Liberal Cultures and Their Critics: The Trials of a Transatlantic Discourse

Liberal Political Theory: Always Unpopular
Alan Ryan
My only political surprise during the eight years in which I taught in the United States was when George Bush denounced the "L-Word." Setting aside the possibility that he simply couldn't pronounce liberalism, was one to believe that the president of a country whose political system defines liberal democracy really meant that he was opposed in principle to one half of his nation's guiding ideology? The answer, one hopes, is no. He had no desire to abolish habeas corpus, trial by jury, or the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. He had no wish to revive unwarranted search and seizure or to bring back the offense of seditious libel. Nor did he wish to institute a theocracy on the Iranian or Pakistani model. If we take the subject of liberal political theory absolutely seriously and literally, and au pled de la lettre, we have to say that liberalism has not been under serious attack within the United States as a matter of political theory. Or, rather and more cautiously, we have to say that liberalism as the operating theory of the political system has not been under attack. Political equality in the sense of "one person one vote" and legal equality in the sense of "access to justice for all" were not being condemned though many different views were canvassed about whether the political and legal systems achieved either of them in practice. Similarly, the liberal conception of political authority - that governments acquire their legitimacy by way of the consent of the governed - has not been challenged, though once again there have been many different views about the extent to which the governed do give their consents.
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Anti-Bourgeois Consciousness and French Identity in Historical Perspective
Sarah Maza
Among the most enduring and conspicuous features of French culture is contempt for persons labeled “bourgeois,” an attitude which stretches in time upstream of Molière's famous Monsieur Jourdain in the seventeenth century and downstream from the hugely popular songs of Jacques Brel and Georges Braessens in the mid twentieth. The French gave us the very word bourgeois, which comes laden with negative associations, and have provided countless models for the posture implicit in the expression épater le bourgeois.
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Reconciling Individuality and Individualism in European Liberalism:
Humboldt to Habermas
Gerald Izenberg
Over the last two decades, political theorists have vigorously debated the adequacy of "rights-based" liberalism to encompass such fundamental human needs as community and identity. Among the most important of them, some have argued, are the needs expressed by the ideal of "individuality." The classical liberal concern with the self-interested individual and the protection of its rights ignores and distorts, critics have claimed, human desires for self-expression, uniqueness, and wholeness. Despite occasional insinuations otherwise by those who fear the dilution or even abandonment of individual rights, the debate is securely located within the classical liberal tradition. None of the participants rejects the importance of fundamental individual rights or the thesis that a main task of liberal democratic society is to preserve and promote them. But for proponents of individuality this is at best a minimum program that, taken alone, actually works to stunt human possibility, and thus freedom itself.
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A Glance at Democratic Individuality
George Kateb
If I may be allowed a personal word: the frame of mind in which I have thought about the concept of democratic individuality for the last twenty five years or so has changed from time to time, even if it has always been fairly intense. Although I have been continuously interested in Emerson from college days to the present, my immersion in his work, which is the foundation of democratic individuality, and in the work of his two greatest younger colleagues, Thoreau and Whitman, began in the mid-1970s, right after the loss of the 1960s. That immersion began in a spirit of admiration - though not unequivocal - for the student generations who were at college from the mid-1960s to the early-1970s. When the spirit of these generations had evaporated and been replaced by what has existed since then - namely, a passion for career, relationships, and therapy (I know that I’m not entirely fair) - I wanted to get a clearer picture of what had disappeared.
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Utopianism, Sentimentalism, and Liberal Culture in America
Ruth H. Bloch
In all its ambiguities, a liberal culture of free markets, individual rights, and constitutional democracy is probably more universally associated with America now than ever before. Especially in this post-communist, post-welfare-state age, liberalism and America together are widely seen as showing the way to a politically free and prosperous future - as well as, of course, representing all the attendant risks of globalization including labor exploitation, cultural imperialism, and environmental degradation. If the connection of America to liberalism seems obvious, the connection of America to utopianism and sentimentalism is, I would argue, equally important but far more obscure. It is the purpose of this paper to analyze the historical interrelationship of these three more or less discrete intellectual systems, and to draw attention to the points of conflict, overlap, and mutual reinforcement among them. This interpretation not only takes issue with an overly simplistic view of present-day American culture as liberal, but, perhaps more importantly, complicates what we mean by American liberal culture by reexamining its eighteenth-century origins.
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Aspirational Nationalism in America
James Kloppenberg
In the epilogue of Ralph Waldo Ellison's Invisible Man, the protagonist probes the deathbed advice of his grandfather. "Could he have meant - hell, he must have meant the principle, that we were to affirm the principle on which the country was built and not the men, or at least not the men who did the violence." Or perhaps the old man meant that we should affirm even the violence, even the endless cycle of "death and destruction," because only such knowledge reveals the searing truth "that men are different and that only in division is there true health." The “passion toward conformity" breeds nightmares of cruelty: "diversity is the word. Let man keep his many parts and you’ll have no tyrant states."
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Liberalism and American Exceptionalism
Dorothy Ross
Among the trials of the transatlantic liberal tradition that theorists and historians have recently addressed is its relationship with nationalism. What supports does nationalism provide for, and what constraints does it impose upon, liberal thought? In the case I am to discuss, how has American exceptionalism, the ideological basis of American nationalism, affected liberal thought in the United States?
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Roundtable: Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club and the Problem of Pragmatism

Menand and Self-Reliance
Bruce Kuklick
Menand takes Charles Peirce's Metaphysical Club of the early 1870s as the jumping-off point to write a history of pragmatism that focuses initially on Oliver Wendell Holmes and then on William James and Peirce - the three most famous members of the Club. When Peirce went to Johns Hopkins, he reconstituted such a club, which briefly included John Dewey, then a graduate student, and Menand uses this coincidence to include a treatment of Dewey and instrumentalism as part of the work of the Metaphysical Club.
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Teaching The Metaphysical Club
James Kloppenberg
The Metaphysical Club works. I assigned Louis Menand's Pulitzer-Prize-winning book in two classes this year, a graduate colloquium in intellectual history and a course for sophomore history majors who had chosen to focus on the field of intellectual history. In part because I knew I would be contributing to this symposium and wanted to communicate my experience with other intellectual historians, in part as an experiment, and primarily because I thought it would prove valuable for both sets of students, I decided to investigate my students' responses to The Metaphysical Club. In part because I have already discussed the substantive issues involved in pragmatism at length elsewhere, and in part because I have confidence in the other scholars who discuss those issues in this symposium, here I will concentrate on my experience teaching the book and my students' experiences reading it.
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Reflections on Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club
Giles Gunn
Louis Menand is a splendid storyteller and The Metaphysical Club makes for a wonderful story, or, rather, set of stories - the book literally contains dozens - that are very skillfully woven together. The ostensible subject of this network of stories is an account of the emergence of American pragmatism at a certain moment in history and its particular forms. A story itself told from a pragmatist point of view (what is the difference that pragmatism made to the way people thought, chiefly about ideas?), it recounts many of the connections among the lives not only of the four major figures responsible for pragmatism's development - Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and John Dewey - but of countless other thinkers and writers who either influenced these four or were influenced by them, from Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Darwin, Benjamin Peirce, and Henry James, Sr., to Alain Locke, W. E. B. DuBois, Horace Kallen, Randolph Bourne, and many others. This is a story that has been told many times before but never, so far as I know, with such scrupulous attention to interlocking biographies and their complex relations to and interactions with contemporary events. There is a richness and depth to Menand's historical writing that has much to do with his ability to capture the elements of the accidental and coincidental without interrupting the flow of his narrative. If one is sometimes left a bit uncertain as to where the route is leading, there is never any doubt that, in Menand's telling of it, the whole journey has been carefully mapped in advance and is coherent from beginning to end.
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Pragmatism in Situ:
Philosophical Accuracy and Historical Context
Karen Hanson
In the preface to The Metaphysical Club, Louis Menand claims that the book "is not a work of philosophical argument" but is instead "historical interpretation," a description of the crisscrossing and reciprocal influences of events and ideas from mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century America. The book's narrative line is fascinating, its thematic sweep impressive, the small details touching, and, as always with Menand, the writing is elegant, witty, and consistently engaging. The reader is plunked into the unhappy politics and horrifying battles of the Civil War; the ferment, the advances and the dead ends of an exciting era of scientific activity; the high ideals and the hard compromises and manipulations that shaped great American universities; the continuing struggles of this nation and the world with the problems of race and racism. In a way very uncharacteristic of a work of philosophy, the personalities of the four major characters, and scores of minor ones, are brought strikingly to the fore. Holmes, James, Peirce, and Dewey - and their many relatives, friends and associates - are robustly conveyed through compelling accounts of their public actions and well-chosen quotations from their private correspondence and diaries. Thus professional philosophers who think they know these pragmatist philosophers - who know, that is, their philosophy - can, through Menand's book, come to know them in a startlingly different way.
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Menand's Postdisciplinary Project
Thomas Haskell
Planting one foot in the academic world at City University of New York, and the other in the editorial offices of such prestigious publications as The New Yorker, The New Republic, and The New York Review of Books, Louis Menand has spent a remarkably productive decade turning out not only The Metaphysical Club and several edited volumes, but also essays that grapple incisively with the hot-button academic issues of our generation - postmodernism, the culture wars, multiculturalism, advocacy in the classroom, and the ever-imperiled rights of academic freedom, among others. Polarizing as these issues have proved to be in other hands, Menand has addressed them in a manner that has seemed refreshingly candid and free of polemical animus. Even-tempered though they are, his essays nearly always elaborate firmly held views on a core subject of far reaching significance: the merits and demerits of disciplinarity.
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Reply
Louis Menand
I deeply appreciate the graciousness and generosity that characterize these comments on my book, and I'm grateful to the editors of the journal for sponsoring them, and for giving me an opportunity to respond.

It is a little hard to be taken to task by Professor Kloppenberg's graduate students for some informal introductory remarks I made in a talk at Harvard, but I meant what I said there. I did not set out, when I undertook to write The Metaphysical Club, to prove a thesis, or to make an intervention in a scholarly debate, or to support a claim about the importance of biography and social history to an understanding of philosophy, or to produce a work of "popular history." I just thought that the Metaphysical Club could be the basis for an interesting story, and in the beginning, after getting guidance from the books cited in the footnote to the preface, I more or less followed my nose through the material.
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Book Reviews

The Old Intellectual History and the New?
  A review of J. W. Burrow's The Crisis of Reason: European Thought, 1848 - 1914
Suzanne Marchand
This is a very good book of a type that hardly exists anymore; reading it is like putting on one's most comfortable trainers and walking through a favorite and still beautiful old neighborhood. There, the well-built houses remain attractive and imposing; some of the gardens are well-tended, and others are overgrown, but none are kitschy or banal. There are lights on in all the windows, and the stroller overhears snatches of highly interesting conversations (Burrow's central metaphor for his reconstructive task). Hearing them converse from the outside, one attends exclusively to the inspiring ideas, never knowing, or particularly wanting to know, how these people earn a living, collect their data or treat their wives (virtually all the interlocutors are male). These are extraordinary individuals who construct grand systems and pass many an hour worrying about big issues: the lessons of history, the true nature of humankind, the social question, and the future of the sciences. They are not petty or greedy, imitators or opportunists. They do not live in a discursively constructed universe, and are more or less oblivious to the material world around them. They are the traditional subjects of intellectual history, and one listens to them happily, but with the strong sense that they have become, for better and for worse, strangers.
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John Higham: The Contrarian as Optimist
   A review of John Higham's Hanging Together: Unity and Diversity in American Culture
Kenneth Cmiel
Any list of major historians of the post-World War II generation would have to include John Higham. Higham produced one classic book, Strangers in the Land, another that was a staple for a generation of scholars, History: The Development of Historical Studies in the United States, and a string of important synthetic essays that continue to be mined by cultural historians. Higham did not publish a stunning quantity of work, but his output was among the most significant of his time.
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In Memoriam

Yehoshua Arieli, 1916 - 2002
Stephen J. Whitfield
One of the very few foreign scholars whose work has exerted an impact upon the historiography of American political ideas died in August, 2002, in Jerusalem, at the age of 86. Yehoshua Arieli was best known in this country for Individualism and Nationalism in American Ideology (1964), an ambitious exploration of what was distinctive about the political culture of the revolutionary and early national eras in particular. But in Israel Arieli became the pivotal figure in establishing the fields of American history and American studies, which he insisted upon situating fully in the context of the European past.