millions of people.
Today’s Fathers point to the volume of human lives lost during historical revolutionary attempts at change and remain content with the status quo. Today’s Sons find the status quo and their limited future options unpalatable and desire to use their agency for change. Both sides shout at each other or converse with their own like-minded within echo chambers. Neither side listens to nor empathizes with the other.
Revisiting the parallels between the generational conflicts in late nineteenth-century Russia and the ones today could lead the younger generations to contemplate some thought-provoking questions that could plausibly influence how they use their agency. Is revolution the only option if older political decision-makers are unwilling to effect policies that address the foremost concerns of the people with the most life years ahead? Why is it taken for granted that every future revolution will lead to tyranny and totalitarianism? Can agency effect a revolution that avoids the perils of Big Government, including totalitarianism? And, even if it can’t, are the risks associated with Big Government worse than those associated with a society run by unscrupulous “strong men” with heavily armed loyal citizen militia willing and able to do their bidding?
As the old adage goes: “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” As such, it behooves individuals looking to revamp liberalism without succumbing to the terrors that went hand in hand with notable historical revolutions to heed Mikhail Bakunin’s insight that “idealism is the despot of thought just as politics is the despot of will.” Consequently, the onus on reconstructing liberalism is to use agency to abstemiously refashion it and, thus, avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Doing otherwise would risk continuing to fuel the fire that champions agency-defeating Cold War liberalism. Whether enough agents are prepared to play the long game and not succumb to the temptations associated with actions motivated by instantaneous gratification remains to be seen.
Buckle up because we’ve got a bumpy ride ahead.
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