HOME / books: Reading between the lines.

Seven Habits of Truly Liberal PeopleAlan Wolfe's persuasive portrait of liberalism.

By K. Anthony AppiahPosted Monday, Feb. 16, 2009, at 7:01 AM ET

(Continued from page 1)

RSS

The last of Wolfe's most original trio of temperaments—the taste for realism—can also be traced back to Kant. We have just lived through an anti-liberal administration hostile to science, one that fantasized we could load the atmosphere with carbon while keeping the Earth's ecology in balance and asserted, against all the evidence, that urging sexual abstinence would stop the spread of AIDS. Wolfe argues that it is liberals, not conservatives, who dare to know.

Wolfe's strategy is to explore the history of liberal ideas, institutions, and instincts; underline those he favors; and claim that they define the whole. This is the only sane way to try to give shape to a tradition so large and unwieldy. Liberalism, like a large rambunctious family, is characterized more by its long-running arguments than by its shared beliefs. It is not so much a creed as a list of things worth fighting about. And as time goes on and history teaches us fresh lessons, new options arise and old ones are discarded. Until the early 20^th century, liberals kept an eye on the economic conditions of the poor, but they were often skeptical about the government's playing a large role in the economy. They favored a "night watchman" state and free markets. Then came the Great Depression; realism required a rethinking of the government's role in the economy.

So I found myself convinced by Wolfe's avoidance of the philosopher's approach, which would be to define liberalism by its respect for human individuality and human rights or a concern for the material welfare of the poor. Modern liberals have much sympathy for these ideals, but they are not liberalism's exclusive possession. The idea that liberalism is not a set of doctrines but this distinctive and multifaceted temperament strikes me as a useful contribution.

In a final chapter on "Liberalism's Promise," Wolfe offers a quick sketch of the modern world with its "increased personal freedom, greater equality, religious diversity, social mobility, sustained economic growth, technological dynamism, global expansion, and an unshakeable conviction on the part of ordinary people that even if they choose not to become involved in politics, their voice ought nonetheless to be the final say on what is permissible and what is not." Liberalism, he argues, "may not have created modernity, but liberalism is the answer for which modernity is the question."

This book is the product of a liberal's reflection in the age of Bush. Wolfe argues, for example, that it is the modern Republican Party's distaste for governance that explains the stunning incompetence of the federal government's response to Hurricane Katrina or of its occupation of Iraq—and that it is the party's hostility to realism that explains the unwillingness to accept scientific arguments about global warming. For each of those seven dispositions, Wolfe identifies failures of recent Republican politics that arose because conservatives have a contrary disposition. I am, let me confess, no friend of George Bush or of modern conservatism. But surely we cannot blame the failures of the former on the temperament of the latter. The Bush administration was strangely hostile to science; but much conservative argument is based on social science—contested, perhaps, but still scientific. The failures of FEMA in New Orleans look to me as much like the results of cronyism as of a bad theory. The argument against conservatism lies in what the world would look like if conservatives carried out their policies competently. On that issue, the Bush years may offer less insight than Wolfe believes.

And if George Bush is a little too present in this book, the most obvious absence in this book about liberalism's future is any real attention to the politics of Barack Obama. (Blame the slow pace of most book publishing.) If liberalism has a future in America, it is surely, for the moment, in the new president's hands. Still, if Wolfe is right, we are about to see whether the liberal temperament is indeed the ideal one for managing the modern world. Because if you look back at that checklist of seven dispositions, what is striking is how very much our new president embodies them all.

Page: 1 | 2SINGLE PAGE

E-MAIL

RECOMMEND... Get Slate RSS Feeds

K. Anthony Appiah taught a variety of subjects at the University of Ghana, Cambridge, Yale, Cornell, Duke, and Harvard before settling in at Princeton, where he now teaches philosophy. His most recent books are The Ethics of Identity and Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers.

What did you think of this article?

Join The Fray: Our Reader Discussion Forum

POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES