This book is a profoundly moving and analytically incisive
attempt to shift the terms of discussion in American politics. It
speaks to the intellectual and political weaknesses within the
liberal tradition that have put the United States at the mercy of
libertarian, authoritarian populist, nakedly racist, and
traditionalist elitist versions of the right-wing; and it seeks to
identify resources that can move the left away from the stunned
intellectual incoherence with which it has met the death of
Bolshevism. In Ira Katznelson's view, Americans are squandering a
tremendous ethical and political opportunity to redefine and
reorient the liberal tradition. In an opening essay and two
remarkable letters addressed to Adam Michnik, who is arguably East
Europe's emblematic democratic intellectual, Katznelson seeks to
recover this possibility.
By examining issues that once occupied Michnik's fellow
dissidents in the Warsaw group known as the Crooked Circle,
Katznelson brings a fresh realism to old ideals and posits a
liberalism that "stares hard" at cruelty, suffering, coercion, and
tyrannical abuses of state power. Like the members of Michnik's
club, he recognizes that the circumference of liberalism's circle
never runs smooth and that tolerance requires extremely difficult
judgments. Katznelson's first letter explores how the virtues of
socialism, including its moral stand on social justice, can be
related to liberalism while overcoming debilitating aspects of the
socialist inheritance. The second asks whether liberalism can
recognize, appreciate, and manage human difference. Situated in the
lineage of efforts by Richard Hofstadter, C. Wright Mills, and
Lionel Trilling to "thicken" liberalism, these letters also draw on
personal experience in the radical politics of the 1960s and in the
dissident culture of East and Central Europe in the years
immediately preceding communism's demise. "Liberalism's Crooked
Circle" could help foster a substantive debate in the American
elections of 1996 and determine the contents of that desperately
needed discussion.
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