Reading Samuel Moyn’s “Liberalism Against Itself” in an Election Year

“It becomes apparent that, while not a Marxist himself, Moyn regrets Marxism’s arguable descent into irrelevance, if only because its extended dialogue with liberalism enriched the latter while spotlighting liberal failings and hypocrisies.”

These are not optimistic times. The banality of this observation should only drive the point home. Perhaps nowhere is this dearth of optimism more gaping than in contemporary liberalism. The banner ideology of the Enlightenment has seemingly tumbled from self-anointed pinnacle of historical development to one contestant among several on a dangerously level global playing field, all within the past generation. Within the Western heartlands of liberal democracy, self-doubt appears omnipresent. The world in general seems to grow less enlightened every year.

In addition to anxiety, such conditions tend to spur intellectual soul-searching. In Samuel Moyn’s recent book Liberalism Against Itself, the historian and law professor traces the roots of liberalism’s doldrums further back, into the mid-20th century. Cold War liberalism, as he calls it, marked a sea change; an ideology previously defined by whiggish optimism and creativity grew noticeably dour and risk averse, paving the way for neoliberalism and neoconservatism to dominate the present and foreclose the future. “Cold War liberalism was a catastrophe—for liberalism,” Moyn declares in the opening sentence. In some ways, liberalism has never fully recovered from this Cold War bottleneck—when postwar fears about communism melded with memories of fascist atrocities to produce a singularly fearful and anti-utopian outlook. Unsurprisingly, it also found God for a time.

The more immediate context of the book, of course, is our era of former President Donald Trump, Brexit, and liberal reactions and overreactions to both. Moyn explains early on that the volume is his response to years of liberal defensiveness and catastrophism in the wake of 2016. Patrick Deneen’s 2018 book Why Liberalism Failed in particular provoked numerous counternarratives that liberalism had not, in fact, failed, or at least that it bore little real responsibility for its own troubles. For the most part, these efforts simply doubled down on Cold War liberal orthodoxy without addressing the deeper sources for its crisis of faith.

Moyn examines about half a dozen ways in which midcentury liberalism went astray, a few of which are worth describing. The first, and perhaps most profound, was in severing its own Enlightenment roots. Deservedly or not, reason, science, and utopia sounded far less liberatory in the 1950s than they did in the 1750s or 1850s. The Soviet experience had arguably rusted the sheen off all three, and Marxist claims to the Enlightenment inheritance went strangely unchallenged by many liberal intellectuals. The Enlightenment’s revolutionary legacy was also mostly ceded to the East (and increasingly the Global South). Continuity and gradual social evolution were emphasized over violent ruptures with the past. Twentieth century liberalism had long since assimilated conservative misgivings about the emancipatory promises of the 18th and 19th centuries. Ghostly roads to serfdom could materialize anywhere and everywhere, reminders of human fallibility and the limits of reason. Best to curb expectations for the future and stay on history’s beaten path.

Some of this narrative is attributed to the scholar Judith Shklar—the “Virgil” guiding Moyn and the reader through liberalism’s descent into hell—and its broad outlines appear both accurate and compelling. It may have even been the aspect of his thesis that resonated most with me. The slow dereliction of the Enlightenment is an important topic, and a project for arresting and reversing this decay has only grown more necessary in the 21st century. It is disappointing, then, that Moyn’s argument is less comprehensive than it could be: His book is so heavily focused on Enlightenment liberalism’s lackluster heirs that it tends to ignore or downplay its avowed enemies. He justifiably dismisses the “Enlightenment triumphalism of our own time” and its “giddy pronouncements that reason has already redeemed humanity from superstition (if only a few postmodernist miscreants and religious zealots would get out of the way).” But this flippant phrasing may also hint at how seriously he takes the threat of unreason. Postmodernism may have been more farcical than sinister during its heyday, but religious zealotry continues to be a scourge of the 21st century. Giddiness is the last thing this situation should elicit, and religion’s most incisive critics understand this.

The next two steps in Moyn’s account of liberalism’s descent are more interesting. In addition to fostering ambivalence toward the Enlightenment, the Cold War also alienated liberalism from the Enlightenment’s rebellious progeny, Romanticism and German Idealism. Moyn gives some credit to Isaiah Berlin for a more nuanced view of the former, but Cold War liberals generally came to link Romanticism with the irrational excesses of their own era, which were now cobbled together under the concept of totalitarianism. And Karl Popper’s disdain for Hegel and “historicism” did more than just blacklist the German philosopher from Anglophone intellectual life. It helped “render history unintelligible to liberals, and the state less an opportunity than a risk.”  Popper’s narrow and uncharitable interpretation of historicism-as-determinism was influential. It also crafted something of a strawman.

Calls to “historicize” more aspects of human life appear frequently on the Left. It was a favorite refrain of the late commentator Michael Brooks and continues to be echoed by his friend Ben Burgis. Moyn himself favors a conception of historicism as “the broad view that history is a forum of opportunity for the acquisition and institutionalization of freedom,” and he mourns what Popper and Cold War liberals did to this richer and more optimistic definition of the word. In this sense, it also emphasizes that humans are products of their historical contexts and cannot be judged fairly or adequately outside of history; this version of historicism is often presented as an antidote to overly scientific (or “scientistic”) views of human nature and culture—views which may more closely resemble Popper’s strawman.

Problems I have with some forms of historicism—and critical theory-adjacent discourse in general—include their smarmy opacity and shifty relativism: They tend to leave me wondering whether the goal is to elucidate or obfuscate the truth. In the case of Brooks, this meant being frustratingly obtuse regarding the genuine (and innate) authoritarian potential within the Abrahamic faiths, as well as the threat this has posed to liberalism. Moyn generally avoids this trap of “pseudo-profundity.” But he does lament the post-Cold War absence of any rival progressive framework within which liberals could interrogate contemporary society. Having ceded their own historicist heritage to Marxism, its possibilities dissolved along with the Soviet Union: “All that remained was one thing after another.” History’s end had unleashed the floodwaters of incoherence and diluted the very idea of progress. And “if history is not progress,” he concludes, “it is meaningless.”

It becomes apparent that, while not a Marxist himself, Moyn regrets Marxism’s arguable descent into irrelevance, if only because its extended dialogue with liberalism enriched the latter while spotlighting liberal failings and hypocrisies. What this narrative elides is whether the Marxian tradition was violently and prematurely tossed overboard by its enemies, or, increasingly drained of explanatory power, it was reluctantly left in history’s wake by many of its own faithful. Perhaps much of the Left has simply outgrown Marx, and this evolution is more natural than tragic. If so, this development may ultimately help clarify, rather than muddy, our view of history’s trajectory.

The following chapter deals with the Cold War rapprochement between liberalism and religious orthodoxy, viewed through the lens of neoconservative matriarch Gertrude Himmelfarb. Himmelfarb’s “Augustinian” preoccupation with human sinfulness and its totalitarian consequences left little room for secular schemes of earthly emancipation. This reflected a larger religious revival in the early postwar years: Ecumenical faith was increasingly summoned as a force for anti-communism, and this broad alliance inevitably circumscribed progressive aspirations for the future (“It seems rather easy for Christian writers to announce the end of the age,” Moyn quotes Shklar as saying, “since, after all, it was never to their liking.”) Rationalism itself came to be suspected of Soviet sympathies in this climate, replaced by stern moralizing and spiritual pessimism even among more secular liberals. In other words, a more Christian liberalism turned out to be about as fun as it sounds.

Subsequent chapters critique Hannah Arendt and Lionel Trilling and are worth reading. Liberalism Against Itself appeared over a year ago, but Moyn’s book has only grown more relevant since then. His diagnosis of liberal despair appears right at home in the 2024 presidential election. An era defined by dueling geriatric presidents and forced enthusiasm may not necessarily need another academic dissection of 2024’s dismal state, but the book is more helpful (and hopeful) than might be expected. One blind spot may be the degree to which identity politics represents another revolt against the Enlightenment. Moyn has always been very attuned to the inadequacies of mainstream liberal politics, but he has very little to say about openly antirationalist currents further left. Often couched in feminist, antiracist, or “anti-imperialist” language, such faux radicalism threatens to balkanize and bog down any broad progressive coalition for the foreseeable future.

This counter-Enlightenment cacophony, in its Left and especially its Right iterations, may itself be a harbinger of something larger. The sense that our world is entering a “postliberal” age has been growing in recent years—compounding a preexisting awareness that many of liberalism’s most serious competitors in this century espouse not Marxism or some other sibling rival born from the Enlightenment but, rather, more primal and provincial doctrines. Authoritarian religion, nationalism, and their various hybrids may well own the future, and this prospect deserves more serious attention than much of the Left is willing to give. Moyn’s arguments for social democratic renewal and against neoliberal hysteria have always been admirable. But complete dismissals of threats to Western liberalism, at home and abroad, are getting old and may someday prove myopic.

Nigel Lloyd Alcorn is a writer in California.