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-twentieth 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.