IRVING LOUIS HOROWITZ
471
the ultimate end of man." An implicit juxtaposition of Peirce against
James and Dewey - against a philosophical tradition "centered about
man's psychologic nature and moral duties" - was leveled by Cohen as
ultimately narrow, impoverished, and illiberal. His own sense of science
was something that rises above a sense of immediate urgency. And he in–
vokes authorities from Plato to Spinoza
to
identify the love of wisdom
as nothing short of the conduct of science and mathematics. I think it
fair to say that in his vision of the scientific, Cohen was far closer to the
conservative tradition he eschewed than to the modern liberalism he
claims to have embodied. Just how his legal empiricism coincided with
scientific rationalism remains a problem, not just for Cohen but for
modern intellectual history as a whole. For if law is but a thing-for-us
while science is a thing-for-itself, just what hope is there for a unified or
integrated vision of the moral order?
Increasingly, Cohen's revulsion for doctrines of activism were further
fueled by the rising tide of authoritarianisms right and left during the
1920s and 1930s. At a time when it was hardly fashionable, Cohen wrote
his famous essay, "Why I Am Not a Communist." It was a blistering in–
dictment of the Soviet regime and of Leninist ideology. Ultimately it was
intellectual disdain of fanaticism and irrationalism that made any possibil–
ity of lining up with communism impossible. And in one of his typical
literary asides, he notes of the choice between communism and fascism, "I
feel that [ am offered the choice between being shot and being hanged."
Liberal society, American society, should not be compelled into a false
choice, since neither variety of totalitarianism exhausts human possibilities.
And liberalism is ultimately a matter of human possibilities.
Cohen loved that word "possibilities," for in it he saw the essence of
Americanism, whether speaking of Alexis de Tocqueville's
Democracy
ill
America
or Vernon Parrington's
Maill ClIrrents
ill
AlI1ericall Thollght.
And
science and literature intersect in confronting the conundrum of the na–
ture of knowledge. The critical and skeptical spirit of American literature
and science makes for distrust of tempting generalizations or self-evident
truths - but this also makes possible the liberal imagination itself In an
interesting note on Russian character, he speaks of the interest in con–
crete science and general mysticism and the absence of "abstract questions
of scientific method" - questions so characteristically present in the kind
of liberal thinking portrayed by Cohen. In this, he is part of a long line
of American thinkers who linked scientific method with the liberal spirit,
even if that connection could not always be made theoretically clear.
The final essay, "The Future of American Liberalism," is the only
statement he wrote specifically for
The Faith oj a Liberal.
It is not a sim–
ple essay, for Cohen is at some pains to square liberalism with
political
in-
