Can Liberalism Still Tell Powerful Stories?1

1. This paper was presented at the Ninth International Conference of the International Society for the Study of European Ideas (ISSEI), The Narrative of Modernity: Co-Existence of Differences, Workshop no. 252, at the University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain, 2–7 August 2004.

Abstract

The need of reason is not inspired by the quest for truth but by the quest for meaning. And truth and meaning are not the same. The basic fallacy, taking precedence over all specific metaphysical fallacies, is to interpret meaning on the model of truth. (Hanna Arendt, The Life of the Mind: Thinking)2

The problem of agency in liberal political thought begins when dictates of reason grounded in philosophical truth become separated from motivations premised on desires and appetites articulated in moral psychology. In the writings of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and John Stuart Mill, political agency requires both reason and motive, and motive, in turn, requires narratives of meaning that enable and motivate us to act. These narratives incorporate elements of the sacred and these religious elements, in turn, become parts of their moral psychologies. Part I is a summary of the role of sacred narrative for human agency in Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and John Stuart Mill. In America, a sacred/national narrative became an essential part of Progressive political thought at the turn of the last century. Part II explores the construction of national narratives in Progressive political thought that were intended to discredit prevailing forms of constitutionalist and other static and abstract forms of rights talk. The decline of this narrative framework and the rise of fixed principles of moral neutrality in liberal public philosophy in America during the second half of the twentieth century had two effects: it downplayed the role of civic virtue and it submerged national narratives of substantive public purpose. This narrative absence runs parallel with the demise of progressive liberalism as a formative political force in America. Recently, American public intellectuals have sought to restore narrative and patriotism to principles of liberal-progressive reform. Part III concludes by returning to the moral psychology of liberalism, this time by contrasting John Rawls and Charles Taylor on human agency.

Notes

Notes

1. This paper was presented at the Ninth International Conference of the International Society for the Study of European Ideas (ISSEI), The Narrative of Modernity: Co-Existence of Differences, Workshop no. 252, at the University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain, 2–7 August 2004.

2. Quoted in Victor Kestenbaum, The Grace and Severity of the Ideal: John Dewey and the Transcendent (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 89.

3. Thomas Hobbes, Elements of Law, ed. F. Tönnies (London, 1889).

4. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. and intro. C. B. Macpherson (London: Penguin Books, 1985). Cited as part, chapter, and page.

5. Author/translator unknown. Subtitle, In Verse by Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, Made English from the Latin Original (London: E. Curll, 1722), 15.

6. Emphasis added. Quoted in J. B. Schneewind, “Locke's Moral Philosophy,” in Cambridge Companion to Locke, ed. Vere Chappell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 215; and see discussion of this issue in James Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 207–9, 293–4, 309–14.

7. John Locke, The Works of John Locke in Ten Volumes (London: T. Tegg, 1823), 7.144.

8. John Locke, Two Tracts on Government, ed. Philip Abrams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 237; hereafter abbreviated as TT.

9. John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, vol. 2, ed. Peter Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 2.22.1–12.

10. Quoted in John Robson, “Civilization and Culture as Moral Concepts,” in The Cambridge Companion to Mill, ed. John Skorupski (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 356. Citation error reads 18 CW.

11. In contrast to these separate social sciences, “there can be no separate Science of Government,” because it is so comprehensively intertwined with the general character of a people. “All questions respecting the tendencies of forms of government must stand part of the general science of society, not of any separate branch of it” (System of Logic, 8 CW, 906).

12. See Eldon J. Eisenach, “John Stuart Mill and the History of Political Thought,” and “Mill's Autobiography as Political Theory,” in Narrative Power and Liberal Truth (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002). In Mill's essay, “Bentham,” David Hume is singled out for searing criticism on these grounds. Although Hume is England's “profoundest negative thinker on record,” says Mill, even the shallowest man can become “a first rate negative philosopher.” Mill dropped this part on Hume when “Bentham” was later republished in his collection, Dissertations and Discussions.

13. A thorough discussion of the philological side of this argument is in Book 4 of System of Logic in a section entitled, “Of the Requisites of a Philosophical Language.” That Coleridge, not Bentham, represented the future is seen by contrasting Mill's portrait of Bentham in 10 CW, 5 and of Coleridge in 10 CW, 121 and is discussed in Eisenach, “Mill and Liberal Christianity,” in Narrative Power and Liberal Truth, 193–5.

14. Frederic Harrison, Tennyson, Ruskin, Mill and Other Literary Estimates (London: Macmillan, 1899), 286; John Morley, “Recollections,” I, Works (London: Macmillan, 1921), 49; and see Eisenach, “John Stuart Mill and the History of Political Thought,” 224–6.

15. John Morley, Critical Miscellanies, vol. 3 (London: Chapman and Hall, 1871–77), 68.

16. Edith Simcox, “On the Influence of John Stuart Mill's Writings,” Contemporary Review 12 (1873): 317.

17. Chesterton's phrase was made prominent in an essay in Sidney E. Mead, The Nation with the Soul of a Church (New York: Harper and Row, 1975).

18. Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Dorothy Ross, Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Jurgen Herbst, The German Historical School in American Scholarship (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1965); Eldon J. Eisenach, The Lost Promise of Progressivism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994). It was actually theologians who paved the way for study in Germany in the three previous decades and it was their students, especially from Yale, who became the founding presidents of Cornell (Andrew Dickson White), Johns Hopkins (Daniel Coit Gilman), and Chicago (William Rainey Harper). See Louise Stevenson, Scholarly Means to Evangelical Ends: The New Haven Scholars and the Transformation of Higher Learning in America, 1830–1890 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).

19. Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977). Nineteenth-century examples include Lyman Beecher, A Plea for the West (New York: Arno Press, 1838; 1977); and Josiah Strong, Our Country (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1885; 1963).

20. Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982); and Eldon J. Eisenach, “The Reconstruction of American Political Thought in a Regime-Change Perspective,” in Studies in American Political Development, vol. 4, ed. Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).

21. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Julia Ward Howe, “Battle Hymn of the Republic” (actual title, “Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory”) produced two of the most notable literary markers of anti-slavery.

22. Theodore Roosevelt, a long-time friend of Abbott's, was on the editorial board and often wrote for Outlook. Booker T. Washington, Jacob Riis, and Edward Everett Hale, along with Roosevelt, published their autobiographies in Outlook before releasing them as books. Albion Small, founding editor of The American Journal of Sociology at the University of Chicago, and Richard T. Ely, the leading reform economist teaching at the University of Wisconsin, were also contributors.

23. Lyman Abbott, The Rights of Man (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1901), 100, 165. Walt Whitman had expressed the same idea in Democratic Vistas: “democracy … is a great word, whose history … remains unwritten, because that history has yet to be enacted.” Quoted in Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).

24. Quoted in Eisenach, The Lost Promise of Progressivism, 187.

25. Charles Cooley, Human Nature and the Social Order, quoted in Eisenach, Lost Promise of Progressivism, 190. Discussion of this and the other textbooks by Dewey and Tufts, and Ely are also found here.

26. See discussion of this aspect of Patten's thought in Eisenach, The Lost Promise of Progressivism, 87–91. An excellent overview of Progressive political economy is James Livingston, Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994).

27. On the more general relationship between American Progressive, British new liberals, and European social democrats, see James Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); and Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings.

28. Lyman Abbott, The Twentieth-Century Crusade (New York: Macmillan, 1918), 99.

29. On the New Deal as Social Gospel, see James Morone, Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003); on Progressive public policy ideas taken up by the New Deal, see Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings.

30. David Truman, The Governmental Process (New York: Knopf, 1951); Robert Dahl, Preface to Democratic Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956); and Pluralist Democracy in the United States (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1967).

31. Samuel A. Stouffer, Communism, Conformity, and Civil Liberties (Transaction reprint, 1954; 1992).

32. Indeed, Walter Lippman anticipated this solution in The Phantom Public (Transaction reprint, 1927; 1993), but his faith in a natural affinity of democratic values, social science, and public policy was so strong that any doubts about democratic participatory values were overcome. Later democratic theorists lacked this faith, in part because the social sciences were increasingly proclaimed “value free” as they became disconnected from Progressive national narratives. See David Ricci, The Tragedy of Political Science: Politics, Scholarship, and Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987); and Raymond Seidelman, Disenchanted Realists: Political Science and the American Crisis, 1884–1984 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985). Henry Kariel, Decline of American Pluralism (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1961), and Peter Bachrach, The Theory of Democratic Elitism: A Critique (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967) were among the first to make this argument explicit.

33. Dahl explicitly denied that the Supreme Court was or could become “the deus ex machina that regularly saves American democracy from itself. … [T]here is not a single case in the history of this nation where the Supreme Court has struck down national legislation designed to curtail, rather than to expand, the key prerequisites to popular equality and popular sovereignty” (A Preface to Democratic Theory, 58–9).

34. Quoted in Gary Peller, “Neutral Principles in the 1950s,” University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform 21(4) (Summer 1988): 592.

35. This term became standard in constitutional jurisprudence in Herbert Wechsler, “Toward Neutral Principles of Constitutional Law,” Harvard Law Review 73 (1959), later republished in Principles, Politics and Fundamental Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961). For a critical discussion of this article from a pragmatic perspective, see Richard A. Posner, Overcoming Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 70–5, 77–9 and, more broadly, Peller, “Neutral Principles in the 1950s.”

36. The final logic of this critique is James Landis, The Administrative Process (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1938) which argues that expert administrative agencies will largely displace the courts (and, indeed, legislatures) in managing most conflicts in the society.

37. These issues are discussed more fully below. See Amy Gutmann, Democratic Education (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). For critiques of these constraints and impositions, see Stanley Fish, The Trouble with Principle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); and Patrick Neal, Liberalism and Its Discontents (New York: New York University Press, 1997).

38. Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978) and Law's Empire (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1988).

39. Michael Sandel, Democracy's Discontent (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).

40. John Dewey, “The Ethics of Democracy,” in The Early Works, vol. 1 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969), 131.

41. Charles Horton Cooley, Social Organization: A Study of the Larger Mind (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1969/1909), 349 and 351.

42. David Ciepley, Liberalism in the Shadow of Totalitarianism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007, forthcoming). And yet, both domestic and foreign policy carried forward some of the momentum of earlier Progressivism. During the Cold War and the 1960s, residual forms of the Progressive narrative remained alive, if somewhat attenuated, in the liberal arts curriculum and through the civil rights movement. Louis Menand stated that Harvard's cosmopolitan general education curriculum in the 1950s and 1960s was “a benign substitute for a national ideology in the Cold War era”: Louis Menand, “Re-imagining a Liberal Education,” in Education and Democracy: Re-imagining Liberal Learning in America, ed. Robert Orrill (New York: College Entrance Examination Board, 1997), 5. On the civil rights movement in the South as Social Gospel, see David Chappell, A Stone of Hope (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). On the Cold War and the national security impetus for national elite support for civil rights in this period, see Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).

43. David Ricci, The Transformation of American Politics: The New Washington and the Rise of Think Tanks (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); and James A. Smith, The Idea Brokers: Think Tanks and the Rise of the New Policy Elite (New York: Free Press, 1993).

44. Stephen Skowronek, The Politics Presidents Make (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).

45. William Galston was a major figure in the Clinton White House who stimulated this rethinking, especially on issues regarding the family, the role of religion, and moral issues. Earlier, he had been a leading critic of John Rawls; see William Galston, Liberal Purposes: Goods, Virtues, and Diversity in the Liberal State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991). He transformed that critique into a defense of liberal pluralism that was partially supportive of substantive values both in political discourse and in public policy: William Galston, Liberal Pluralism: The Implications of Value Pluralism for Political Theory and Practice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). During this same time, a “communitarian” movement in political and social theory had begun a critique of conservative versions of individualist, free market, and rights based discourse, led by the sociologist Amitai Etzioni; this critique, however, could equally apply to prevailing liberal discourse.

46. For a discussion and critique of Rorty on this linkage, see Christopher J. Voparil, “America as the Greatest Poem: Rorty, Whitman, and Baldwin on the Politics of the Nation,” unpublished paper, 2003 APSA meetings.

47. Thomas Nagel, A View from Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). In Equality and Partiality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), Nagel applies this ideal of universal reason to political philosophy.

48. Stanley Fish charges that those who refuse to play the liberal “theory game” are consigned to an “epistemological criminal class”: Stanley Fish, The Trouble with Principle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 191.

49. This is the argument of Michael Lind, The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution (New York: The Free Press, 1995). An excellent example of exactly this colonial ruling model for America is Amy Gutmann, Identity in Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).

50. Kestenbaum, The Grace and the Severity of the Ideal; Chappel, Stone of Hope; Morone, Hellfire Nation; William Connolley, Why I Am Not a Secularist (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

51. The first regime, “Anglo-America” (1789–1861), was succeeded by “Euro-America” (1875–1960s). The civil religion that Lind proposes for the fourth republic, “Trans-America,” is “civil familism.”

52. See Jeffrey C. Isaac, The Poverty of Progressivism: The Future of American Democracy in a Time of Liberal Decline (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), for a summary and critique of these writings, represented, for example, by E. J. Dionne, Jr and John Judis.

53. Two good examples are Alan Dawley, Struggles for Justice: Social Responsibility and the Liberal State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); and Jonathan M. Hansen, The Lost Promise of Patriotism: Debating American Identity, 1890–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

54. By my hasty count from the Index, references to excluded minorities appear on 324 of the 505 pages of the book: African Americans (123 pages), Native Americans (113 pages), and women (88 pages).

55. A concise statement of the logical incompatibility of liberalism (and civic republicanism) with patriotism is found in David P. Barnet, “Should Liberalism Count Patriotism a Virtue?: Pride in Nation, Conformity and Individuality,” unpublished paper, 2003 APSA meetings. The paper concludes that, like religion, “we should … count patriotism as strictly a private virtue” (36).

56. And a built-in intellectual elitism: we brave/fearless few risk hard and principled choices in a society of intellectually and morally lazy citizens all too willing to support illiberal values and policies. See R. Smith, Civil Ideals, 502.

57. There are two other forms of constitutive stories, economic ones that celebrate the material flourishing of a people (60–2, 79–80, 82–3), and political stories, celebrating the power of citizens in the government, the popular achievement of independence or revolution, etc. (62–4, 93–5). These two kinds of stories, however, are much less binding and long-lived than ethically constitutive stories which “are more likely to be religious or quasi-religious, kinship-like, and gendered than economic or political power stories” (69).

58. See Sheldon Wolin, “Contract and Birthright,” Political Theory 14(2) (May 1986): 179–93.

59. Two recent books are almost perfect examples of this colonial form of leadership within a framework of a principled or value-free multiculturalism: John Tomasi, Liberalism Beyond Justice: Citizens, Society, and the Boundaries of Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), posits four grades of citizens (A–D), with only the first two as meeting the standard, the last to be isolated, and all but the A-citizens, in need of moral development. Gutmann, Identity in Democracy, provides a guidebook of sorts, telling leaders of national institutions which identity groups to favor and which to disfavor in order to advance egalitarian values. The prevailing assumption in both books is that the liberal elites are above both ascriptive identities and substantive moral/political values, so their policy choices will be good for everyone, even if most do not share power with them.

60. Moral powers as a concept is discussed in Political Liberalism, 103–4, but only as capacities for a sense of justice and conceptions of the good behind a veil of ignorance and not as powerful motives for action by historically situated persons.

61. This argument is more fully developed in Eisenach, “John Stuart Mill and the History of Political Thought,” 217–27.

62. This is one of the main criticisms made by Sandel in Democracy's Discontent. See also Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), and “What Is Human Agency?,” in Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Charles Taylor in “Modes of Secularism,” in Secularism and Its Critics, ed. Rajeev Bhargava (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991), while accepting Rawls's argument on the need for an overlapping consensus (37–8), criticizes his argument that comprehensive moral doctrines can effectively be isolated from the content of that consensus (48–52), especially in light of the fact that all democratic nations require patriotism (44).

63. Hans Joas, The Genesis of Values, trans. Gregory Moore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), chap. 8.

64. Samuel Batten, The Christian State: The State, Democracy and Christianity (Philadelphia: Griffith and Rowland Press, 1909), 217, 244.

65. Ely quoted from Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory, 280, 289.

66. John Dewey and James Tufts, Ethics (New York: Henry Holt, 1908), 153, 362–3.

67. For just such a historically informed attempt to reconstruct American political thought in terms of agency, see James A. Block, A Nation of Agents: The American Path to a Modern Self and Society (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2002).