The Future of Liberalism

by Wolfe, Alan

• ISBN13: 9780307386250
• ISBN10: 0307386252
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-02-09
• Publisher: Vintage

Summary

A compelling and deeply felt exploration and defense of liberalism: what it actually is, why it is relevant today, and how it can help our society chart a forward course. The Future of Liberalismrepresents the culmination of four decades of thinking and writing about contemporary politics by Alan Wolfe, one of America's leading scholars, hailed by one critic as "one of liberalism's last and most loyal sons." Wolfe mines the bedrock of the liberal tradition, explaining how Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, John Dewey, and other celebrated minds helped shape liberalism's central philosophy. Wolfe also examines those who have challenged liberalism since its inception, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to modern conservatives, religious fundamentalists, and evolutionary theorists such as Richard Dawkins. Drawing on both the inspiration and insights of seminal works such as John Locke'sSecond Treatise on Government,Adam Smith'sTheory of Moral Sentiments,Kant's essay "What is Enlightenment?," and Mill'sOn LibertyandThe Subjection of Women,Wolfe ambitiously sets out to define what it truly means to be a liberal. He analyzes and applauds liberalism's capacious conception of human nature, belief that people outweigh ideology, passion for social justice, faith in reason and intellectual openness, and respect for individualism. And we see how the liberal tradition can influence and illuminate contemporary debates on immigration, abortion, executive power, religious freedom, and free speech. But Wolfe also makes it clear that before liberalism can be successfully applied to today's problems, it needs to be recovered, understood, and embracednot just by Americans but by all modern peopleas the most beneficial way to live in our complex modern world.The Future of Liberalismis a crucial, enlightening, and immensely rewarding step in that direction.

Author Biography

Alan Wolfe is a professor of political science and director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College. A contributing editor of The New Republic, The Wilson Quarterly, and CommonWealth, he also writes for The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Washington Post. He lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.


From the Hardcover edition.

Excerpts

Chapter 1

The Most Appropriate Political Philosophy for Our Times

At the Ending

“In the beginning,” wrote John Locke in hisSecond Treatise on Government, “all the world was America.”

Locke, the late-seventeenth-century English philosopher as well known for his explanation of how our ideas are formed as for his insistence that government be based on the consent of the governed, viewed America, at least before the white man arrived, as a land in which, because “no such thing as money was any where known,” conflicts over that particular root of all evil would not be necessary. From that seemingly simple idea sprung a political philosophy thoroughly alien to the absolutist monarchies of Europe. Because everyone possesses the capacity to work, all have a right to the property created when their labor is mixed with the blessings offered by the land. It follows that societies are best organized by freedom (no one can legitimately take away what naturally belongs to you), as well as equality (nor can they take it away from anyone else). To say that in the beginning all the world was America is to claim that freedom and equality would become forces too powerful to resist. That, in turn, became the single most influential component of liberalism: the dominant, if not always appreciated, political philosophy of modern times. Three centuries after Locke wrote his masterpiece, liberalism offers the best guide not only to our own times, but to the future as well. It will be my task in this book to show why.

Liberalism is a way of thinking and acting so easily taken for granted that one can easily forget how it struggled to come into existence; solved many of the problems it was asked to address; spread its influence around the world, not through coercion, but because of its universal appeal; and remains to this day far more attractive than its leading alternatives. As important as liberalism has been to the development of modern citizens and the societies they inhabit, it suffers today from a crisis of confidence. To flourish, liberalism needs to be recovered, and the stakes in its recovery are much greater than which party wins a forthcoming election, proposes the latest social reform, or even launches the next war. Modern citizens all too often forget that the liberal way of life is a good way of life, indeed, under the political conditions in which they live, the best way of life. It is liberalism’s underlying philosophy—its understanding of human nature, its respect for both individualism and equality, its discovery of the social, its passion for justice, its preference for experience over theory, its intellectual openness, its commitment to fairness—that offers us the surest path toward both individual freedom and a collective sense of purpose. We need liberalism if we are to respect the integrity of human beings, design institutions that serve their needs, and enable them to shape their destinies. John Locke pointed the way, and we remain indebted to him every time we insist that we be recognized for our own accomplishments or demand that nobody be treated as inherently more superior (or inferior) than anyone else.

There was a time when Americans appreciated the importance of the political philosophy that John Locke did so much to bring into being. “Locke’s little book on government is perfect as far as it goes,” Thomas Jefferson wrote to Thomas Mann Randolph, his brand-new son-in-law, exactly one hundred years after the publication ofThe Second Treatise. Jefferson was hardly revealing state secrets; the whole literate world knew the extent to which he had relied on Locke when he wrote the Declaration of Independence. So closely connected were Lockean ideas with the development of the United States that one of the classics of modern political thought, the Harvard political scientist Louis Hartz’sLibe

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Excerpted from The Future of Liberalism by Alan Wolfe
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