A word about the ongoing discussion (begun by Jonah Goldberg) of whether contemporary left-liberals are more ignorant of their movement’s intellectual history than conservatives or libertarians are of those of their movements.
One of Goldberg’s correspondents mentions John Rawls. I think Rawls may be significant in quite a different way. It is Rawls who most clearly represents the liberalism of contemporary left-liberalism. That is, it is Rawls who synthesized a robust welfare state, strongly egalitarian anti-discrimination throughout the (public and private) basic institutions of society, and a first-order commitment to civil liberties and individual social and religious freedom. This was neither social democracy nor the Old or New Left, neither identity politics nor vanguardism. It held together a number of things that were widely-believed-in among the Cold War liberal elite as well as substantial parts of the northern Democratic coalition, but excluded much that was important to the student left of the 60s, among other groups. And it’s more-or-less orthodox today among the people Goldberg means by left-liberals. There are, of course, people farther left than left-liberals, people who reject what they see as Rawls’ compromises with the market, his individualism, and so on. But there are people too far right to quote Russell Kirk, too.
Now here’s the interesting bit: Rawls’ account of the intellectual history of his kind of liberalism is not littered with references to American figures like Croly or Bellamy (leftists but not liberals). A college student picking up Theory of Justice will more or less come away with the impression that no political theory had been written since Mill. There was Kant, and there was classical utilitarianism, and there was Mill… and then there was John Rawls. Other philosophers are discussed, of course. But Rawls describes pre-1971 political thought as basically stuck between 19th-century utilitarianism and Aristotilean/Christian perfectionism. The twentieth-century progressives and social democrats and Marcuse-types are almost nowhere to be seen. (Neither, of course, are major figures from Strauss to Arendt to Hayek.)
And in a weird but real sense Rawls was right– not as an account of intellectual history, but as an account of the intellectual history of welfare liberalism. Early-twentieth-century American leftists weren’t his intellectual history; Mill and Kant were. Goldberg keeps suggesting that left-liberals are ignorant of “their” history. But I’m not sure in what sense it’s supposed to be “theirs.” Some contemporary leftists say things that Harrington or Galbraith, Hofstadter or Schlesinger or Beard, Croly or Bellamy, or Cole or Laski, or James or Dewey, also said. But that doesn’t mean that there’s a direct line of influence from the earlier figures to today’s. It’s one thing to be ignorant of the sources that have influenced one’s thinking. It’s another to be ignorant of other people who’ve occupied a position on their day’s political spectrum something like the one you occupy on yours.
To the degree that todays left-liberalism is Rawlsian, I don’t know that it really does owe much to the non-liberal left of the late 19th/ early 20th centuries. Other than Keynes and Isaiah Berlin, I kind of doubt that there are many intellectual figures between Mill and Rawls who really do exercise ongoing influence on the structure of left-liberal thought. I certainly think that Berlin is has more ongoing influence than Croly; Berlin is more truly part of “their” intellectual heritage. And it’s not as though no one ever talks about Berlin.
(The postmodernist, poststructuralist, post-Marxist far left is quite different; it’s mainly an academic movement anyways, and its adherents know their Marcuse and Arendt, Heidegger and Foucault, Gramsci and Neitzsche. But those figures really aren’t part of the intellectual heritage of a mainstream contemporary American left-liberal.)
By contrast, contemporary American libertarianism has a pretty continuous and longstanding line of descent. Many of us studied directly with people who studied with at least one of Rothbard, Rand, Hayek, or Friedman. Rothbard and Hayek were both students of Mises’, who was a student of Menger’s– and by now we’ve got an unbroken line almost all the way back ’till Mill’s time. There’s early- and mid-20th century work that genuinely does shape libertarian thought in a way that Croly or Bellamy just don’t shape contemporary left-liberalism.
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