JOURNAL OF AMERICAN HISTORY

December 2007 (Vol. 94, No. 3), p. 1002

Liberalism for a New Century. Ed. by Neil Jumonville and Kevin Mattson. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. xviii, 252 pp. Cloth, $50.00, ISBN 978-0-520-24919-6. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 978-0-520-25071-0.)

The often-neglected irony of Louis Hartz's account of The Liberal Tradition in America (1955) was that there was, in fact, no liberal tradition in America because the existence of a liberal tradition presupposed competing ideologies. And, as Hartz explicitly noted, he was not referring to any actual historical tradition. "Liberalism" was an analytical construct encompassing a variety of values and tendencies that Hartz believed had characterized American society and had sprung from America's exceptional nonfeudal past. Although Hartz, at times, seemed to reify the "liberal tradition," it was the subsequent literature that, in various defenses and critiques, treated liberalism as an actual historical tradition, extending at least from John Locke to the present. It was that literature that spawned now-exhausted debates such as the one about whether the American founding was based on liberal or republican principles. There is, however, a historically specifiable liberal tradition in American political discourse that began with the ascendancy of Franklin D. Roosevelt and his capture and elaboration of the title and that spawned a philosophical counterpart manifest in the work of individuals such as John Dewey. Before that point, "liberal" and "liberalism" had little distinct meaning either in American politics or scholarly commentary. One of the virtues of the essays comprising Liberalism for a New Century is that, for the most part, the volume deals with the actual liberal political tradition in the United States rather than with the abstraction conjured up by academicians.

One exception, however, is Peter Berkowitz's claim that the "spirit" of American liberalism was the culmination of "a tradition of thought and politics stretching back at least to seventeenth century England" (p. 13). While most of the contributors are defenders of liberal politics, Berkowitz casts liberalism as the totality of American thought and resurrects a critique (typical of émigré scholars such as Leo Strauss) of liberal "freedom's self-subverting tendencies" and how "free societies contain the seeds of their own destruction" (p. 17). The essay by John Patrick Diggins is another exception. He argues that the critique of the Enlightenment idea of freedom initiated by émigré scholars such as Theodor Adorno, and further developed by French postmodernists and poststructuralists, is not relevant to American liberalism. Both Berkowitz and Diggins defend the conservative dimension of a broadly construed image of American liberalism, and their essays seem anomalous among the other contributions, which, despite critical reflection, focus on and mostly valorize various concrete dimensions of the past, present, and future of liberal politics in the United States.

      The foreword, by E. J. Dionne Jr., presents the book as an attempt to rescue and revitalize the tradition of progressive politics from which liberalism arose. The editors, Neil Jumonville and Kevin Mattson, emphasize the need to restore the once positive, but now often-maligned, image of liberalism and make its principles relevant to the present. Jennifer Burns explores the relationship between liberalism and the "conservative imagination"; Alan Brinkley defends the pragmatic character of liberal "belief"; Jumonville warns against excessive "liberal tolerance"; Mattson parses "liberalism and democracy"; Michael Kazin reflects on what "liberals owe to radicals"; Michael Ruse urges a strong liberal position on the issue of biological "evolution"; Mona Harrington argues that liberals should not back away from a defense of "family values," and, similarly, Amy Sullivan claims that liberals must not concede faith and religion to conservatives; Alan Wolfe urges a stronger liberal position on national issues such as "environmentalism"; Danny Postel defends the extension but indigenization of liberalism in countries such as Iran; and Michael Tomasky looks "beyond Iraq" to a new "liberal internationalism." It is refreshing to encounter academic essays that, on the whole, address a specific dimension of politics and engage concrete issues of public policy.

John G. Gunnell
State University of New York
Albany, New York