Ideologues refighting a familiar battle. To find anything of value
in this volume you must begin by ignoring its basic premise. Kramer
and Kimball, editor and managing editor, respectively, of The New
Criterion, are out to unveil "liberalism's betrayal of its own
vaunted values and goals." They argue that in pursuing equality,
liberalism has sacrificed its core value, freedom, thereby
producing a discrepancy between liberal institutions/policies and
liberal principles. But the relationship between freedom and
equality has been explored many times with more subtlety and
insight than here. Fortunately, the volume's contributors mostly
address other issues, sharing only the editors' strange notion that
"liberalism" is some threatening entity that, quite apart from any
specific principles, has infected much of our society. Apparently
the invidiousness of liberalism stems in part from its ability to
assume multiple, even contradictory guises. Contrast, for example,
Elshtain's argument that a rigid liberal insistence on tolerance is
not necessarily a neutral stance when applied to religious beliefs
with Silber's mostly autobiographical essay urging that liberalism
implies only a commitment to rational procedures, or Windschuttle's
excoriation of liberal anti-imperialism in Britain with Kagan's
concern that a liberal embrace of manifest destiny promotes an
overly aggressive and expansive American foreign policy. Is it
possible that these authors read each other's essays and reflected
even for a moment on the advisability of grouping their arguments
together as if they were attacking the same thing? In fact, several
of the essays, especially those by Elshtain and Kagan, and
O'Sullivan's examination of the moral consequences of impatience,
are genuinely provocative, but it would be easier to take them
seriously if they were not packaged together in an assault on the
decadence of liberalism. It's hard to get excited about essays
presented as such relentless polemic. (Kirkus Reviews)
Just fifty years ago the literary critic Lionel Trilling spoke of
liberalism as "not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual
tradition" in American society. At the turn of the twentieth
century this is clearly no longer the case, when conservative ideas
have succeeded in many areas of public policy. Yet America's
mainstream institutions-the media, the academy, popular culture,
religion, the law-remain largely under the sway of a liberal ethos.
In this incisive collection of essays which appeared originally in
The New Criterion, nine distinguished critics and observers examine
the origins and prospects of liberalism, from its roots in thinkers
such as Rousseau and Mill to its troubled legacy in
twentieth-century pursuits. They are cogent in explaining the
compromising effects of liberalism in the moral and intellectual
life of our culture, and seek to disentangle what is beneficent
from what is destructive in its ideas. At a time when basic liberal
assumptions about man and society are so deeply entrenched that
they go largely unrecognized-and unexamined-The Betrayal of
Liberalism offers a rewarding and enriching analysis. Its
contributors include Roger Scruton, Keith Windschuttle, Hadley
Arkes, Robert Conquest, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Robert Kagan, John
Silber, John O'Sullivan, Hilton Kramer, and Roger Kimball.
General
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