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 | | The Virtues of Liberalism by James T. Kloppenberg ISBN-10: 9780195121407 ISBN-10: 0-19-512140-6 ISBN-13: 9780195121407 ISBN-13: 978-0-19-512140-7 Hardcover 1998-08-06 Oxford University Press, USA Find Lowest Price |
Editorials | ||
Product Description This spirited analysis--and defense--of American liberalism demonstrates the complex and rich traditions of political, economic, and social discourse that have informed American democratic culture from the seventeenth century to the present. The Virtues of Liberalism provides a convincing response to critics both right and left. Against conservatives outside the academy who oppose liberalism because they equate it with license, James T. Kloppenberg uncovers ample evidence of American republicans' and liberal democrats' commitments to ethical and religious ideals and their awareness of the difficult choices involved in promoting virtue in a culturally diverse nation. Against radical academic critics who reject liberalism because they equate it with Enlightenment reason and individual property holding, Kloppenberg shows the historical roots of American liberals' dual commitments to diversity, manifested in institutions designed to facilitate deliberative democracy, and to government regulations of property and market exchange in accordance with the public good. In contrast to prevailing tendencies to simplify and distort American liberalism, Kloppenberg shows how the multifaceted virtues of liberalism have inspired theorists and reformers from Thomas Jefferson and James Madison through Jane Addams and John Dewey to Martin Luther King, Jr., and then explains how these virtues persist in the work of some liberal democrats today. Endorsing the efforts of such neo-progressive and communitarian theorists and journalists as Michael Walzer, Jane Mansbridge, Michael Sandel, and E. J. Dionne, Kloppenberg also offers a more acute analysis of the historical development of American liberalism and of the complex reasons why it has been transformed and made more vulnerable in recent decades. An intelligent, coherent, and persuasive canvas that stretches from the Enlightenment to the American Revolution, from Tocqueville's observations to the New Deal's social programs, and from the right to worship freely to the idea of ethical responsibility, this book is a valuable contribution to historical scholarship and to contemporary political and cultural debates. | ||
Reviews | ||
The location of our responsibility As the reviewer below mentions, this is a collection of articles that Kloppenberg has published at different times over the years. I agree with the reviewer below that there is some overlap between the articles. In fact, the whole argument would have been greatly strengthened by just rewriting the articles as a new book. Kvetch, kvetch, kvetch. Yes, it could be better but what we have here is one of the strongest combinations of historiography and actual history possible. There are so many virtues to this book that to complain that it could be better would be downright inane of me. Kloppenberg is exploring several themes in the course of these articles. The first is that the past is messier than it is usually presented as being. There is a tendency in much historical writing to want to simplify that messiness in order to argue a particular point. Thus the whole republicanism-liberalism debate. Kloppenberg wants us to accept that our founders drew from multiple traditions including Protestantism, republicanism, an early liberalism restraint by natural law and the Scottish Enlightenment. They themselves saw these traditions as largely compatible. They were not interested in intellectual consistency as much as working through the issues of the times within the institutions they were trying to create. They tried to balance competing values and interests. Gosh, just like we do. His second major theme is the centrality of religion to all American thought but especially to our political thought. "The language of religion...was pivotal in enlisting the allegiance of eighteenth-century Americans to the republican cause. Thomas Paine was an American hero when he sprinkled Common Sense with biblical allusions...he became a pariah when he attacked Christianity in The Age of Reason" (p.62). Christianity later sustained the abolitionists, the woman's movement, the Knights of Labor and the progressives. Kloppenberg wants to claim that perhaps the major reason liberalism seems to no longer speak the majority of Americans is that it has become aggressively secular. Finally, Kloppenberg wants to assert the centrality of pragmatism to both historiography and political and cultural practice. In fact, pragmatism becomes the method by which we balance competing claims of all kinds. The pragmatic method is presented as being an ongoing balancing act between competing values, between knowledge and faith, between the rights of the individual and the responsibility of the individual to their community. I want to emphasize a couple of points that Kloppenberg makes here. He quotes the following from Walter Lippman's Drift and Mastery: "Everyone is compelled to omit infinitely more than he can deal with; everyone is compelled to meet the fact that a democratic vision must be made by the progressive collaboration of many people" (p. 130). This is a difficult but important point and gets to one of the paradoxes of Kloppenberg's approach. The idea is that politics is never-ending and is constantly being revised. Everything is open to question by the democratic community. This is where my review title comes from. The location of our responsibility is in submitting honestly to this type of political practice as constant critique (p.89). Not only is our knowledge provisional but it must also be seen as contextual, i.e., as the product of a particular time and place. All of our cultural values are as well. Our rights such as free speech or "the duty of mutual respect" are the result of centuries of hard and sometimes bloody "cultural labor"(p.159). I mention that particular duty because I am often dismayed by the tone of reviews of political books on Amazon. Mutual respect may be a value we are losing and we are the smaller for it. I greatly admire Kloppenberg's learning and approach to these issues. I think he is absolutely on the right track. My major issue with his approach has to do with the dialogue between fundamentalists (of all kinds- scientism, religious, political) and those (like myself) who see tolerance as being a sine qua non for democracy. I recognize that tolerance for a fundamentalist is a very questionable value. If you really believe you know the truth why would you tolerate falsity? This seems to me to be the major challenge facing any form of deliberative democracy- how do you get everyone to agree to play by the rules? I would like to make one last compliment to Kloppenberg. This is an incredibly learned man. He seems to have absorbed so much of not just our cultural tradition but that of France, England and Germany's that it is a little bit scary. If you are curious to see more of his methodology at work or some of that learning on display take a look at his Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought. It is one of the great works in intellectual history in the last twenty years. | ||
Interesting corrective to "rights" culture In a series of essays the author challenges the notion that historically the American polity is best described as rights-bearing individuals pursuing self-interests to the exclusion of other social and political considerations which is the very definition of classical liberalism. A major focus is on the religious and republican strands of thought that have been historically interwoven into our basically liberal culture and thereby makes our liberalism "virtuous." Duty and responsibility to the larger community have always been a part of Christian and moral thought. Adam Smith, often invoked by present-day free-marketeers, was a Scottish moral philosopher who saw the market as a means to broader social goods. Christianity has often emphasized the essential equality and brotherhood of men and the requirement of participating in the life of the community. Republicanism is usually associated with public-spirited, independent, virtuous citizens who view centralized power as corrupting. The Jeffersonian small, land-owning farmer epitomizes the republican virtuous citizen which accounts for the early American fear of the rise of manufacturing because the factory system created a class of dependent laborers. In other words, the author maintains that our political philosophy has always been a juggling act balancing the liberal basics of freedom versus duty to the community and of self-interests or wealth accumulation versus equality. According to the author, pragmatism, a philosophy often associated with John Dewey, is the approach to take in making political or social decisions. It is a philosophy that eschews absolutes and depends largely on actual social experiences to arrive at solutions and accommodates our various strands of political thought. It is a democratic philosophy because it is collective experience as articulated by citizens as opposed to prescriptions by experts that is sought. The author acknowledges that the "virtues" of liberalism have largely faded from public speech. Citizens have become mostly independent, rights-bearing entities without community obligations. Consumerism is the operant ideology. The author's calls for communities of democratic deliberation would seem to have no place in present-day culture. In addition, the recognition that communications is fundamental to a democracy generates only fleeting comments concerning the power of ever-consolidating media giants to limit and manipulate public speech and ideas. The essays written at different times do have some overlap. Furthermore, there is some drift and shifts in the subjects and arguments across the essays. However, overall the essays are interesting. The views of numerous historical actors and authors as they relate to virtuous liberalism are presented: Madison, Jefferson, Tocqueville, William James, Weber, Dewey, Lippman, FDR, Rorty, Habermas, Sandel, and Rawls among others. | ||