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PARTISAN REVIEW
be misunderstood in these matters, that I myself am not drawn toward
making this election. I reject Mr. Barrett's alternatives simply because
they are not real and legitimate alternatives.
By his questions Mr. Barrett seems to require that liberalism be
detached from its immediate and "existential" nature and that it be
dealt with only in its ideal "essential" nature as Mr. Barrett defines it.
He lays it down as a condition that if one is to attack liberalism one
must in honesty attack liberalism's assumptions of
pragmati~m
and natu–
ralism ; and he seems to imply that the critic of liberalism who dares go
back to deal with the values of the Enlightenment is in danger at least
6f refutation and probably of something worse, of exposing himself as
religious and reactionary.
As to pushing our inquiry as far back as it will go, although I would
add the proviso that we must be careful not to confuse with its source
the present issue we inquire into, I agree with Mr. Barrett that some–
thing is to be gained by a historical reprise. And I myself habitually
keep the Enlightenment in my thought and reading, having been led
to do so a good many years ago by the necessities of dealing with Mat–
thew Arnold's situation. I don't say this with any pride in my special
historical vision, for I conceive that the whole of modern literature has
been an inquiry into the values of the Enlightenment. The inquiry
began with Rousseau; indeed, if Montaigne has any part in the liberal
tradition-and whose part is finer?-then the inquiry began with Pascal's
attack on Montaigne. In ways too numerous to mention here in detail,
the inquiry has continued up to the present, and the contemporary
literature which by common consent is of the greatest stature follows
in the line of Blake, Burke and Wordsworth.
Which is to suggest that the movement the textbooks call the
Enlightenment is too simple and unitary a segment of history to serve
Mr. Barrett's purpose of inquiry. The Enlightenment is but one element
of a dialectical situation of which the opposing and complementary ele–
ment is Romanticism. John Stuart Mill's essays on Coleridge and
Bentham are a classic statement of the nature of this dialectic, and
Freud's work may be understood as a present example of a possible
synthesis of the two elements. I can perhaps suggest to Mr. Barrett at
least the approximate limits of my criticism of liberalism if I say that
it has been guided by my sense that contemporary liberalism seems in–
capable of responding to the realistic values of Romanticism which,
equally with the idealistic values of the Enlightenment, are properly
part of its heritage.
As for Mr. Barrett's attempt to control the inquiry into liberalism
