Re: consideration of The Liberal Imagination

Bowman has nudged me to apply a little more rigour to the question of “Wither (sic) Liberalism?” To that end I’ve opened Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination with pen in hand, and begun filling the margins with all manner of 21st Century yap-back. I hope to post short, less yappy, considerations of Trilling’s critiques.

Lionel, amidst the detritus of neoliberalism

But let’s start with Louis Menand’s 2008 introduction to Trilling’s book (The Liberal Imagination was originally published in 1950). Menand makes note of Trilling’s intellectual dodge — Trilling never defines “liberal” or “liberalism” in any of the essays collected here. Menand reaches for Isaiah Berlin:

There are, as a matter of political theory, radically different types of liberals. There is, in Isaiah Berlin’s famous distinction, the liberal who believes in negative liberty, “freedom from,” and the liberal who believes in positive liberty, “freedom for.” There is the liberalism of markets and individualism, and there is the liberalism of planning and the collective.

Interesting to note how quickly Menand skates straight to the thin ice in that last sentence. When he wrote it, the '08 market crash had not yet happened — in fact NYRB’s reissue of The Liberal Imagination preceded the crash by exactly one week. Not a moment too soon. It’s 12 years later and “neoliberalism is DEAD!” is common parlance in the broadsheets. Personally, I’ve long had a firmer grasp of the “neo” than I ever did of the “liberalism” it commandeered and stripped for parts.

So the hat-tip to Berlin is helpful — the “freedom from”/“freedom for” dialectic still frames well, in my own experience, as you can see in my meandering conversation with Paul, both here and here.

Knee-jerk thought: Kids These Days, particularly the ones taking over the dying newspapers — to what degree are they conscious of this dialectic, if at all?

More anon. But if you’re the impatient sort, or if you’d rather pass on my artless treading of water and head straight to synchronized swimming, check out The Christian Humanist’s exploration of Trilling’s 1961 essay, “On The Teaching Of Modern Literature.”