What Was Liberalism?
The Past, Present, and Promise of a Noble Idea
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Descripción editorial
A sweeping history of liberalism, from its earliest origins to its imperiled present and uncertain future
Donald Trump is the first American president to regard liberal values with open contempt. He has company: the leaders of Italy, Hungary, Poland, and Turkey, among others, are also avowed illiberals. What happened? Why did liberalism lose the support it once enjoyed? In What Was Liberalism?, James Traub returns to the origins of liberalism, in the aftermath of the American and French revolutions and in the works of such great thinkers as John Stuart Mill and Isaiah Berlin.
Although the first liberals were deeply skeptical of majority rule, the liberal faith adapted, coming to encompass belief in not only individual rights and free markets, but also state action to provide basic goods. By the second half of the twentieth century, liberalism had become the national creed of the most powerful country in the world. But this consensus did not last. Liberalism is now widely regarded as an antiquated doctrine. What Was LIberalism? reviews the evolution of the liberal idea over more than two centuries for lessons on how it can rebuild its majoritarian foundations.
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A once glorious, now besieged creed gets a searching critique in this shrewd political history. Journalist Traub (John Quincy Adams: Militant Spirit) explores liberalism's development through the ideas of leading theoreticians, from James Madison's model of limited, constitutional, sometimes antimajoritarian government, to John Stuart Mill's brief for unfettered personal liberty, to the 20th-century Progressives' program for an expansive state that tames market capitalism with regulation, provisioning of public goods, and social insurance. His survey culminates in liberalism's postwar triumphs against fascism and then communism in Europe, and in furthering civil rights in the United States, where it became America's "civic religion." He then charts liberalism's decline as flagging welfare and regulatory states were challenged by resurgent free-market dogmas, globalization brought economic upheaval and insecurity to Western workers, and liberal cosmopolitanism clashed with traditional worldviews. The result, he argues, is the Trump-ian populist backlash against bedrock liberal tenets of inclusiveness, individual rights, and reasoned debate. Writing in elegant, aphoristic prose, Traub's trenchant analysis takes populist discontents seriously, particularly on the topic of immigration "It is not at all clear that pious Syrians can become progressive Swedes" while defending liberalism's core values. The result is a clear-eyed, timely discussion that illuminates both liberalism's humanity and its hubris.
