A Wolfe Tome.(The Future of Liberalism)(Book review)

The Future of Liberalism, by Alan Wolfe (Knopf, 352 pp., $25.95)

ALAN WOLFE of Boston College is a prolific and generally well-regarded author. In the last five years he's published four books on contemporary politics and public policy: The Transformation of American Religion, Does American Democracy Still Work?, Return to Greatness, and Is There a Culture War? His new book, The Future of Liberalism, timed to coincide with the arrival of the Obama administration, tries to provide an in-depth intellectual framework for Wolfe's mildly unconventional liberal political predilections. "No one is more temperamentally conservative," he says, "than a Manhattan leftist living in a rent-controlled apartment and holding tenure." (This quip is witty enough, but it's followed by such solemnities as "Liberalism matters only because people do.")

Academics and journalists haven't been able to defend liberalism effectively, Wolfe claims, so he's had to raise his pen once again. Liberalism's core principle, he argues, is that "as many people as possible should have as much say as is feasible over the direction their lives will take." Who of any consequence in America would disagree? He goes on to insist that "the liberal proposition, tested by long experience, is that whatever dependency results from using public policy to address inequalities, the resulting gains in individual mobility, development of physical and mental capacity, and racial and gender equality far outweigh them."

The reader, seeing this definition of liberalism, might then expect a careful, grounded discussion of how different policy options have played out over time. But with the exception of his thoughtful discussion of why religion and liberalism not only are compatible in the U.S. but sometimes reinforce each other (and this is far and away the book's best chapter), the reader is led in a different direction. As Wolfe sees it, markets are what produce dependency, while rights, presumably including welfare rights, foster independence. I say presumably because at one point early in this hastily compiled book, the author lays out the argument against welfare reform--but then, many pages later, he inserts an endorsement of same into the text.

Instead of providing a careful, grounded, empirical evaluation of the welfare reforms and their implications, Wolfe mires the reader in a slough of European categories ill-aligned with the American experience. American critics of liberalism, says Wolfe early on, "rarely recognize how much they owe to Europe," and specifically to the 19th-century Spanish priest Felix Sarda y Salvany, "for the liberal bashing they find so attractive." Who? The how and when of the vast influence exerted by Felix Sarda y Salvany, who saw liberalism as the "evil of all evils," is left unspecified but serves as a gateway to what follows. That's the way the book is organized: It often reads as though Wolfe had poured out his note cards summarizing his reading onto the pages but wasn't sure what order they should be in.

The book has two competing conceptual threads. The first is that Rousseau is the father of modern American conservatism--yes, you've got that right, the Rousseau who inspired the Jacobins is, according to Wolfe, the unacknowledged godfather of the Republican Right. Rousseau's emphasis on the need to hew to nature, Wolfe argues, cuts off his supposed heirs from recognizing the need to improve on nature through human artifice. The second is that liberalism has its roots in Immanuel Kant, who said that man should "dare to know"; people should, says Wolfe, "take the side of culture over nature." In this framework, both Jerry Falwell and contemporary evolutionary biologists are, with their pessimistic insistence on the limits imposed by human nature, Rousseau's heirs and hence allies of a sort. In fact, Wolfe suggests, if Rousseau were alive today, he might well have become an evolutionary social biologist. I was tempted to stop reading right there.

Wolfe says ...