The Virtues of Liberalism PDF
Preview The Virtues of Liberalism
THE VIRTUES OF LIBERALISM This page intentionally left blank THE VIRTUES OF LIBERALISM James T. Kloppenberg OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogota Buenos Aires Calcutta Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Paris Sao Paulo Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Copyright © 1998 by Oxford University Press, Inc. First published in 1998 by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 2000 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kloppenberg, James T. 1951 ~ The virtues of liberalism / James T. Kloppenberg. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0-19-512140-6; 0-19-514056-7 pbk. I. Liberalism—United States. I. Title JC574.2.U6K58 1998 3—dc2i 97-50589 3 5 7 9 8 6 42 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper FOR MARY This page intentionally left blank PREFACE AUTHORS PUBLISHING COLLECTIONS of previously printed essays wrestle with competing impulses. On the one hand, it is tempting to rewrite the es- says completely to reflect changes in perspective, to register the impact of new scholarship, and (most tantalizing of all) to respond to critics. On the other hand, it is tempting merely to reprint the essays and move on to other projects. Here I have decided to follow a middle course, revising some essays and leaving others alone. Another temptation is to exaggerate the unity and coherence of the pieces being brought together to form a whole. These essays were written, over the span of a decade, for different purposes; thus, although each stands alone, they sometimes echo each other. I can only hope such similarities will reinforce the arguments that overlap rather than disturb readers who proceed through the book systematically. All the essays deal with aspects of American political thought, but they do not present a single consecutive argument. Although most of the essays cover considerable spans of time, they are arranged here to proceed more or less chronologically, moving gradually from a focus on the eighteenth century to the present. Since some of the essays (notably chapters 2 and 6) have attracted commen- tary and criticism, to alter them would be to throw a curve ball to readers who are already familiar with the essays and might reasonably expect to find the argu- ments they considered valuable (or vulnerable). Chapter 2, "The Virtues of Lib- eralism: Christianity, Republicanism, and Ethics in Early American Political Discourse," was originally published in the Journal of American History in 1987. One of several essays written by historians attempting to break the logjam that clogged studies of early American politics and culture in the 1980s, it is an ef- fort to clarify as well as complicate the relations between distinct sources of American political thought and practice. Chapter 6, "Democracy and Disenchant- ment: From Weber and Dewey to Habermas and Rorty," was published in 1994 Vlll PREFACE in a volume edited by Dorothy Ross, Modernist Impulses in the Human Sciences. It extends and sharpens one of the central arguments I advanced in Uncertain Vic- tory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870-1920 (1986) about hermeneutics and democracy that some critics of the book misunderstood and links that argument with contemporary debates swirling around the work of Jiirgen Habermas and Richard Rorty. Three of these essays (chapters 3, 4, and 9) fall into a second category: they are considerably revised. Chapter 3, "Knowledge and Belief in American Public Life," was originally published in 1995 in Knowledge and Belief in America: En- lightenment Traditions and Modern Religious Thought, a volume edited by William M. Shea and Peter A. Huff. The essay surveys the tangled connections between eighteenth-century Enlightenment ideals of reason and diverse traditions of reli- gious faith in American philosophy and politics. Chapter 4, originally entitled "Re- publicanism in American History and Historiography," appeared in 1992 as a companion piece with an article by Maurice Agulhon, "'Republicain'a lafran- faise" in La Revue Tocqueville/The Tocqueville Review. The essay explores meth- odological and substantive issues related to the ideas of republicanism that pow- erfully influenced writing about eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American political culture during the 1970s and 1980s, ideas that contributed to a reassess- ment of, and widespread confusion about, the meanings of liberalism in America. An earlier version of Chapter 9, "Why History Matters to Political Theory," ap- pears in a volume edited by Ronald Walters, Scientific Authority and Twentieth- Century America (1997). The essay deals with the current reorientation of think- ing about politics and social science by exploring the rise and consequences of a (sometimes implicitly) pragmatist historical sensibility among contemporary phi- losophers and political theorists. Two essays (chapters 5 and 8) appear with only minor changes because they have been published quite recently. Chapter 5, "Life Everlasting: Tocqueville in America," examines the strange career of Democracy in America in the United States from its first American publication in 1838 to the present. Published in La Revue Tocqueville/The Tocqueville Review in 1996, it too originally accompanied an essay by a distinguished French historian, in this case Fran9oise Melonio, who provided a precis of her outstanding book Tocqueville et les franfais (1993). Chapter 8, "Political Ideas in Twentieth-Century America," appeared in the En- cyclopedia of the United States in the Twentieth Century (1995), edited by Stan- ley Kutler; it connects issues in contemporary political discourse with the broader sweep of twentieth-century political thought and reform. Finally, chapter 7, "Deliberative Democracy and the Problem of Poverty in America," appears in print here for the first time. It was written to serve as the in- troductory essay for the volume Self and Community in America, edited by Willi Paul Adams and Winfred Fluck. I presented earlier, more and less wide-ranging versions of this essay, under the title "Elusive Consensus: Shaping the Welfare States in Britain, France, and the United States Since World War II," seven times at universities and academic conferences from 1989 to 1993, as I tried to learn PREFACE ix from specialists in several disciplines why American liberals in the 1940s failed in their efforts to implement generous programs of social provision of the sort that came to be identified with social democratic governments in northern Eu- rope. Now that the U.S. Congress has acted on President Bill Clinton's promise to "end welfare as we know it," it is instructive to recall the efforts of those who tried instead to end poverty as we know it, and to understand why their experi- ment with deliberative democracy failed. The virtues of liberalism shaped their aspirations; the explanation of their defeat lies elsewhere.
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