I have not read Moyn's book so I can't comment on it directly, but when I hear "Cold War liberal" or "Cold War liberalism" the figures who come to mind for me are not philosophers and intellectuals like Hannah Arendt or Isaiah Berlin, but Hubert Humphrey or Scoop Jackson or the later Max Shachtman - politicians, organizers, and activists who combined a hawkish, anti-communist foreign policy with an essentially social democratic domestic policy. For these figures, Cold War liberalism was very much a "fighting faith" (Arthur Schlesinger, Jr's term, I believe) that sought to build a great society (to coin a phrase) with strong labor unions, an expansive federal welfare state, etc. as an alternative to Communism. The domestic policy planks of Scoop Jackson's 1976 presidential campaign included, from an old New York Times article I dug up, "a Federal takeover of welfare costs, full national health insurance under the Kennedy‐Corman bill, an increase in Federal aid to education from 7 percent to 33 percent over three or four years, a national housing program aimed at building three million units a year, Federal insurance of municipal bonds and full employment under the Humphrey‐Hawkins bill." This is at least as ambitious, arguably even more ambitious, than what Bernie Sanders campaigned on in 2016 and 2020. So I find Moyn's apparent contention that Cold War liberalism entailed a turn *away* from grand visions and collective projects to be fairly baffling.
I haven't read Moyn yet either, but I think this is at most half-right. The Jacksons and Humphreys certainly were certainly better on domestic policy than, say, the contemporary Democratic Party. But in my opinion it's pretty easy to show how the coalescence of Cold War liberalism c. 1950 also involved a retreat from the grander and more collective visions of the 1930s and 1940s. The massive rearmament proposed in NSC-68 and implemented after the US intervention into the Korean War pretty clearly marked the abandonment of any attempt to further expand the welfare state until the 1960s (chapter 5 of Benjamin Fordham's Building the Cold War Consensus is good on this). Even before Korea, Schlesinger was personally involved in whipping Americans for Democratic Action to emphasize support for rearmament over their domestic agenda. You can also compare the program of ADA against their anti-Cold War rival Progressive Citizens for America - PCA called for “nationalization of the coal mines, the steel industry, the railroads, and the electrical utilities,” while ADA did not. Or even compare Schlesinger's vision of what the vital center meant in his writings of the late 1940s (viz. "a vast expansion in government ownership") compared to the actual policy agendas of Truman, Stevenson, and Kennedy. Any history of ADA makes clear the brief exuberance and quick disappointment after the 1948 election. By 1949, the Council of Economic Advisers (headed by founding ADA-er Leon Keyserling) was being forced to publicly renounce any sense of affinity with the UK Labour Government. And so on.
What I'm having trouble wrapping my mind around is how to connect the dots between the sort of practical political project a figure like Hubert Humphrey pursued and the conception of liberalism that someone like Judith Shklar advances in The Liberalism of Fear. Humphrey and his academic allies from the University of Minnesota political science department had a very clear conception of politics that was focused on the positive role of parties and groups in organizing (and managing) political conflict. They wanted two coherent, clearly distinguishable and therefore "responsible" national political parties, a liberal Democratic Party and a conservative Republican Party, and they wanted the Democrats to be the vehicle for an alliance between organized interest groups like labor unions and activist government, with a positive conception of how the political economy should be structured. It was very group-based and focused to a significant extent on political economy. Shklar, in The Liberalism of Fear, is focused above all on protecting individuals from cruelty and violence and the abuses of public power, and she contends that "apart from prohibiting interference with the freedom of others, liberalism does not have any particular positive doctrines about how people are to conduct their lives or what personal choices they are to make." These seem like substantively different conceptions of liberal politics to me, even though both were motivated to a significant extent by anti-communism. If the kind of Cold War liberalism represented by a Humphrey constitutes a retreat from the potential alternatives you mention, I am just not sure how or why Shklar, Himmelfarb, Arendt et al had anything to do with that.
The conflation of racism and imperialism/pro-colonialism is astoundingly common -- the two are, of course, intimately linked, and pro-colonialism needs racism -- but not vice versa. Kant was clearly a racist and just as clearly an anti-colonialist (at least in Perpetual Peace), but Germany is currently having a very stupid "was Kant a racist?" debate because nobody appears capable of grasping that you can be both a racist and think colonialism was a crime against humanity, so it's an endless cycle of "But On the Different Human Races" v "But Perpetual Peace."
I am immediately reminded of that portion of the U.S. abolitionist community (e.g. esp. Louis Agassiz) who derided slavery partially or primarily on racist grounds for the cultural and (now we would say) genetic 'contamination' sequel to the prolonged contact of 'Europeans' with 'Africans'.
This is another excellent piece. I'll comment more later, but wanted to identify some connections right away that both support John's analysis here, and perhaps add to it. First is Judith Shklar's Liberalism of Fear. Both in advocating for it and analyzing while defending it's shortcomings, she herself rooted this concept in the experience of the Holocaust. I think her widely influential work training a generation of political scientists at Harvard in this sensibility supports some of the explicit aspects of John's argument here and offers ways to extend them. Secondly, John's own work on the contemporary moment in the U.S. is clearly relevant: Moyne has recently offered one of the most prominent - and profoundly unsatisfactory - critiques of using the 14th Amendment to hold Trump accountable for his violation of the oaths of office and his several active roles in insurrection. I think this just connects some of the dots in several aspects of John's own work, and makes explicit the flaws in the rather odd and quite unconvincing balancing act Moyne seems to be attempting. Finally, I will have to look at Moyne's book directly to try to make sense of something entirely absent here, which is the depth and even defining quality of classical Liberalisms well before even John's excavation of 1789 and after - Liberalism's devaluation of politics goes all the way back to Locke, and has flourished ever since as part of a political philosophy in which the most foundational human right is property, rather than, say, the modes of empowerment associated with citizenship. Here, for me a guiding text is Jennifer Nedelsky's work on the US Constitution (Private Property and the Limits of American Constitutionalism; see Mark Tushnet's fine review of just how significant Nedelsky's critique is). So in sum: a failure to acknowledge (?) or appreciate the liberalism of fear, and an even more problematic failure to locate the foundational tension with or hostility to the political at the roots of Anglo-American liberalism since its origins. These are odd and perhaps fatal flaws in Moyne's effort, as John discusses it here. (note: Locke, responding to the dominant royalist ideologies of his time such as the then canonical celebrator Patriarchy by Filmer, has, similar to the much later cold war liberalisms of fear, an antagonist that must be resisted and fully overcome. Our problem would be not with the project or goal but rather with the flawed tools: that is with the fundamental flaws that a owner-not-citizen, property-centric Liberalism codified both in the resistance to divine monarchy and feudalisms, and later in the resistance to 18th c Jacobins and 19th century socialisms.
I listened to an old talk by Moyn on this subject recently, and found it interesting but frustrating, without being able to put my finger on what I found frustrating. I think this articulates what I was feeling--especially the point that the argument seems pitched at a level above the actual real world political events. You have to actually argue that the lessons liberals learned from Nazism and Soviet communism were somehow the wrong lessons to draw!
I find myself unsympathetic to that point-of-view, but can see someone not so's arguing that 0.) that hard cases make bad law, and that this can be so because 1.) they can be singular cases, and mix the peculiar (Hitler's anti-smoking) with general and appropriate lesson-fodder (getting young people into some sort of uniform as early as possible, true of Nazism, Communism, Japanese militarism, Betar,…).
Let's cautious: Nazism and Communism are but two examples, and seemingly even Ian Fleming thought that twice could be coïncidence.
This is great. Not having any expertise in the thinkers Moyn was discussing, it seemed to me his real project was constructing an "anti-canon" of people modern liberals/progressives should no longer value. I also found the book lacking a "so what". He seems to want to blame the flaws of LBJ and Jimmy Carter (or any other "liberal" with power) on Isaiah Berlin but there's no dot connecting in terms of practical impacts.
As a academic frustrated with the state of the field, I found this to be the most succinct summary of what I find so unnerving: 'But critique is perhaps the wrong term: it is, in the law professor Moyn’s own words, a “case against” and it often reads more like a legal brief than a work of political theory or intellectual history: evidence feels mustered and presented to indict and convict, rather than to understand and interpret.' This is a malady that afflicts more than legal theorists--all academics seem to think of their job to be to offer an ultimate moral judgement on a thinker/text/idea--to separate the good from the bad--rather than to understand, complexify, illuminate, so as to get a better sense of how good and bad emerge in our world out of specific historical circumstances and human choices. And, judging from the argument in Moyn's book (at least as Ganz interpret's it--I have not read this), maybe what is at the heart of Moyn's work is a very specific notion of what he wants out liberalism. Arendt seems to think of liberal virtue (reason, moral commitment, etc.) manifesting more as judgement, discernment, attunement to the world (a world of complex moral-political problems), where what Moyn seems to want is some sort of unwavering and self-righteous commitment to a cause. Maybe? I dunno...
This is a great analysis of Liberalism Against Itself that validates some of my own frustrations with Moyn's thesis from listening to his interview on KYE and starting the book (which I did not finish). Another point I found inexplicable was his lack of attention to the Civil Rights Movement and its political implications for post-war liberalism (to be fair, I didn't finish the book so it's possible that this was addressed more comprehensively in another chapter).
I didn't really have the right framework to fully explain why the absence of the CRM upset me so much when I first was explaining this book to friends, but now that you've laid this all out I think this deficiency is symptomatic of the same tendency to treat intellectual discourse as an idle abstraction totally divorced from political constraints, considerations, or constituencies that you note in your review. it's really not that shocking that Cold War liberals abandoned their utopian political project for America as soon as black people demanded full and equal citizenship *within* that project in a way that could no longer be ignored. But attending to the various ways that white backlash to an increasingly integrated society constrained the prospects for an expansive liberalism of universal bounty and forced liberal thinkers to play defense with ad-hoc justifications for a policy of "leveling down" would require Moyn to think about political discourse as downstream from mass politics, and he just can't bring himself to fully acknowledge that.
It has been a while since I read Arendt but I remember that I was worried about her commitment to separating the political goals of liberal revolution from the 'social question' that is, economic justice. That is why Arendt tended to favor the American over the French Revolution. That said, Moyne screed is quite thought provoking
I have not read Moyn's book so I can't comment on it directly, but when I hear "Cold War liberal" or "Cold War liberalism" the figures who come to mind for me are not philosophers and intellectuals like Hannah Arendt or Isaiah Berlin, but Hubert Humphrey or Scoop Jackson or the later Max Shachtman - politicians, organizers, and activists who combined a hawkish, anti-communist foreign policy with an essentially social democratic domestic policy. For these figures, Cold War liberalism was very much a "fighting faith" (Arthur Schlesinger, Jr's term, I believe) that sought to build a great society (to coin a phrase) with strong labor unions, an expansive federal welfare state, etc. as an alternative to Communism. The domestic policy planks of Scoop Jackson's 1976 presidential campaign included, from an old New York Times article I dug up, "a Federal takeover of welfare costs, full national health insurance under the Kennedy‐Corman bill, an increase in Federal aid to education from 7 percent to 33 percent over three or four years, a national housing program aimed at building three million units a year, Federal insurance of municipal bonds and full employment under the Humphrey‐Hawkins bill." This is at least as ambitious, arguably even more ambitious, than what Bernie Sanders campaigned on in 2016 and 2020. So I find Moyn's apparent contention that Cold War liberalism entailed a turn *away* from grand visions and collective projects to be fairly baffling.
I haven't read Moyn yet either, but I think this is at most half-right. The Jacksons and Humphreys certainly were certainly better on domestic policy than, say, the contemporary Democratic Party. But in my opinion it's pretty easy to show how the coalescence of Cold War liberalism c. 1950 also involved a retreat from the grander and more collective visions of the 1930s and 1940s. The massive rearmament proposed in NSC-68 and implemented after the US intervention into the Korean War pretty clearly marked the abandonment of any attempt to further expand the welfare state until the 1960s (chapter 5 of Benjamin Fordham's Building the Cold War Consensus is good on this). Even before Korea, Schlesinger was personally involved in whipping Americans for Democratic Action to emphasize support for rearmament over their domestic agenda. You can also compare the program of ADA against their anti-Cold War rival Progressive Citizens for America - PCA called for “nationalization of the coal mines, the steel industry, the railroads, and the electrical utilities,” while ADA did not. Or even compare Schlesinger's vision of what the vital center meant in his writings of the late 1940s (viz. "a vast expansion in government ownership") compared to the actual policy agendas of Truman, Stevenson, and Kennedy. Any history of ADA makes clear the brief exuberance and quick disappointment after the 1948 election. By 1949, the Council of Economic Advisers (headed by founding ADA-er Leon Keyserling) was being forced to publicly renounce any sense of affinity with the UK Labour Government. And so on.
What I'm having trouble wrapping my mind around is how to connect the dots between the sort of practical political project a figure like Hubert Humphrey pursued and the conception of liberalism that someone like Judith Shklar advances in The Liberalism of Fear. Humphrey and his academic allies from the University of Minnesota political science department had a very clear conception of politics that was focused on the positive role of parties and groups in organizing (and managing) political conflict. They wanted two coherent, clearly distinguishable and therefore "responsible" national political parties, a liberal Democratic Party and a conservative Republican Party, and they wanted the Democrats to be the vehicle for an alliance between organized interest groups like labor unions and activist government, with a positive conception of how the political economy should be structured. It was very group-based and focused to a significant extent on political economy. Shklar, in The Liberalism of Fear, is focused above all on protecting individuals from cruelty and violence and the abuses of public power, and she contends that "apart from prohibiting interference with the freedom of others, liberalism does not have any particular positive doctrines about how people are to conduct their lives or what personal choices they are to make." These seem like substantively different conceptions of liberal politics to me, even though both were motivated to a significant extent by anti-communism. If the kind of Cold War liberalism represented by a Humphrey constitutes a retreat from the potential alternatives you mention, I am just not sure how or why Shklar, Himmelfarb, Arendt et al had anything to do with that.
The conflation of racism and imperialism/pro-colonialism is astoundingly common -- the two are, of course, intimately linked, and pro-colonialism needs racism -- but not vice versa. Kant was clearly a racist and just as clearly an anti-colonialist (at least in Perpetual Peace), but Germany is currently having a very stupid "was Kant a racist?" debate because nobody appears capable of grasping that you can be both a racist and think colonialism was a crime against humanity, so it's an endless cycle of "But On the Different Human Races" v "But Perpetual Peace."
I am immediately reminded of that portion of the U.S. abolitionist community (e.g. esp. Louis Agassiz) who derided slavery partially or primarily on racist grounds for the cultural and (now we would say) genetic 'contamination' sequel to the prolonged contact of 'Europeans' with 'Africans'.
This is another excellent piece. I'll comment more later, but wanted to identify some connections right away that both support John's analysis here, and perhaps add to it. First is Judith Shklar's Liberalism of Fear. Both in advocating for it and analyzing while defending it's shortcomings, she herself rooted this concept in the experience of the Holocaust. I think her widely influential work training a generation of political scientists at Harvard in this sensibility supports some of the explicit aspects of John's argument here and offers ways to extend them. Secondly, John's own work on the contemporary moment in the U.S. is clearly relevant: Moyne has recently offered one of the most prominent - and profoundly unsatisfactory - critiques of using the 14th Amendment to hold Trump accountable for his violation of the oaths of office and his several active roles in insurrection. I think this just connects some of the dots in several aspects of John's own work, and makes explicit the flaws in the rather odd and quite unconvincing balancing act Moyne seems to be attempting. Finally, I will have to look at Moyne's book directly to try to make sense of something entirely absent here, which is the depth and even defining quality of classical Liberalisms well before even John's excavation of 1789 and after - Liberalism's devaluation of politics goes all the way back to Locke, and has flourished ever since as part of a political philosophy in which the most foundational human right is property, rather than, say, the modes of empowerment associated with citizenship. Here, for me a guiding text is Jennifer Nedelsky's work on the US Constitution (Private Property and the Limits of American Constitutionalism; see Mark Tushnet's fine review of just how significant Nedelsky's critique is). So in sum: a failure to acknowledge (?) or appreciate the liberalism of fear, and an even more problematic failure to locate the foundational tension with or hostility to the political at the roots of Anglo-American liberalism since its origins. These are odd and perhaps fatal flaws in Moyne's effort, as John discusses it here. (note: Locke, responding to the dominant royalist ideologies of his time such as the then canonical celebrator Patriarchy by Filmer, has, similar to the much later cold war liberalisms of fear, an antagonist that must be resisted and fully overcome. Our problem would be not with the project or goal but rather with the flawed tools: that is with the fundamental flaws that a owner-not-citizen, property-centric Liberalism codified both in the resistance to divine monarchy and feudalisms, and later in the resistance to 18th c Jacobins and 19th century socialisms.
I listened to an old talk by Moyn on this subject recently, and found it interesting but frustrating, without being able to put my finger on what I found frustrating. I think this articulates what I was feeling--especially the point that the argument seems pitched at a level above the actual real world political events. You have to actually argue that the lessons liberals learned from Nazism and Soviet communism were somehow the wrong lessons to draw!
I find myself unsympathetic to that point-of-view, but can see someone not so's arguing that 0.) that hard cases make bad law, and that this can be so because 1.) they can be singular cases, and mix the peculiar (Hitler's anti-smoking) with general and appropriate lesson-fodder (getting young people into some sort of uniform as early as possible, true of Nazism, Communism, Japanese militarism, Betar,…).
Let's cautious: Nazism and Communism are but two examples, and seemingly even Ian Fleming thought that twice could be coïncidence.
This is great. Not having any expertise in the thinkers Moyn was discussing, it seemed to me his real project was constructing an "anti-canon" of people modern liberals/progressives should no longer value. I also found the book lacking a "so what". He seems to want to blame the flaws of LBJ and Jimmy Carter (or any other "liberal" with power) on Isaiah Berlin but there's no dot connecting in terms of practical impacts.
As a academic frustrated with the state of the field, I found this to be the most succinct summary of what I find so unnerving: 'But critique is perhaps the wrong term: it is, in the law professor Moyn’s own words, a “case against” and it often reads more like a legal brief than a work of political theory or intellectual history: evidence feels mustered and presented to indict and convict, rather than to understand and interpret.' This is a malady that afflicts more than legal theorists--all academics seem to think of their job to be to offer an ultimate moral judgement on a thinker/text/idea--to separate the good from the bad--rather than to understand, complexify, illuminate, so as to get a better sense of how good and bad emerge in our world out of specific historical circumstances and human choices. And, judging from the argument in Moyn's book (at least as Ganz interpret's it--I have not read this), maybe what is at the heart of Moyn's work is a very specific notion of what he wants out liberalism. Arendt seems to think of liberal virtue (reason, moral commitment, etc.) manifesting more as judgement, discernment, attunement to the world (a world of complex moral-political problems), where what Moyn seems to want is some sort of unwavering and self-righteous commitment to a cause. Maybe? I dunno...
all this talk of truncated political imagination from people whose horizon of possibility is confined to the bismarckian welfare state
Very well said. Have you read Cherniss's book? It makes a good pairing.
have not
This is a great analysis of Liberalism Against Itself that validates some of my own frustrations with Moyn's thesis from listening to his interview on KYE and starting the book (which I did not finish). Another point I found inexplicable was his lack of attention to the Civil Rights Movement and its political implications for post-war liberalism (to be fair, I didn't finish the book so it's possible that this was addressed more comprehensively in another chapter).
I didn't really have the right framework to fully explain why the absence of the CRM upset me so much when I first was explaining this book to friends, but now that you've laid this all out I think this deficiency is symptomatic of the same tendency to treat intellectual discourse as an idle abstraction totally divorced from political constraints, considerations, or constituencies that you note in your review. it's really not that shocking that Cold War liberals abandoned their utopian political project for America as soon as black people demanded full and equal citizenship *within* that project in a way that could no longer be ignored. But attending to the various ways that white backlash to an increasingly integrated society constrained the prospects for an expansive liberalism of universal bounty and forced liberal thinkers to play defense with ad-hoc justifications for a policy of "leveling down" would require Moyn to think about political discourse as downstream from mass politics, and he just can't bring himself to fully acknowledge that.
It has been a while since I read Arendt but I remember that I was worried about her commitment to separating the political goals of liberal revolution from the 'social question' that is, economic justice. That is why Arendt tended to favor the American over the French Revolution. That said, Moyne screed is quite thought provoking