What the Cold War Did to Liberalism (w/ Samuel Moyn)
Added 2023-09-05 20:25:20 +0000 UTCIn his provocative new book, Liberalism Against Itself, historian Samuel Moyn revisits the work of five key Cold War thinkers—Judith Shklar, Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, Gertrude Himmelfarb, and Lionel Trilling—to explain the deformation of liberalism in the middle of the twentieth century, a time when, in his telling, liberals abandoned their commitment to progress, the Enlightenment, and grand dreams of emancipation and instead embraced fatalism, pessimism, and a narrow conception of freedom. For Moyn, the liberalism that emerged from the Cold War is, lamentably, still with us—a culprit in the rise of Donald Trump, and a barrier to offering a compelling alternative to him.
Sources:
Samuel Moyn, Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times (2023)
Judith Shklar, After Utopia: The Decline of Political Faith (1957)
Lionel Trilling, The Middle of the Journey (1947)
Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination (1950)
Matthew Sitman, "How to Read Reinhold Niebuhr, After 9-11," Society, Spring 2012
Comments
If you ever change the format to Know Your Leftist Ally (for liberals) I would love to know more about what the left means by "emancipation" or "liberation" and what liberal democratic societies lack to be considered emancipated or liberated.
Thomas Holz
2023-10-18 01:27:24 +0000 UTCSome of these comments remind me of what I liked least about academia: the tendency to criticize an argument for leaving something out. An argument/book can’t do everything! I appreciated Moyn’s argument because it got me to think differently about the questions/era that most interest me (and many KYE listeners, I’ll bet). Are there counterarguments? Sure, but, so what. This was a thrilling episode. Thank you, Matt, Sam, and Samuel.
Kathleen Reeves
2023-09-23 15:45:34 +0000 UTCThis conversation was stimulating but I was disappointed that it never got to Berlin. I'm pretty skeptical that Berlin overgeneralized from negative experience, or quarantined the Enlightenment, or ceded to Soviet propaganda that the Soviet Union was the heir of the Enlightment, or brought liberalism to within a hair's breadth of neo-liberalism. But I'd like to hear the argument.
David Gillman
2023-09-22 00:43:13 +0000 UTCThis is a fascinating discussion, but I found Moyn's conception of Cold War liberalism to be rather disconnected from its practical expression in postwar US politics. Take the paradigmatic Cold War liberal, Henry "Scoop" Jackson (aka the "Senator from Boeing"), for example. Jackson was an extremely hawkish anti-Communist who advocated an aggressive foreign policy and support for the military-industrial complex. At the same time, when it came to domestic politics he was a staunch social democrat throughout his career. In 1976, he ran for president on a platform that included, according to 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." How do we square this kind of program with the depiction of Cold War liberalism Moyn advances here? A focus on Cold War liberalism's politicians, organizers, and activists would, I think, be more fruitful in helping us understand what it was all about, and in seeing what resonances there are between it and the liberalism of our own time.
Chris Maisano
2023-09-12 17:06:11 +0000 UTCjust an abundance of riches these last few weeks-- a music episode, a soul-searching episode, and now samuel moyn. THIS is the true KYE experience (at least to one weirdo)
Jack Wolfe
2023-09-12 11:18:22 +0000 UTCCloser to a follower of Roberto Unger, more fairly read in full (or heard in Carlyle lecture form, online for free). I do adore the idea of a Straussian writing “Humane” or “Not Enough”
Thomas Arnold
2023-09-10 03:49:09 +0000 UTCThis Hegelian prognosis of liberalism is highly relevant for the Left, since the socialism of our horizon is both an inheritance and redemption of emancipatory liberalism. We’ve yet to fulfill it as we’ve yet to overcome it. If Moyn had used Niebuhr as a case study, it would’ve been compelling to cover his earlier work ‘Moral Man & Immoral Society’, in which, even while hedging bets on Stalin, he seems to plant the seeds of future disavowal, all inside a lucid critique of liberalism’s neglect that resonates with Moyn’s.
Benjamin Pletcher
2023-09-09 21:02:53 +0000 UTCThere’s a recently published translation from Norte Dame Press of The Phenomenology of Spirit (four decades in the making) by Peter Fuss and John Dobbins. Much more readable than the standard Miller translation.
Benjamin Pletcher
2023-09-09 20:48:59 +0000 UTCEnzo Traverso’s ’Revolution: An Intellectual History’ is instructive here
Benjamin Pletcher
2023-09-09 20:32:00 +0000 UTCInteresting conversation. There’s more to be said regarding the Pelagian/Augustinian lines that Moyn and Eric Nelson have drawn. But one thing that might bridge liberals from Benjamin Constant, TH Green, Judith Shklar, and even figures like Baldwin and Ellison is this: politics can be progressive, politics can be perfectionist, and they can be either or both. But politics is rarely, if ever, redemptive. That’s the more interesting line that these figures tend to walk, think, and live through.
Kyle Trowbridge
2023-09-09 20:00:43 +0000 UTCFunny story, when I was in college she came to campus to give a talk, and I was one of the students who got to have dinner with her! (Matt)
Know Your Enemy
2023-09-08 19:51:38 +0000 UTC… placing this out-of-context comment out of convenience, but… Listening to the latest “Shield of the Republic” podcast. Would love to hear some KYE context around Mona Charen. Future content fodder… thx!
Craig Lammes
2023-09-08 00:13:15 +0000 UTCSometimes all the liberal-punching seems a bit Oedipal.
Adam Lewis
2023-09-07 16:05:43 +0000 UTCMaybe RD was unclear about your intent.
Matt Martin
2023-09-07 15:53:40 +0000 UTCGreat conversation, which had me disagreeing with Moyn enough that I have to read the book. But why do you join him in conflating emancipatory politics with utopian politics? There’s a lot of liberation and flourishing to be had without perfectionism.
Matt Martin
2023-09-07 13:58:22 +0000 UTCGreat episode. Any recommendations on getting started on Hegel that might include accessible translations and/or reader guides?
mark muoio
2023-09-07 02:00:38 +0000 UTCDo any other KYE episodes discuss him?
Michael Mannix
2023-09-06 20:56:01 +0000 UTCTrilling looked directly at things rather than build on received ideas. People point to his hesitating prose as a neurotic defect but it's that lack of confidence in relying on anything except how his own thought develops (and contradicts) based on what he's engaging with that makes him a worthwhile thinker. People looking less closely at things may have been influenced by what seems like cynicism in him, but his project seems to be more about finding a way forward while considering all the unavoidable facts.
Austin English
2023-09-06 19:15:02 +0000 UTCMaybe this is a just a feature of the discussion on the podcast and not a fair reflection of the book, but the way Moyn has framed his terms seems… pretty confused? He doesn’t seem to define what he means by liberalism, which seems like a big omission given that his thesis is about a change within liberalism. He also seems pretty vague about whether he means liberalism as a governing ideology or material relationship in society, or as a philosophical idea. Most of his discussion is framed around liberalism as a philosophy as maintained by the thinkers he studies, but he also insists that policy makers in the neoliberal era through the present were influenced by these “retreats”. But how? Were the figures he studied influential on the early neoliberal movement? Does he mean “liberals”, as in specific political factions, or liberalism meaning the western era governing ideology more broadly? Then at other times, he suggests a lack of engagement by liberal thinkers with things like the welfare state or anti-colonization, but that only seems to cut against his point that these currents reflect anything institutionally. How were these figures influential at some points but marginal at others? It feels like his thesis depends a lot on this slipperiness: He can include as many examples that illustrate his point as he likes, but he doesn’t have to explain why they were significant, and he also excludes the relationship between these thinkers and conservatism, or alternative political currents, or institutions. It just ends up feeling like a collection of figures he thinks are interesting but without much clarity about them
J. Haskin
2023-09-06 16:37:51 +0000 UTCThis is a good conversation, but I feel like the influence of the civil rights movement has to be part of the story of what happened to Cold War liberalism in America? It's certainly suggestive that all these liberal thinkers abandoned their utopian political project for America as soon as black people (and other minorities) demanded full and equal citizenship *within* that project in a way that could no longer be ignored. To be clear, I don't want to put all this on the libs -- conservatives understood the potential for white backlash that the CRM produced, and used it to force a realignment which made the New Deal consensus near-untenable. But I do think that some of this retreat from perfectionism and progressivism has to be attributed to ad-hoc justifications for a policy of "leveling down" that liberal elites saw as a politically necessary response to the transformations in America's racial caste system which occurred in the 60s and 70s.
Will Hubbert
2023-09-06 03:48:12 +0000 UTCRadical David said “Huh? What do you mean?” Then deleted it. Can KYE listeners ungaslight me? -This is a condescending tone, right? -This question is confusing, given the lucid discussion in the podcast, right? -This statement reveals a listener who doesn’t understand American colloquial phrases, right? I dunno, maybe an anti sport guy?
Michael Mannix
2023-09-06 03:11:04 +0000 UTCThe discussion of Trilling is some of your best work
Where there’s a Wills there’s a Way
2023-09-06 03:03:44 +0000 UTCInject an entire volume of episodes about liberal tolerationism vs perfectionism into my bones NOW!
Michael Mannix
2023-09-06 00:54:39 +0000 UTCExcellent work this
-thundergolfer-
2023-09-06 00:24:01 +0000 UTCGreat episode! Really thought-provoking stuff. I wonder if a secularized version of Augustinianism almost necessitates a timid, unhopeful liberalism? It seems that without any idea of grace and redemption it does easily turn into a pessimistic outlook. Granted the narrative of hope within Christianity has not always prevented a timidity among its adherents (maybe notably Reinhold Niebuhr famously sitting out the Civil Rights movements for a sort of centrist reasoning)
Samuel McCann
2023-09-06 00:22:39 +0000 UTCIs samuel a straussian?
Nico Villarreal
2023-09-06 00:08:15 +0000 UTCThe methodology you’re describing is Straussianism! 😉
Dónal Gill
2023-09-05 23:42:35 +0000 UTCThis guy to me sounds like the type who's good at close reading but doesn't actually dig into the historical/material context very rigorously - it's simply not true that mill and tocqueville represented an ambitious liberalism that saw itself as the heirs of progress, except in the most superficial sense. We know what mill thought about Marx and the ricardian socialists, we know what tocqueville thought about the socialists who created the 1848 revolutions and what his politics were in relation to it. Already by the mid 19th century liberalism was trying to do everything it could to defeat communists and acting as centrists/conservatives to existing bourgeois society. Liberal ambition began and ended with the first French revolution and Hegel, ect.
Nico Villarreal
2023-09-05 23:29:55 +0000 UTCthis sounds like another certified banger ✨✨ thanks to KYE for being such a point of light in these dark times 💖 (as long as you don't get any ideas about adding 999 more)
Where there’s a Wills there’s a Way
2023-09-05 20:31:50 +0000 UTC
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