Samuel Moyn. Liberalism Against Itself

“Cold War liberalism was a catastrophe—for liberalism.” That is how Samuel Moyn opens his latest book, Liberalism Against Itself, pithily summarizing its main message. In the following pages, Moyn gives us a swift overview of Cold War liberalism’s key thinkers, with chapters on Judith Shklar, Isaiah Berlin, and Karl Popper, as well as on lesser lights like Gertrude Himmelfarb and Lionel Trilling. This cast of characters is used to illuminate key aspects of Cold War liberalism, most notably its rejection of any belief in collective emancipation as dangerously proto-totalitarian. Moyn also makes a surprise addition by including a chapter on Hannah Arendt. Arendt herself of course rejected the label “liberal,” but, as Moyn convincingly shows, she might nevertheless be described as a “fellow traveller,” being equally skeptical of the possibility to institutionalize an emancipatory politics. Moyn’s book contributes to a burgeoning literature on Cold War liberalism. But while much of the recent literature has been written by fanboys, Moyn strikes a very different tone. In his account, thinkers like Berlin and Popper remade the liberal tradition for the worse. Their liberalism was drained of any commitment to perfectionism or progressivism, starting instead from a quasi-Augustinian emphasis on the sinfulness of man. (Ironically so, since all protagonists of Moyn’s book were Jewish). Cold War liberals lionized thinkers like Lord Acton and Sigmund Freud, who shared their bleak view on human nature, “yoking liberalism to original sin as well as psychic bestiality” (5). At the same time, they rejected the legacy of theorists committed to the possibility of true human emancipation such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, G. W. F. Hegel and Karl Marx, and, in Berlin’s case, the entire Enlightenment. Thus, they turned liberalism from a doctrine wedded to hope to one centered on fear.

Ancient history · Cold war · Liberalism · Political science · Politics · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies