Review by Choice Review
According to Fawcett (The Economist), liberalism has achieved coherence and success more through political practice than as doctrine in economics and moral philosophy. In three distinct eras (1830-1880, 1880-1945, and 1945-1989), liberal politicians, intellectuals, journalists, and economists were more "worldly" than their competitors, more engaged with the unique demands of modernity. His analysis is artfully knit together through unexpected but revealing pairings of thinkers and actors in each era from Germany, France, Britain, and the US confronting inescapable ethical and material conflict, distrusting power while maintaining faith in progress and respect for persons. Chapters on liberal imperialism, on economists' varied responses to the Great Depression, and on contemporary political ideas are especially thoughtful, stressing the centrality of contingency and choice and, always, the primacy of politics. A felicitous combination of wit and erudition whose good sense and refined sensibilities are confirmed in recent academic scholarship in the history of liberal political thought, best represented by Duncan Kelly, The Propriety of Liberty (2010). Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduate, graduate, research, and professional collections. --Eldon John Eisenach, University of Tulsa
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
BEFORE IT BECAME a political philosophy, liberalism was not that difficult to define: A person was liberal if generous, catholic in taste or even excessively rotund. Liberal people may not have been universally admired, but few took to castigating them as dangerous to the health of the state. The opposite of "liberal" was not "conservative" but "strict." When Bassanio tells Portia in "The Merchant of Venice" that he will give her "the dearest ring in Venice," she replies, "I see, sir, you are liberal in offers." No one in Shakespeare's audience would have concluded that the dissolute nobleman with whom she banters stood on the left side of the political spectrum. Once it did become a political term - its first significant appearance took place in Spain under Napoleonic occupation - liberalism, although now clearly identified with the political left, began almost immediately to run into considerable definitional difficulties. In the 19th century, a liberal could - in fact most liberals of that era did - distrust democracy; in the 20th, almost no one would confess to such a sin. Liberals could be nationalists or internationalists. They urged war and advocated peace. Some were open to parties to their left, such as socialists and Communists, while others were among the extreme left's fiercest critics. Down to today, those who insist that markets work best without interference often identify themselves as liberal, if of the "classical" variety, but so do those "modern" liberals who call on government to correct market failures. "The word 'liberal' is notoriously slippery," writes Edmund Fawcett, formerly of The Economist, as he begins "Liberalism: The Life of an Idea," his richly informative historical tour of liberal leaders and concepts. His "experience as a journalist served him well," Fawcett says of the British sociologist Leonard Hobhouse. The same could be said about Fawcett. Widely read, apparently conversant in at least three languages and a vivacious writer - one German politician "had a beard like a yew hedge and a frown of stubborn ferocity" - Fawcett aims to make liberalism comprehensible to contemporary readers. To do so, he takes a commendably liberal approach, bringing as many within the tent as possible. Liberals, he insists, do not argue from a doctrinal checklist so much as they understand that conflict is unavoidable, distrust unjust authority, hold faith in progress and respect all, or at least most, people. It is more a way of doing politics than it is a fixed political position. The term is capacious enough to include both Jean-Paul Sartre and Milton Friedman, George Orwell along with Margaret Thatcher. Fawcett devotes roughly equal attention to liberalism's origins in the middle decades of the 19th century, its late-19th -and early-20th-century struggles with democracy, and its post-World War II resurgence, before briefly pondering its likely future. Names and events whiz by as he jumps from one country to another, offering synopses of innumerable books, some famous and others obscure, brief biographical vignettes and accounts of policies both successful and failed. Fawcett bends over backward to include nations. Germany, he insists, ought to be part of the liberal story, and he profiles figures largely unrecognizable to English -language readers, such as Hermann Schulze-Delitzsch, an advocate of mutualism, otherwise known as the cooperative movement; as well as Bismarck's opponent Eugen Richter, he of the yewlike beard. A liberal surely ought to be inclusive, but Fawcett, in my view, is in this respect far too much so. The Savoyard royalist Joseph de Maistre, as anti-liberal a figure as one can find, is rightly called a "conservative reactionary," but the Nazi lawyer Carl Schmitt, who comes in a close second, is characterized, wrongly, as "ambiguous." Because liberals accept conflict as inevitable, Fawcett discusses the ideas of John C. Calhoun, the South Carolina politician who drew up an elaborate scheme to protect minority rights. But Calhoun belongs with de Maistre and Schmitt, not James Madison (with whom Fawcett pairs him). "Whatever form it took, over interests, beliefs or ways of life," as Fawcett himself characterizes the liberal perspective, "the thought was that conflict must be tamed, transformed into competition and made fruitful in trade, experiment and argument." Calhoun, by contrast, devoted his life to defending the narrow interests of slaveholders and justifying the brutal way of life that came with it. The conflict his passions helped bring about was famously irrepressible - and anything but fruitful. Historians of ideas, especially liberal ones, nearly always stumble on what has been called das Adam Smith Problem: How can we reconcile Smith's defense of the impersonal market in "The Wealth of Nations" with his insistence on the importance of sympathy in "The Theory of Moral Sentiments"? Fawcett, who views Smith as a pre-liberal, thankfully skips over this issue. Alas, however, this only means that he comes face to face with das Friedrich Hayek Problem. Hayek, the 20th -century Austrian-born laissez-faire economist, is immensely important to Fawcett and a recurrent character in the book. Yet how can Hayek's insistence on spontaneity and freedom be reconciled with his intellectual rigidity, distrust of progress and unconcern with social justice? Fawcett concludes that no such reconciliation is possible. "The suspicion never went away that his entire system rested on expediency - that no concern, in other words, be it for justice, law, rights or privacy - mattered save as how it furthered economic growth." This is regrettably awkward prose. Who has such suspicions? I know I do. Does Fawcett? It is not Fawcett's task to award a prize to history's greatest liberal. Still, there is one thinker in this book whose ideas come up for discussion whenever he seeks to explain liberalism's most characteristic ideas. John Stuart Mill indeed deserves the honor. Although he could be snobbish toward the masses, Mill leaves much to admire. "On Liberty" is a beautifully written, and highly teachable, introduction to liberal thinking. Inspired by the love of his life, Harriet Taylor, Mill wrote more sympathetically about women's equality than any other man of his time. His economic ideas, anything but rigid, changed to meet the conditions of changing economies. He hated slavery and took the North's side in the American Civil War. His essays on Bentham and Coleridge, which Fawcett cites with admiration, demonstrate his unerring ear for what even problematic thinkers can teach. "Nobody since has offered as many-sided or candid a statement of the conflicting pressures within the liberal creed," Fawcett writes of Mill. On this point he is completely correct. One will find in Fawcett's brief reflections on the future neither a liberal celebration à la Francis Fukuyama nor bitter nostalgia about liberalism's decline into decadence à la Robert Bork. We have come full circle to liberalism's origins, he believes, as once again we're faced with the task of bringing a humane and respectful order out of the chaos of the world around us. Far from being the sole product of the rich liberal democracies of the West, liberal ideas, he believes, offer enormous promise to those struggling for a better future in places like Iran, India and China. "They have work for many lifetimes," Fawcett concludes. "If something like that is close to true, it is too early to bury liberalism under a statue of hope." The term 'liberal' is capacious enough to include George Orwell and Margaret Thatcher. ALAN WOLFE is the author of "The Future of Liberalism." His book on why diaspora is good for the Jews will be published in October.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 20, 2014]
Review by Choice Review
Review by New York Times Review
