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Liberalism against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times
The Cold War roots of liberalism’s present crisis
“[A] daring new book.”—Becca Rothfeld, Washington Post
By the middle of the twentieth century, many liberals looked glumly at the world modernity had brought about, with its devastating wars, rising totalitarianism, and permanent nuclear terror. They concluded that, far from offering a solution to these problems, the ideals of the Enlightenment, including emancipation and equality, had instead created them. The historian of political thought Samuel Moyn argues that the liberal intellectuals of the Cold War era—among them Isaiah Berlin, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Karl Popper, Judith Shklar, and Lionel Trilling—transformed liberalism but left a disastrous legacy for our time.
In his iconoclastic style, Moyn outlines how Cold War liberals redefined the ideals of their movement and renounced the moral core of the Enlightenment for a more dangerous preserving individual liberty at all costs. In denouncing this stance, as well as the recent nostalgia for Cold War liberalism as a means to counter illiberal values, Moyn presents a timely call for a new emancipatory and egalitarian liberal philosophy—a path to undoing the damage of the Cold War and to ensuring the survival of liberalism.
“[A] daring new book.”—Becca Rothfeld, Washington Post
By the middle of the twentieth century, many liberals looked glumly at the world modernity had brought about, with its devastating wars, rising totalitarianism, and permanent nuclear terror. They concluded that, far from offering a solution to these problems, the ideals of the Enlightenment, including emancipation and equality, had instead created them. The historian of political thought Samuel Moyn argues that the liberal intellectuals of the Cold War era—among them Isaiah Berlin, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Karl Popper, Judith Shklar, and Lionel Trilling—transformed liberalism but left a disastrous legacy for our time.
In his iconoclastic style, Moyn outlines how Cold War liberals redefined the ideals of their movement and renounced the moral core of the Enlightenment for a more dangerous preserving individual liberty at all costs. In denouncing this stance, as well as the recent nostalgia for Cold War liberalism as a means to counter illiberal values, Moyn presents a timely call for a new emancipatory and egalitarian liberal philosophy—a path to undoing the damage of the Cold War and to ensuring the survival of liberalism.
240 pages, Hardcover
Published August 29, 2023
39 people are currently reading
870 people want to read
About the author
Samuel Moyn
35books120followersSamuel Moyn is professor of law and history at Harvard University. He is the author of The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, and Christian Human Rights (2015), among other books, as well as editor of the journal Humanity. He also writes regularly for Foreign Affairs and The Nation.
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
September 30, 2023
While taking the form of an extremely erudite intellectual history � “See Ma?� Moyn the sometime intellectual historian seems to want to say, “I can still do it!� � of “Cold War liberals� like Judith Shklar, Karl Popper, Hannah Arendt, and Isaiah Berlin, the real targets of Moyn’s scalpel are what he deems to be the contemporary heirs to this tradition of “negative� liberalism � Anne Applebaum, Timothy Garton Ash, Paul Berman, Michael Ignatieff, Tony Judt, Leon Weiseltier, etc., e.g. Boomer public intellectuals who in Moyn’s estimation have insisted on a pallid form of political-only liberalism that has ignored inequality and thus paved the way for neoliberalism, and failed to see how their rose colored view of American society has provided an apologia for neoconservatives foreign adventures that have aimed to remake a truculent world in our image.
In my estimation, Moyn overplays the ideological and intellectual causality for material (and eventually intellectual) triumph of neoliberalism � in fact it was the crisis of accumulation in the 1970s that paved material way for the neoliberal ascendency that began under Carter and ran through Obama’s presidency. With this said, Moyn is indubitably correct that a major story of liberalism, as an intellectual and political movement of the last half century, is the intellectual triumph of Rawlsian theories of justice coupled to a politics that had systematically produced the exact opposite of Rawlsian justice. And I certainly agree with his bottom line, that a liberalism only attentive to the pallid promises of negative freedom, and that fails to confront the ever worsening economic inequality of our times, is unlikely to provide a long term viable alternative to anti-“elite� appeals of the right.
To make his polemical point, Moyn also underplays how the contemporary heirs to the Cold War liberals in fact have repudiated some of the worst features of Cold War liberalism, such as its rejection of the Enlightenment as being responsible for the Romantic backlash against the Enlightenment. As a matter of political philosophy this is always a tricky call, however: how responsible are political movements (and leaders) for the reactions they provoke? Was Streseman (or Stalin, for that matter) to blame for Hitler? Is Obama to be held to account for Trump � or, for that matter, is Trump responsible for enabling Bidenomics? Likewise in intellectual life, it’s one thing to blame the Cold War liberals for having spawned the Boomer neocons and neoliberals, who see themselves as their heirs; but can we fairly blame them for provoking reactionaries like Patrick Deneen (or for that matter Steve Bannon on the Bronze Age Pervert)?
In my estimation, Moyn overplays the ideological and intellectual causality for material (and eventually intellectual) triumph of neoliberalism � in fact it was the crisis of accumulation in the 1970s that paved material way for the neoliberal ascendency that began under Carter and ran through Obama’s presidency. With this said, Moyn is indubitably correct that a major story of liberalism, as an intellectual and political movement of the last half century, is the intellectual triumph of Rawlsian theories of justice coupled to a politics that had systematically produced the exact opposite of Rawlsian justice. And I certainly agree with his bottom line, that a liberalism only attentive to the pallid promises of negative freedom, and that fails to confront the ever worsening economic inequality of our times, is unlikely to provide a long term viable alternative to anti-“elite� appeals of the right.
To make his polemical point, Moyn also underplays how the contemporary heirs to the Cold War liberals in fact have repudiated some of the worst features of Cold War liberalism, such as its rejection of the Enlightenment as being responsible for the Romantic backlash against the Enlightenment. As a matter of political philosophy this is always a tricky call, however: how responsible are political movements (and leaders) for the reactions they provoke? Was Streseman (or Stalin, for that matter) to blame for Hitler? Is Obama to be held to account for Trump � or, for that matter, is Trump responsible for enabling Bidenomics? Likewise in intellectual life, it’s one thing to blame the Cold War liberals for having spawned the Boomer neocons and neoliberals, who see themselves as their heirs; but can we fairly blame them for provoking reactionaries like Patrick Deneen (or for that matter Steve Bannon on the Bronze Age Pervert)?
November 24, 2023
As someone who has navigated through 77 non-fiction books so far this year, each resonating with the themes of political thought, liberalism, and American and Continental philosophy I find Samuel Moyn’s “Liberalism against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times� not just interesting, but a truly transformative read. Have you been looking around, and witnessing the endless chaos, utterly baffling irrationality at actions undertaken by institutions and individuals and just scratch your head and wonder, just how did all of this happen? Moyn has got you covered.
Liberalism against Itself though concise at 176 pages, does not lack depth of content. It examines how Cold War liberalism deviated from its Enlightenment roots - where emancipation and equality were paramount - to a version prioritizing individual liberty and framing liberalism from a forward-looking progressive stance to a defensive fear based one at great moral and societal cost. Moyn uses 5 intellectuals from this era to illustrate the profound shift that took shape: Isaiah Berlin, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Karl Popper, Judith Shklar, and Lionel Trilling. Their redefinition of liberalism along with their contemporaries, according to Moyn, is central to the current crisis we face in understanding and applying liberal principles.
What strikes me most about Moyn’s narrative is how it resonates with my personal intellectual journey which may be why I was so moved by his book. His analysis ties several loose threads I have been chasing over the last 3 years around the incoherence of modern liberalism. Moyn not only identifies when and how the emancipation project was rerouted but also highlights the vital role of creativity and courage to act in spite of that underpinned the original foundations of Liberalism from the 18th and 19th centuries. I’ve been wonder, what the heck happened to that ethos imbued in those writings?! Again, Moyn has got you covered.
Moyn’s critique extends beyond historical analysis, He presents a compelling case for reviving an emancipatory and egalitarian liberal philosophy. I personally see this philosophy deeply rooted in the Deweyan concept of intelligence - the idea that we can apply creative and thoughtful solutions to the challenges we face today in our context. It’s about acknowledging the contingency of our circumstances rather than resigning ourselves to them as conveniently constructed atemporal necessities articulated by those who benefit from this construction. Moyn does not explicitly lay out a playbook, but reading between the lines he is urging us to rethink and actively engage in reshaping our social and political landscapes, inspired by the original Enlightenment ideals submerged and attacked by Cold War Liberals.
In “Liberalism against Itself,� Samuel Moyn has not just chronicled a historical shift; he has provided a critical framework for understanding the current state of liberalism and a call to action for those of us who see the necessity of its revitalization. This book is a must-read for anyone who, like me, feels the urgency of rekindling the lost virtues of liberalism and is willing to engage in the creative and intelligent work of shaping a more equitable world.
Liberalism against Itself though concise at 176 pages, does not lack depth of content. It examines how Cold War liberalism deviated from its Enlightenment roots - where emancipation and equality were paramount - to a version prioritizing individual liberty and framing liberalism from a forward-looking progressive stance to a defensive fear based one at great moral and societal cost. Moyn uses 5 intellectuals from this era to illustrate the profound shift that took shape: Isaiah Berlin, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Karl Popper, Judith Shklar, and Lionel Trilling. Their redefinition of liberalism along with their contemporaries, according to Moyn, is central to the current crisis we face in understanding and applying liberal principles.
What strikes me most about Moyn’s narrative is how it resonates with my personal intellectual journey which may be why I was so moved by his book. His analysis ties several loose threads I have been chasing over the last 3 years around the incoherence of modern liberalism. Moyn not only identifies when and how the emancipation project was rerouted but also highlights the vital role of creativity and courage to act in spite of that underpinned the original foundations of Liberalism from the 18th and 19th centuries. I’ve been wonder, what the heck happened to that ethos imbued in those writings?! Again, Moyn has got you covered.
Moyn’s critique extends beyond historical analysis, He presents a compelling case for reviving an emancipatory and egalitarian liberal philosophy. I personally see this philosophy deeply rooted in the Deweyan concept of intelligence - the idea that we can apply creative and thoughtful solutions to the challenges we face today in our context. It’s about acknowledging the contingency of our circumstances rather than resigning ourselves to them as conveniently constructed atemporal necessities articulated by those who benefit from this construction. Moyn does not explicitly lay out a playbook, but reading between the lines he is urging us to rethink and actively engage in reshaping our social and political landscapes, inspired by the original Enlightenment ideals submerged and attacked by Cold War Liberals.
In “Liberalism against Itself,� Samuel Moyn has not just chronicled a historical shift; he has provided a critical framework for understanding the current state of liberalism and a call to action for those of us who see the necessity of its revitalization. This book is a must-read for anyone who, like me, feels the urgency of rekindling the lost virtues of liberalism and is willing to engage in the creative and intelligent work of shaping a more equitable world.
September 24, 2023
This is a high level philosophy book, one that requires a lot of previous reading on liberalism since the cold war, which I do not have. I have passing familiarity with many of the figures described in detail in the book, but that was NOT enough. It is hard to judge if Moyn is treating all these people fairly.
For me, what I got out of it is the fear of the modern liberal. The idea that Nazism, Communism, Authoritarianism, Populism are all products of earlier liberalism, and therefore that liberals can't trust themselves. And how after the Cold War, that fear drove many liberals to embrace a kind of philosophy that can only be described as dithering and weak. NOT forceful and persuasive.
I'm familiar with many of the conservative political arguments against the modern neoliberals. Being anti-woke is a kind of calling card for many in America today. I take it Moyn is dissatisfied with the thinkers who have led to these kind of failures. In the end, Moyn is making an argument for a new intellectual movement. One that goes back to the spirit of the enlightenment - not conservative, not afraid of liberal excess. This is an interesting book, but I can only recommend it for people very familiar with many of the leading thinkers of the last 100 years.
For me, what I got out of it is the fear of the modern liberal. The idea that Nazism, Communism, Authoritarianism, Populism are all products of earlier liberalism, and therefore that liberals can't trust themselves. And how after the Cold War, that fear drove many liberals to embrace a kind of philosophy that can only be described as dithering and weak. NOT forceful and persuasive.
I'm familiar with many of the conservative political arguments against the modern neoliberals. Being anti-woke is a kind of calling card for many in America today. I take it Moyn is dissatisfied with the thinkers who have led to these kind of failures. In the end, Moyn is making an argument for a new intellectual movement. One that goes back to the spirit of the enlightenment - not conservative, not afraid of liberal excess. This is an interesting book, but I can only recommend it for people very familiar with many of the leading thinkers of the last 100 years.
January 13, 2025
Liberalism Against Itself by Samuel Moyn is a timely book about a seemingly untimely topic. Moyn’s motivation is to diagnose how liberalism came to be an attenuated political philosophy that narrowly defined freedom and liberty, foreclosing the liberating potential of both. He concludes that it was the liberal philosophy of the early Cold War (between 1940 and 1960) where the liberating potential of liberalism was lost to the anxieties of totalitarianism. Moyn’s thesis is not always convincing. There are times where it seems like he is romanticizing an imagined 19th century liberalism that never existed where Hegelian and Marxist philosophy were integrated into a liberal tradition that aimed to liberate all people regardless of race, gender, or nation. Other times, and particularly in the conclusion, he claims that liberalism needs to free itself from its own Cold War past and develop a new political philosophy relevant to the problems of our times - economic inequality, racial injustice, and gender expression.
Liberalism Against Itself takes the form of a series of intellectual biographies of major Cold War thinkers like Judith Sklar, Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, and others. My impression is that this book actually started as an intellectual biography of Sklar, since her work is presented with more nuance and she frequently appears in other chapters as an interlocutor or critic. Though critical of all of the Cold War liberals he examines, Moyn is a fair critic and presents a balanced view of their ideas. One of the values of the book is that it would make a good introduction to many of the more obscure thinkers, like Sklar and Gertrude Himmelfarb, that are rarely discussed outside of university conferences.
Overall, Liberalism Against Itself is more of a specialist’s book. Moyn’s analysis is fair and learned, but is unlikely to stimulate the reader not already well-versed in Cold War intellectual history. Still, it’s a worthwhile and short read for those interested in the history of ideas or how liberalism became so toothless.
December 12, 2024
I had a whole thing ready to go - about how this book ably illustrated the limits to the pseudotheory espoused by modern liberals (like, oh let's pick a random name, George Packer) who are too befuddled by their worldviews' incoherences to actively understand the world - but ŷ ate it. Suffice to say that it is great and the intellectual history is more than relevant to our times, it is acutely necessary. Highly prized.
May 20, 2024
This is a temporary note. I gave this book a five-star rating not because I agreed with it, but because it spurred my thinking. I agreed with some of it and disagreed strongly with other parts of it. More to come.
June 9, 2024
'The most important fact about Cold War liberal political theory is how profoundly it broke with the liberalism it inherited.'
Denne bog er et opgør med den sammenhængende takegang om 'liberalisme', og i den forbindelse en kritik af den kolde krigs liberalisme samt den nyliberalime og nykonservativisme bogen postulerer den affødte.
Kritikken er i grunden bred (om kolonialisme, rationalitet, historicisme og alt det som bliver kaldt negativ frihed), men samler sig ved at finde en udvisning af oplysningstanker i tidens liberalt tænkere (specielt Popper, Arendt og Berlin) og slutter med en opfordring til at nutidens liberale skal droppe 'ny-koldkrigs-liberalismen' og finde en en ny og original fortolkning af det at være liberal. Det er dejligt at læse én der ikke tror løsningen på nutidens splittelser er mere 'klassisk'/'gamle' liberalisme.
Jeg har slet ikke fagligheden til at kunne vurdere Moyns argumenter, men de virker overbevisende - jeg blev specielt overrasket af at læse tænkere jeg godt kan lide kritisere Rosseau og vende mange blinde øjne mod kolonialisme.
Jeg stopper ikke med at være Popper-fan, men nu er jeg fan med betingelser.
Personligt tror jeg Moyn overfør hvor meget koldkrigstænkerene betyder for politikere i dag eller førhen, men det rør ikke ved bogens centrale påstand.
Min anbefaling vil nok være, at man har en del viden om oplysningstids-liberalisme før man læser denne. Det tror jeg ville have hjulpet mig.
Denne bog er et opgør med den sammenhængende takegang om 'liberalisme', og i den forbindelse en kritik af den kolde krigs liberalisme samt den nyliberalime og nykonservativisme bogen postulerer den affødte.
Kritikken er i grunden bred (om kolonialisme, rationalitet, historicisme og alt det som bliver kaldt negativ frihed), men samler sig ved at finde en udvisning af oplysningstanker i tidens liberalt tænkere (specielt Popper, Arendt og Berlin) og slutter med en opfordring til at nutidens liberale skal droppe 'ny-koldkrigs-liberalismen' og finde en en ny og original fortolkning af det at være liberal. Det er dejligt at læse én der ikke tror løsningen på nutidens splittelser er mere 'klassisk'/'gamle' liberalisme.
Jeg har slet ikke fagligheden til at kunne vurdere Moyns argumenter, men de virker overbevisende - jeg blev specielt overrasket af at læse tænkere jeg godt kan lide kritisere Rosseau og vende mange blinde øjne mod kolonialisme.
Jeg stopper ikke med at være Popper-fan, men nu er jeg fan med betingelser.
Personligt tror jeg Moyn overfør hvor meget koldkrigstænkerene betyder for politikere i dag eller førhen, men det rør ikke ved bogens centrale påstand.
Min anbefaling vil nok være, at man har en del viden om oplysningstids-liberalisme før man læser denne. Det tror jeg ville have hjulpet mig.
October 18, 2023
As individual vignettes it can be occasionally insightful, but it is more successful as polemic than as historical explanation. Amid the torrent of contempt, the cardinal historical virtue of empathy is nowhere to be found, and we are left wondering why these Cold War liberals might have found a politics of realism and limits compelling amid the ruins of world war. Alas, we will have to wait for a better book to get an answer to that question.
April 13, 2024
I’ve been following this conversation about liberalism that has developed over the past few years because, like many people, I was caught off guard by the rise of far right populism and extremist politics. Freedom House has documented an overall decline in democracy around the world for the past 18 years now and this trend is confirmed by other metrics such as those of the V-Dem project and the polity scores. Why is the world giving up on liberalism/liberal democracy? I wanted to know (still want to know) so I read Deneen’s book Why Liberalism Failed and various academic articles that spin off on all sorts of different aspects of the problem from the rise of social media to the question of post-truth and plain old propaganda. Many of these things were very helpful in understanding why this trend is happening and they are maybe more helpful than books like this that try to take the big picture view and talk about liberalism as a whole theoretical tradition. As much as I enjoy that stuff, I think it could reasonably be argued that once we zoom out that far, it’s actually less helpful to understanding what’s going on because it becomes just a philosophical debate. Most people are not thinking deeply about the tenants of liberalism or neoliberalism and all the different variations therein and then deciding to vote or not vote or vote for a populist demagogue accordingly. It really does all come down to things like social media, narratives, and propaganda.
That said, I appreciate this book for reminding us about this whole school of thought, or theoretical tradition that comes down to us from the Enlightenment --liberalism. It's such an old tradition that we've lived with so long it's like an old t-shirt that's been washed and stretched out so many times it barely resembles its original shape. The term has been so used and abused over the years until now it seems to encompass almost everything and almost nothing. Does it mean democracy or capitalism? Yes! Does it mean freedom or regulation? Yes! Freedom for individuals or freedom for markets? Yes! The book is helpful for explaining a bit about how liberalism evolved over the years. i.e. why "neoliberalism" a thing that seems so contrary to everything else in liberalism is a thing.
I appreciate Moyn’s overall argument in this book —that liberalism has gotten away from what it once meant. G. John Ikenberry made a similar argument in a 2018 article called “The end of the liberal international order?� Ikenberry called for a return to the embedded economy of the New Deal --the idea that the market should work for society and human needs should come first, not the other way around. (In other words: anti-neoliberalism). Moyn's book is less specific on the recommendations part but that’s okay with me because, like I said, its value lies in its explanation of how the concept of liberalism evolved during the second half of the 20th century.
The book got me curious to read Judith Shklar, since Moyn said she's kind of his guide for the book. Indeed, now that I've read Shklar's After Utopia I can see how this book by Moyn is kind of newer version of it. Shklar's book was written back in 1956. I wasn't familiar with things like "Christian fatalism," that she references, but I did understand what she meant by "the romantics" --anti-intellectualism, a preference for emotion-rather-than-reason, a rejection of standardization and "the mass society" etc. That's plenty familiar to us now, but back in the mid-1950s Shklar had yet to meet the first hippie. I bet she wasn't at all surprised by the 1960s counter-culture. We seem to be entering a similar era now: people are suspicious of science and any and all authority figures. Politicos use micro-targeted ads to appeal to the emotions of individuals rather than to reason and no one but no one is talking anymore about what's best for the community overall. People think politics is all about what benefits them personally rather than what would make society as a whole better off. So it's no wonder people are bemoaning the end of liberalism and wanting to understand why this is happening.
This class of people that Moyn calls "Cold War liberals" are people who, like Shklar, were writing about liberalism during the Cold War. Of the ones Moyn talks about I've read Karl Popper, Isaiah Berlin and Hannah Arendt. I liked and appreciated both Popper's and Berlin's arguments, Popper's 1945 book The Open Society and Berlin's famous essay from the 1950s on the two kinds of freedom (positive and negative). I think for their time, both were useful criticisms about the dangers of totalitarianism. Stalin’s purges of the 1930s and the Soviet version of the Great Terror were recent history and Mao’s Cultural Revolution that left millions dead was just around the corner. There was something extremely repressive in these regimes that *claimed* to be based upon Marx’s ideas but Shklar argues that criticisms that blame such engineered humanitarian disasters on the ideas/ideologies in whose name they were committed is a form of "intellectual determinism." She all but mocks those who, in the 1930s, drew a direct line from Rousseau to Hitler(!)... or even Jacobinism. But so what? Can the ideas of liberalism be perverted to nefarious ends by power hungry people? Sure, but that doesn’t make those ideas any less valid. Corrupt humans can corrupt any idea for nefarious ends but this is not the main argument of the book.
The main argument of both books is that something crucial in liberalism has been lost and we need to get it back. What is this thing? For Shklar, and I think for Moyn too, when they talk about the loss of liberalism, the thing they are lamenting is the loss of a sense of collective agency to create a better world. That's what Shklar means anyway when she talks about the end of political theory. Liberals no longer sit around dreaming about how to create the ideal society anymore. Moyn means something like increasing equality and liberty for an ever-wider number of people (i.e. progressive politics that favors socially progressive policies). Fair enough. I can buy both arguments.
What I said earlier about Moyn essentially re-writing Shklar's book was not exactly true. The two books are very different; it's just that you can see a lot of Shklar in Moyn but Shklar's book is a critique of theoretical approaches or states of mind (romanticism and Christian fatalism) whereas Moyn's book is more like critiques of specific liberals of the 20th century. It's not the same critique for everyone though. Take his critique of Hannah Arendt, for example. He doesn't accuse Arendt of blaming liberalism for totalitarianism. Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem and Origins of Totalitarianism will always remain classics because they show us how easily dictatorships can form in the modern world. There's nothing in them that blames liberalism for totalitarianism. Instead Moyn makes a post-colonial critique of her later works “On violence� and “On Revolution� in which she denounces the violent overthrow of colonialist powers in the third world by various independence movements. I haven't read those particular books by Arendt but I imagine this criticism is likely spot-on.
Overall I liked this book by Samuel Moyn and think it is worth your time. It's a great contribution to the on-going debate about whether liberalism is dead or not.
That said, I appreciate this book for reminding us about this whole school of thought, or theoretical tradition that comes down to us from the Enlightenment --liberalism. It's such an old tradition that we've lived with so long it's like an old t-shirt that's been washed and stretched out so many times it barely resembles its original shape. The term has been so used and abused over the years until now it seems to encompass almost everything and almost nothing. Does it mean democracy or capitalism? Yes! Does it mean freedom or regulation? Yes! Freedom for individuals or freedom for markets? Yes! The book is helpful for explaining a bit about how liberalism evolved over the years. i.e. why "neoliberalism" a thing that seems so contrary to everything else in liberalism is a thing.
I appreciate Moyn’s overall argument in this book —that liberalism has gotten away from what it once meant. G. John Ikenberry made a similar argument in a 2018 article called “The end of the liberal international order?� Ikenberry called for a return to the embedded economy of the New Deal --the idea that the market should work for society and human needs should come first, not the other way around. (In other words: anti-neoliberalism). Moyn's book is less specific on the recommendations part but that’s okay with me because, like I said, its value lies in its explanation of how the concept of liberalism evolved during the second half of the 20th century.
The book got me curious to read Judith Shklar, since Moyn said she's kind of his guide for the book. Indeed, now that I've read Shklar's After Utopia I can see how this book by Moyn is kind of newer version of it. Shklar's book was written back in 1956. I wasn't familiar with things like "Christian fatalism," that she references, but I did understand what she meant by "the romantics" --anti-intellectualism, a preference for emotion-rather-than-reason, a rejection of standardization and "the mass society" etc. That's plenty familiar to us now, but back in the mid-1950s Shklar had yet to meet the first hippie. I bet she wasn't at all surprised by the 1960s counter-culture. We seem to be entering a similar era now: people are suspicious of science and any and all authority figures. Politicos use micro-targeted ads to appeal to the emotions of individuals rather than to reason and no one but no one is talking anymore about what's best for the community overall. People think politics is all about what benefits them personally rather than what would make society as a whole better off. So it's no wonder people are bemoaning the end of liberalism and wanting to understand why this is happening.
This class of people that Moyn calls "Cold War liberals" are people who, like Shklar, were writing about liberalism during the Cold War. Of the ones Moyn talks about I've read Karl Popper, Isaiah Berlin and Hannah Arendt. I liked and appreciated both Popper's and Berlin's arguments, Popper's 1945 book The Open Society and Berlin's famous essay from the 1950s on the two kinds of freedom (positive and negative). I think for their time, both were useful criticisms about the dangers of totalitarianism. Stalin’s purges of the 1930s and the Soviet version of the Great Terror were recent history and Mao’s Cultural Revolution that left millions dead was just around the corner. There was something extremely repressive in these regimes that *claimed* to be based upon Marx’s ideas but Shklar argues that criticisms that blame such engineered humanitarian disasters on the ideas/ideologies in whose name they were committed is a form of "intellectual determinism." She all but mocks those who, in the 1930s, drew a direct line from Rousseau to Hitler(!)... or even Jacobinism. But so what? Can the ideas of liberalism be perverted to nefarious ends by power hungry people? Sure, but that doesn’t make those ideas any less valid. Corrupt humans can corrupt any idea for nefarious ends but this is not the main argument of the book.
The main argument of both books is that something crucial in liberalism has been lost and we need to get it back. What is this thing? For Shklar, and I think for Moyn too, when they talk about the loss of liberalism, the thing they are lamenting is the loss of a sense of collective agency to create a better world. That's what Shklar means anyway when she talks about the end of political theory. Liberals no longer sit around dreaming about how to create the ideal society anymore. Moyn means something like increasing equality and liberty for an ever-wider number of people (i.e. progressive politics that favors socially progressive policies). Fair enough. I can buy both arguments.
What I said earlier about Moyn essentially re-writing Shklar's book was not exactly true. The two books are very different; it's just that you can see a lot of Shklar in Moyn but Shklar's book is a critique of theoretical approaches or states of mind (romanticism and Christian fatalism) whereas Moyn's book is more like critiques of specific liberals of the 20th century. It's not the same critique for everyone though. Take his critique of Hannah Arendt, for example. He doesn't accuse Arendt of blaming liberalism for totalitarianism. Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem and Origins of Totalitarianism will always remain classics because they show us how easily dictatorships can form in the modern world. There's nothing in them that blames liberalism for totalitarianism. Instead Moyn makes a post-colonial critique of her later works “On violence� and “On Revolution� in which she denounces the violent overthrow of colonialist powers in the third world by various independence movements. I haven't read those particular books by Arendt but I imagine this criticism is likely spot-on.
Overall I liked this book by Samuel Moyn and think it is worth your time. It's a great contribution to the on-going debate about whether liberalism is dead or not.
February 5, 2024
It’s become a quite common refrain among a certain group of popular political science writers to argue, after diagnosing all the problems with the current ‘wokeism�/‘progressivism� that what is needed is the return to the Good Ol� liberalism, that respects individual liberty and protects individual interests by limiting the state’s power and the madness of crowds. I would say it’s also a popular go-to political position by men - it’s almost always men - in their 40-60s in places like Central Europe, who don’t want to go all the way to Hayek and Friedman in arguing against progressive political forces that envision state as something beyond a vehicle for the protection of selfishness and personal ambition.
The problem is that this Good Ol� liberalism is, in terms of political philosophy according to Moyn’s argument, a relatively novel position. In this great book, Samuel Moyn charts the development of what he calls the ‘Cold War liberalism� from its origins in the aftermath of the Second World War through intellectual profiles of a series of some better-known thinkers - like Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper or Hannah Arendt (who is not a part of the purely liberal tradition but serves as a component of his argument in the construction of what he calls the ‘anti-cannon� in her creation of the concept of totalitarianism, which he also finds relatively dubious) - and some relatively lesser known ones such as Judith Skhlar or Gertrude Himmelfarb.
The core of his argument is that in response to the totalitarian threat against the Western (American) liberal order, a number of thinkers resorted to a distorted view of liberalism that served to protect only a very limited amount of political freedoms and largely abandoned the prospects of emancipation, progress and Enlightenment (which he argues were the essential components of 19th-century liberalism) as a whole, thus leaving the concept of progress to the Soviet Union. Instead of perceiving the state as a vehicle for betterment of the society, they saw its role as a mere protector of negative liberty.
Moyn traces this through a wider set of intellectual developments - from the development of an anti-cannon (with Rousseau as the main villain), through the abandonment of historicism and Hegelianism, reinvention of historical figures like Tocqueville or Lord Acton, all the way to the greater introduction of Freudian ideas of self-control through thinkers like Lionel Trilling.
There have been many great reviews of this book from both the history of ideas and philosophical standpoints, and I would not claim to be able to independently evaluate Moyn’s assessment of the individual figures. Although some reviewers have suggested that his interpretation of the ‘invention� of the Cold War liberalism is quite narrow and self-serving (essentially to argue against books like Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed) and a large part of the 19th-century liberal canon by figures like Benjamin Constant is precisely set against the usurpation of power by state authorities, what this book does well is the charting of the general trend in the post-war era.
What I can say, however, is that the argument is persuasive and goes beyond this set of figures.
Surely, the book is a relatively dense and while at some points quite a legalistic analysis of intellectual history, but it is also a case for more ambitious liberalism for our time. It is a call to reach beyond the narrow ambitions of the ‘Liberalism of Fear� (in Shklar’s terms) in the way that liberals conceptualise the past, the future and the possible. So that in today’s age of danger to the liberal order we do not constantly overreact and try to rush to treating the symptoms, but look at the way that the liberal system actually works so that arguments against it seem at least less appealing.
As Moyn argues in his conclusion, the task of today’s liberalism is not to constantly reinvent its Cold-war past and constantly get lost in its entanglements, but rather to re-incorporate its former commitments to the emancipation of the powers of the public and the creation of the new as the highest life. I think that is something hopeful to believe in and work towards.
The problem is that this Good Ol� liberalism is, in terms of political philosophy according to Moyn’s argument, a relatively novel position. In this great book, Samuel Moyn charts the development of what he calls the ‘Cold War liberalism� from its origins in the aftermath of the Second World War through intellectual profiles of a series of some better-known thinkers - like Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper or Hannah Arendt (who is not a part of the purely liberal tradition but serves as a component of his argument in the construction of what he calls the ‘anti-cannon� in her creation of the concept of totalitarianism, which he also finds relatively dubious) - and some relatively lesser known ones such as Judith Skhlar or Gertrude Himmelfarb.
The core of his argument is that in response to the totalitarian threat against the Western (American) liberal order, a number of thinkers resorted to a distorted view of liberalism that served to protect only a very limited amount of political freedoms and largely abandoned the prospects of emancipation, progress and Enlightenment (which he argues were the essential components of 19th-century liberalism) as a whole, thus leaving the concept of progress to the Soviet Union. Instead of perceiving the state as a vehicle for betterment of the society, they saw its role as a mere protector of negative liberty.
Moyn traces this through a wider set of intellectual developments - from the development of an anti-cannon (with Rousseau as the main villain), through the abandonment of historicism and Hegelianism, reinvention of historical figures like Tocqueville or Lord Acton, all the way to the greater introduction of Freudian ideas of self-control through thinkers like Lionel Trilling.
There have been many great reviews of this book from both the history of ideas and philosophical standpoints, and I would not claim to be able to independently evaluate Moyn’s assessment of the individual figures. Although some reviewers have suggested that his interpretation of the ‘invention� of the Cold War liberalism is quite narrow and self-serving (essentially to argue against books like Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed) and a large part of the 19th-century liberal canon by figures like Benjamin Constant is precisely set against the usurpation of power by state authorities, what this book does well is the charting of the general trend in the post-war era.
What I can say, however, is that the argument is persuasive and goes beyond this set of figures.
Surely, the book is a relatively dense and while at some points quite a legalistic analysis of intellectual history, but it is also a case for more ambitious liberalism for our time. It is a call to reach beyond the narrow ambitions of the ‘Liberalism of Fear� (in Shklar’s terms) in the way that liberals conceptualise the past, the future and the possible. So that in today’s age of danger to the liberal order we do not constantly overreact and try to rush to treating the symptoms, but look at the way that the liberal system actually works so that arguments against it seem at least less appealing.
As Moyn argues in his conclusion, the task of today’s liberalism is not to constantly reinvent its Cold-war past and constantly get lost in its entanglements, but rather to re-incorporate its former commitments to the emancipation of the powers of the public and the creation of the new as the highest life. I think that is something hopeful to believe in and work towards.
February 13, 2024
I found this worthwhile because of how Moyn combines intellectual history with the history of the twentieth century. The central thesis is also important, namely, that liberalism has ceded any compelling utopic vision as the result of its war against the state and against any form of socialism, all the result of the Cold War. The case studies of, for example, Popper, Berlin, and Arendt are compelling in rounding out both the sense of these scholars and in locating the major ideational currents.
There are two problems with this book. First, I think Moyn would do well to learn how to write. He could simplify his sentence and paragraph structures by reminding himself that both sentences and paragraphs should contain one major theme. He has the tendency to pack in everything and the density of his prose leaves the reader looking for verbs, objects, and subjects. Second, he closes the book by insisting that some new form of liberalism be invented, one that would contain a convincing utopic theme. He might have given us a clue or two about how that might happen. Not that a critic is required to provide a positive formulation. Good critique can be enough. Nevertheless, Moyn's project seems incomplete and half backed if he does not also give us a sense of how we might save liberalism from itself.
I found the chapter on Arendt particularly good.
There are two problems with this book. First, I think Moyn would do well to learn how to write. He could simplify his sentence and paragraph structures by reminding himself that both sentences and paragraphs should contain one major theme. He has the tendency to pack in everything and the density of his prose leaves the reader looking for verbs, objects, and subjects. Second, he closes the book by insisting that some new form of liberalism be invented, one that would contain a convincing utopic theme. He might have given us a clue or two about how that might happen. Not that a critic is required to provide a positive formulation. Good critique can be enough. Nevertheless, Moyn's project seems incomplete and half backed if he does not also give us a sense of how we might save liberalism from itself.
I found the chapter on Arendt particularly good.
October 8, 2023
Das ist ein bewusst provokantes Buch. Moyn wirft einigen Cold War Liberals vor, die liberale Tradition derart verengt zu haben, dass Liberalismus sich schließlich kaum noch von Neokonservatismus und Neoliberalismus unterscheidet: Cold War Liberalism habe emanzipative Zukunftsentwürfe aufgegeben und Freiheit nur noch auf individuelle Freiheit im Westen verengt. Somit hätten Liberale keine Argumente mehr, um den interventionistischen Wohlfahrtstaat zu verteidigen und stünde der wachsenden sozialen Ungleichheit gleichgültig gegenüber.
Diese großen Thesen werden in der Einleitung und im Schluss vertreten, dazwischen sind 6 biografische Studien zu Denker:innen, die mehr oder weniger (Arendt etwa) dem Liberalismus zugeordnet werden können. An diesen arbeitet Moyn sich dezidiert ab. Mit Assoziation und Suggestion werden methodische Reflexionen ersetzt: Warum ausgerechnet diese Personen etwas über die Entwicklung des politischen Liberalismus aussagen sollen und inwiefern sie wirklich eine Gruppe bilden, sind Fragen, denen Moyn sich nicht stellt. Zudem wird der Liberalismus vor dem Zweiten Weltkrieg merkwürdig homogenisiert und idealisiert.
Diese großen Thesen werden in der Einleitung und im Schluss vertreten, dazwischen sind 6 biografische Studien zu Denker:innen, die mehr oder weniger (Arendt etwa) dem Liberalismus zugeordnet werden können. An diesen arbeitet Moyn sich dezidiert ab. Mit Assoziation und Suggestion werden methodische Reflexionen ersetzt: Warum ausgerechnet diese Personen etwas über die Entwicklung des politischen Liberalismus aussagen sollen und inwiefern sie wirklich eine Gruppe bilden, sind Fragen, denen Moyn sich nicht stellt. Zudem wird der Liberalismus vor dem Zweiten Weltkrieg merkwürdig homogenisiert und idealisiert.
February 15, 2024
The pitch of the book seemed interesting: analyzing the failures of liberalism in the late twentieth century. However, the book doesn't actually do that. Instead, it ends up being a literature review of five writers who I've never heard of and have no context. I've never read Judith Shklar, and so had a tough time following.
The author of the book writes a lot about "cold war liberalism" but doesn't define it nor does a good job comparing it to other forms of liberalism.
If you're someone who has read all five authors mentioned in the book, you might be able to follow. If you haven't, you'll be confused. However, if you've already read all five authors then you probably don't need this last book to tell you what to think.
The author of the book writes a lot about "cold war liberalism" but doesn't define it nor does a good job comparing it to other forms of liberalism.
If you're someone who has read all five authors mentioned in the book, you might be able to follow. If you haven't, you'll be confused. However, if you've already read all five authors then you probably don't need this last book to tell you what to think.
December 22, 2024
"Raising one part of society above the other is not incidental to Moyn’s activities as a a writer and teacher, it’s their primary function. Moyn teaches Law and History at Yale, an institution not renowned for drawing the distinction between what each individual thinks they’re thinking and whatever leverage they may think their thinking has on History. The whole point of an elite university is to blur this distinction; to make the reader or student think their thinking will have consequences for Society. This is the attitude that unites Moyn with the subjects of the book under review, far more than it divides them."
full review here:
full review here:
December 26, 2023
This was a challenging read. If you're not familiar with the major twentieth century intellectuals and political philosophers/theorists whom Moyn engages with, you may need to undertake additional reading.
I interviewed Moyn for my podcast:
I like Moyn. He enjoys getting underneath people's skin/taking "resistance" liberals to task for their intellectual bankruptcy.
I interviewed Moyn for my podcast:
I like Moyn. He enjoys getting underneath people's skin/taking "resistance" liberals to task for their intellectual bankruptcy.
December 10, 2024
So good. Dense, but the guy really has the receipts! Really excited to see the chapter on “garrisoning the self�, which I think reconciled the glaring tension of “liberty� in a neoliberal world order that is at the very least resistant to radical change and sometime outright hostile to certain styles of personal expression and free speech. A lot to mull over. Wish he would’ve floated some places to at least look for solutions. But anyways�
July 17, 2024
Short treatments of a few big names, but there's not a lot to unify this, and the editor appears to have been asleep at the wheel. Ultimately, you'll enjoy it if you have no interest whatsoever in being fair to the people under discussion (and I do not!), but if you're a bit more generous (which I should be), you'll probably find the discussions a little shallow.
January 21, 2024
Insights into individual authors better than the overall argument, which is not entirely convincing � especially as the portrait of the earlier and better liberals remains underdeveloped and underdefined
May 14, 2024
I wonder if the Cold War version of liberalism merely tightened the straitjacket that was always there? Anyway, this overview of early Cold War liberal thinkers underlines the real political pessimism of the mid-20th century Atlantic world.
June 8, 2024
Moyn is a talented writer and the book flows nicely but it is a little underwhelming. The main purpose of the book is to examine the pessimism that liberals embraced during the cold war. Unfortunately the book does not really demonstrate what liberalism was like before the cold war, or that the cold war (as opposed to the pair of world wars, the rise of fascism, the great depression, etc) was the thing that created liberal pessimism and conservatism. The end result is a reasonably interesting series of intellectual biographies of cold war liberal (and liberal adjacent) figures that fails to pull off the effect it seems like it's going for. The book also spends so much time talking about Shklar's After Utopia that it sometimes feels like I should just be reading that book instead. I don't regret reading it but I will probably not read anything else by Moyn at least for a while. I would probably have enjoyed this book more if I knew more about liberal intellectual history going into it.
January 23, 2025
I've pasted my review of this book from War on the Rocks. A worthwhile read, but I have some criticisms.
I enjoyed this and learned a good deal about some important thinkers, but there's also a good amount that I disagree with. Reviewing for a website, will post that review when done.
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