The Betrayal of Liberalism: How the Disciples of Freedom and Equality Helped Foster the Illiberal Politics of Coercion and Control.(Review)

The Betrayal of Liberalism: How the Disciples of Freedom and Equality Helped Foster the Illiberal Politics of Coercion and Control, ed. Hilton Kramer and Roger Kimball. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee Publishers, 1999, 248 pp., $14.95 paperback.

Hilton Kramer and Roger Kimball are the two figures largely responsible for publishing the New Criterion--perhaps the finest periodical in American cultural life since the initial numbers of Partisan Review. Indeed, the recent fruits of their collaboration resemble nothing more than the heady writings that flowed like good wine during that more venerable publication's first decade. Such contributors as Roger Scruton, Robert Conquest, Jean Bethke Elshtain, and Robert Kagan suffer only slightly by comparison to Hannah Arendt, George Orwell, Lionel Trilling, and other fast-stepping cultural critics in the early Partisan Review. Their reflections, culled by Kramer and Kimball into The Betrayal of Liberalism, support my contention that the best of the 1990s measures up to the old criterion established in the 1930s.

Many anthologies are such random affairs that only the binding seems to hold the essays together. Not so for Kramer and Kimball's volume. Each of the closely reasoned, well-integrated essays merits careful reading. If there is a villain commonly denounced by all the contributors, it is Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Scruton puts matters most succinctly when he declares that Rousseau's cardinal sin "is the assumption that we can jettison all institutional traditions and conventions and decide how to make them anew" (30). Scruton and Kimball hold up the presumption that history begins with the French revolution--or the Russian revolution, for that matter--to the most withering of attacks.

Scruton reminds us that Pietas is observed "not in a rejection of customs, institutions, and laws, but, on the contrary, in an underlying acceptance--a humble recognition that we are not the producers but the products of our world" (39). He extends the assault on Rousseau--and, by extension, on Marx and Mill--quite beyond the more reasonable perspective (to me) that human beings are both producers in and products of this world. Kimball takes a similar, if more reserved, path in his assault on Millian liberalism. Segueing from Rousseau to Mill, he accuses the English utilitarian of "moral arrogance." "The libertarian streak in On Liberty is little more than a prophylactic against the coerciveness that its assumption of virtuous rationality presupposes" (51).

Many of the remaining pieces are well intentioned, but, though they strike resounding blows, they fail to puncture family the vital organs of liberalism as the dominant persuasion of the twentieth century. Keith Windschuttle properly reminds us that, while imperialism is part of the record of the West, still the West has "long nurtured an intellectual tradition that has been opposed to imperialism and the conquest of others." Quite true. But we need now some detailed analysis of why and how British imperialism distinguished itself positively whilst French, Dutch, and Belgian imperialisms are marked by their brutality to, and impoverishment of, local custom and culture. Hadley Arkes likewise makes a strong case that the founding fathers' sense of natural rights is far superior to the pragmatic Supreme Court in its diminished, shallow, and even corrupt decision-making that recognizes no sense of lawfulness apart from power itself (118). But since the latter is the common product of conservative as well as liberal judges, it is hard to appreciate how Arkes's observation contributes to the case against liberalism.

Robert Conquest, Jean Bethke Elshtain, and Robert Kagan wax eloquent in this anthology. Conquest notes myopic liberal responses to Soviet totalitarianism. Jean Bethke Elshtain critiques the liberal betrayal of the tradition of toleration in religious affairs and its reduction to a monistic assault on strongly held religious beliefs and persuasions. Robert Kagan's analysis of the distinction between the argument from national interest, often used as smoke by liberal politicos, and national identity, offers a vision of "armed liberalism" (188). But one senses that the issue in these essays is less the status of liberalism as an American ideology than liberalism as a watered down, slightly weakened opposition to tyranny.

The articles by John Silber, and to a lesser degree John O'Sullivan, are self-referential and reflective in nature. Silber is hard pressed, or better, pressing hard, to justify every decision he has made as Boston University's head. But he does so in the name of liberalism and against extremism of the left and the right. One is puzzled by how liberalism betrays democracy, or as seems more pertinent on campuses throughout America, how extremism demolished liberalism. I am not certain that the call for patience, avoiding the sacking of Rome in a day, finds any purchase in the shifting ideological terrain of contemporary politics. At the same time, one can accept O'Sullivan's moral strictures--and indeed I do--without viewing them as encapsulating the revolt against liberalism.