Ming Kit Wong speaks to Samuel Moyn, Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence at Yale Law School and Professor of History at Yale University, about his series of lectures on Cold War Liberalism
In The Cold War and the Canon of Liberalism, delivered as the Carlyle Lectures in the History of Political Thought 2022, Professor Samuel Moyn explores the politics of canonization: the way in which a theoretical worldview, retrospectively known as “Cold War Liberalism”, articulated itself and embedded its assumptions through canonizing particular thinkers as part of the liberal tradition in certain ways. By focusing on the work of Judith Shklar, Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Hannah Arendt, and Lionel Trilling, Moyn attempts to show how the process of canonization during the Cold War effectively limited the ethical ambitions of liberalism itself, with devastating consequences for our present politics.
Moyn explains that, although his historical survey was in part prompted by the absence of a generalised account of Cold War liberal political theory, it is not merely an ‘antiquarian exercise’; it was also prompted by what he sees as the unremitting political institutionalization of Cold War liberal thought since the 1970s and the recent revival of the concept of Cold War Liberalism as an ideology ‘that presents basic liberal values, most of all individual freedom, as constantly under threat — not simply from external enemies, but also from internal demands for justice, democracy, and secularism.’ As Moyn observes, ‘there has been a spate of texts in recent years defending this basic Cold War liberal stance in response to the domestic threat posed by wayward voters such as in the Brexit or Trump scenarios. Many have been responding to the far right, most notably to the publication of Why Liberalism Failed by Patric Deneen.’ For Moyn, therefore, the Carlyle Lectures provided a timely opportunity to examine the politics of Cold War Liberalism, ‘an opportunity to figure out the relationship of Cold War Liberalism to previous traditions of liberalism, the neoliberalism that prevailed after the early Cold War period, and alternative liberalisms that we might promote in the future,’ he says.
Furthermore, Moyn is also intervening within the recent literature on liberalism. Contra Amanda Anderson, whose Bleak Liberalism depicts a long tradition that had always been sober and realist in its moral aspirations, Moyn argues that Cold War Liberalism fundamentally transformed the liberal tradition by abandoning its central features. In this respect, Moyn is informed by Helena Rosenblatt’s The Lost History of Liberalism, which uncovers a tradition of liberalism before the twentieth century that was centred on moral progressivism. As Rosenblatt shows, it was only during the Cold War and the ascendency of America in the twentieth century that liberalism was refashioned into an ideology that focused on individual rights. The object of the Carlyle Lectures, according to Moyn, was to develop this argument and offer a more detailed historical analysis of the way in which Cold War Liberalism represents a caesura in the liberal tradition.
In tracing the Cold War politics of canonization, Moyn has constructed his own anti-canon of Cold War liberals who have each abandoned various aspects of liberalism as a result of individual choices, the geopolitics of the Cold War, or historical contingency. As Moyn tells me, ‘Our ideas are historically contingent and constructed; although they come about partly through the internal relations of ideas to one another as elaborated by individuals in time, they are also strongly connected to the context in which they are formulated.’
Moyn begins with Judith Shklar, the protagonist of his lecture series overall. Through an examination of her early works, he demonstrates Shklar’s underlying commitment to an Enlightenment conception of liberalism that prioritised radical aspirations of emancipation. As the author of After Utopia, Shklar castigated Isaiah Berlin for expelling the Enlightenment from liberalism, and she rejected the eighteenth century’s shift from an emphasis on moral and intellectual self-fulfilment to an exclusive focus on negative liberty. Yet, Moyn observes that Shklar eventually retreated from these critiques in her later career and redefined the Enlightenment as a more minimalist call for safety, pluralism, and tolerance. Thus, Shklar moved towards a survivalist position that was empathetic to an amoral and non-ideological ‘liberalism of fear.’
Isaiah Berlin is the subject of the second lecture, despite Moyn’s own complaints the proliferation of a ‘Berlin industry’ dedicated to rehabilitating the inadequacy of his historical writings, as Moyn suggests. Nevertheless, he applauds Berlin for appreciating the fact that liberalism could not remain external to its romantic roots and for his defence of Romanticism against critics who blamed it for the origins of totalitarianism. However, despite rescuing the romantic conception of self-creation, Berlin did not integrate it into his overall normative vision and defended the ideal of negative liberty instead. Neither did Berlin provide a full account of how his political commitments denied the importance of the romantic ideal of positive liberty. In Moyn’s view, Berlin correctly recognised the significance of Romanticism to the liberal tradition, but ultimately failed to develop that insight.
In his third lecture, Moyn focuses on Karl Popper’s critique of historicism against Austrian Marxism. According to Moyn, Popper’s naturalistic philosophy not only liquidated the Hegelian category of historicism which had previously inspired nineteenth century writings such as those of the British idealists, but also effectively severed the canon of liberalism from continental thought. Furthermore, Moyn points out that Popper’s reformulation of liberalism coincided with the rise of neoliberalism, suggesting that Cold War Liberalism remains inextricably entangled with neoliberalism and that it is important to examine the relationship between them.
Moyn subsequently explores the role of Gertrude Himmelfarb and other “Acton revivalists” who, in response to the threat of the Soviet Union, had appropriated Lord Acton’s writings on Christianity to posit a set of eternal moral standards and establish theological constraints on politics. Like Popper, they were critical of the historicism of Marx and Hegel. For Moyn, there is hence a connection between Cold War Liberalism and neoconservatism insofar as they both share the view that rallying religion was an important or useful way of responding to certain political dangers.
In his following lecture on Hannah Arendt, Moyn argues that there were implicit racial and geographical limits to her conception of freedom. As he pointed out, Arendt’s failure to mention the Haitian revolution in her work despite her focus on both the French and American revolutions was symptomatic of Cold War Liberalism’s silence on decolonization during an Age of Decolonization. To this extent, Moyn contends, Arendt epitomized the general fact of Cold War liberal Atlanticism. To be sure, as Moyn acknowledges, Arendt’s support for Zionism was an exception, but this only affirmed the general fact that Cold War Liberalism restricted its aspirations elsewhere and assumed an implicit political geography.
Finally, Moyn looks at the ways in which Lionel Trilling and others canonized the work of Sigmund Freud to recommend an austere, self-regulating political subject that would monitor her passions and avoid enthusiasm. As Moyn sees it, Trilling called for the immunization of hope and false optimism, and appreciated how Freud’s work can be used to formulate a liberalism that was anti-utopian. In Trilling’s conception, psychoanalysis could be incorporated into liberalism in order to allow the latter to become more realistic and attuned to the limits of politics. Thus, Moyn contends that Cold War liberals divorced liberalism from the radical hopes of its tradition.
Taken together, Moyn argues that Cold War liberal thought led to the abandonment of the Enlightenment ideal of emancipated agency and the romantic vision of perfectionist, creative agency in favour of an anti-historicist, theologically constraining, geographically restricted, and self-subjugating conception.
In Moyn’s view, however, liberalism ought to be a futuristic and perfectionist project towards achieving creative agency for individuals and groups. His ideal is a Left Hegelian and Tocquevillian liberalism which sees individual freedom as fundamentally a collective and historical acquisition. In fact, according to him, the liberal tradition was precisely this until the advent of Cold War Liberalism liquidated these categories. By presenting what he calls a ‘subversive genealogy’ of liberalism, Moyn hopes to convince us that we do not necessarily have to reject liberalism altogether, but only its Cold War version, and that we can reclaim its original aspirations intellectually. Acknowledging that Cold War Liberalism was created under historically contingent conditions allows us to realise that ‘we can always choose better paths’ in the present.