Cold Liberalism of War is an unknown in France, while its theoretical importance is not negligible: the criticisms it has addressed to the State are largely at the origin of neoconservatism.
Liberalism Against Itself presents itself as a strange monograph on cold war liberalism. This current, unknown in France, loses its mystery when we talk about the name of Raymond Aron or the opposition to totalitarian regimes after the Second World War. It designates the articulation of a liberal political position and an Atlanticist geopolitical posture, the latter imposing its strategic and ideological constraints on the first. By multiplying the crisp anecdotes and the coupled judgments, the historian of ideas Samuel Moyn paints the portrait of several intellectuals who serve accused in the trials of cold war liberalism. The admitted goal of the book is to demonstrate that it is this liberalism that would have paved the way for intellectual currents that we generally be responsible for the decline of the social state: neoliberalism and neoconservatism. Such an objective immediately causes the suspicion of a teleological reading of history where ideas weigh heavier than institutions. This suspicion is reinforced by the fact that the Cold War and its events are almost absent from the book.
This strangeness dissipates a little when lighting up the work in the light of its controversial objective. Professor at Yale, S. Moyn is also a public intellectual who regularly takes up position in several progressive left newspapers such as The Nation Or Sink. By developing a criticism of the liberal intellectuals of the Cold War, S. Moyn targets as much, if not more, their heirs in the contemporary American public sphere. The election of Trump in 2016 was accompanied by a wave of conservative publications whose academic epicenter was the movement “ post -post “, Which calls for the opportunity to finally go beyond the liberal status quo. In response, center-right and center-left intellectuals called to save liberalism to resolve the American democratic crisis-the condition of this rescue, clearly exposed by Mark Lilla in The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politicsbeing to refocus liberalism on its historical values. S. Moyn belongs to a third camp which considers on the contrary that the success of right -wing populism requires an openly progressive form of liberalism.
Once these elements have been placed, we understand better why S. Moyn’s work focuses essentially on intellectual and strategic errors committed by the Liberals of Cold War. It is less for him to explain and contextualize the formation of a cold war liberalism than to draw a portrait in the form of a scarecrow to ensure that it cannot be erected as a model today. The history of ideas therefore plays a critical role here: it allows us to unlock certain statues of the Anglo-Saxon liberal canon. However, to function, this criticism assumes that there are a set of identifiable liberal values, in the light of which the historian could affirm that “ The liberalism of the Cold War was a disaster – for liberalism (P. 1).
The errors of cold war liberalism
Liberalism Against Itself tells the mistakes of intellectuals of the Cold War: abandonment of lights, rejection of romanticism, renouncement of progress, pessimistic anthropology of Christian origin, imperialist complicities and restrictive psychology. The chapters are organized around six intellectual figures (Judith Shklar, Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Hannah Arendt and Lionel Trilling) which allow S. Moyn to highlight these errors. Judith Shklar occupies a central place in this gallery insofar as it would have offered a definition of cold war liberalism as “” Liberalism of Fear »» In a text published in 1989. This liberalism of fear would have the main objective of protecting individuals from cruelty – in particular that instituted by the State, personal freedom having meaning only for those who are delivered from fear. This approach is sometimes qualified as a survivalist, insofar as it focuses on the political minimum we would need to live. However, before making the lawyer for survivalism, Shklar had herself strongly criticized the pessimism of the post-war liberals in his first book, After Utopia Posted from his thesis in 1957. At that time, Shklar condemned the abandonment of the ideal of emancipation of the Enlightenment and the conversion of the liberals to the conservative idea that “ Reason itself generates totalitarianism (P. 27).
The following chapters illustrate this withdrawal of progressive ideals, due to an exaggerated fear of totalitarian risk. Among the mistakes criticized by S. Moyn, two are distinguished by their scope. First of all, in chapter 3, S. Moyn shows how the criticism of Hegelian and Marxist historicism, which made the success of Karl Popper, ends up mine the liberal representations of progress. By denying the possibility of establishing laws of history, Popper would have ended up succumbing to the seductions of Hayek’s thought, which considers any form of interventionism as a source of unpredictable perverse effects (p. 84-86). This criticism is particularly impactful, because it shows that the Liberals of the Cold War have helped to undermine the attempts to think together liberalism and social state, while emphasizing the intellectual proximity between the liberalism of this period and neoliberalism.
In chapter 5, S. Moyn stops on the figure of Gertrude Himmelfarb to denounce the conversion of the Liberals of Cold War to a conservative anthropology. Unknown in France, this historian of ideas is one of the main figures of American neoconservatism which she will have largely participated in disseminating in the columns of Standard Weekly. But, before promoting neoconservatism, Himmelfarb had started her university career by working on Lord Acton which she helped popularize as a model of an anchoring of liberalism in a Christian pessimistic anthropology. The Liberals of Cold War would have been convinced by the idea that it was necessary to accompany liberalism of a Christian cultural background to thwart its revolutionary tendencies. S. Moyn clearly shows that this Christian anthropology provides an essential resource for cold war liberalism in its fight against totalitarianism conceived as a “ secular religion ». By interpreting the promises of communism as a form of millennarism, Christianity appears as an ally of liberalism. Obviously, this introduction of Christianity in the liberal corpus contrasts with the history of liberalism, but it is perfectly integrated into the classic representations of the Cold War between a religious America to Communist Atheism.
(Re) write the history of liberalism
This critical presentation of cold war liberalism leads to an obvious question: can we still speak of liberalism to designate these intellectuals ? The rejection of the Enlightenment and the condemnation of the French Revolution, the importance given to religion and the reduction of freedom to a Western ideal that should be protected rather than trying to achieve, all it looks at the bottom of conservatism. S. Moyn offers a solution to get out of this problem: the Liberals of Cold War are indeed liberals insofar as they participate in the rewriting of the liberal doctrine. This rewriting goes through the canonization of new figures, but especially through the transfer of canonical figures to a anticancer. This is what Karl Popper does by criticizing Rousseau or Hegel and Himmelfarb by popularizing the writings of Lord Acton. In the eyes of S. Moyn, the construction of this anticancer is part of a more general process of displacement of the roots of liberalism of continental Europe of the XVIIe And XVIIIe centuries to England by XVIe century. In doing so, the liberalism of Cold War would have participated in erasing the original link between liberalism and emancipation in order to temper its revolutionary character.
In this quarrel on the history of liberalism, S. Moyn actually criticizes the Liberals of Cold War and their heirs for rewriting history to justify themselves not to have been up to liberal ideals. However, this criticism only depends if it is believed that there is a clear liberal doctrine to which one can return to judge the evolution of liberalism. This explains that Liberalism Against Itself tumor of references to the liberals of XVIIIe and XIXe century, to show that Constant or Tocqueville defend optimistic and ambitious liberalism. Nevertheless, the structure of the work does not really allow S. Moyn to do more than a allusion to a lost history of liberalism in which France occupies an important place. This is problematic, insofar as the argument of S. Moyn depends a lot on the way in which we represent the history of liberalism. To totally win adhesion, the thesis of a liberalism which turns against itself must deploy in long time, to inscribe the Cold War in a global history of liberalism.
Indeed, if we consider that from its beginnings, liberalism is worked by an essential tension between optimism and pessimism, then cold war liberalism appears as an interesting but typical chapter of the history of liberalism. Admittedly, based on the example of French liberalism, S. Moyn can illustrate the importance of romanticism for liberalism to XIXe century or to defend the idea that liberalism has a universalist vision of democracy. Obviously, we must revalue the French Revolution to defend the idea that liberalism requires and imposes institutional upheavals (p. 48-52). However, by contenting himself with allusion, S. Moyn can avoid dealing with the history of liberalism in France. By relying on it, the Liberals of the Cold War would have a good game of advancing that French liberalism experienced a pessimistic turning point which largely precedes the Cold War. Thus, from the 1930s, the liberalism of an Elijah Halévy was a fear of the tyranny which led him to bring socialism and Nazism closer, as well as to be wary of the promises of universal emancipation.
In essence, S. Moyn adopts an approach similar to that of the Liberals of the Cold War by integrating them into its own anti -cancer. In doing so, he is exposed to succeeding and failing in the same places as them. In other words, he could manage to divert us from the study of the Liberals of the Cold War without proposing an alternative model, just as the latter have managed to marginalize thinkers such as Rousseau or Hegel without however managing to fully integrate Lord Acton into the liberal cannon. In the eyes of S. Moyn, it seems that this risk is the price to pay to bring “ the liberals of our time to imagine a form of liberalism which is entirely original (P. 176). As such, Liberalism Against Itself is a salutary reminder of the progressive and emancipatory horizon of liberalism. Paradoxically, reading the book leads us to learn the following lesson: the reinvention of liberalism will not go through a wave of excommunications.