Bleak Liberalism

Why is liberalism so easily dismissed by thinkers both to its left and its right? To radicals on the left calling for wholesale transformation and conservatives claiming a monopoly on pessimistic or realistic” conceptions of humanity, liberalism’s assured progressivism can seem like thin gruel. By these accounts, liberalism is unable to register the complexities of lived experience or to speak to the need for meaningful forms of belief and affiliation. Amanda Anderson’s study makes the case for a renewed understanding of the liberal tradition, demonstrating that liberalism has a more complex and thick” array of attitudinal stances and political objectives than the conventional contrasts admit. Throughout its history, she argues, liberalism has engaged sober and even stark views of historical development, political dynamics, and human and social psychology. Anderson draws on a wide range of political thinkers, from John Stuart Mill to Judith N. Shklar, but emphasizes the ways in which literature reflects the ambitions and difficulties facing liberalism. Her discussion encompasses canonical works of high realism (Dickens’s Bleak House,” Eliot’s Middlemarch,” and Trollope’s The Way We Live Now”), a representative constellation of political novels from England and the United States (Dickens’s Hard Times,” Gaskell’s North and South,” Forster’s Howards End,” Trilling’s The Middle of the Journey”), and two works of modernism (Ellison’s Invisible Man” and Lessing’s The Golden Notebook”), which themselves dramatize the ideological conflicts of the twentieth century in striking ways. Anderson’s deft combination of intellectual history and literary analysis discloses a richer understanding of one of the most important political ideologies of the modern era.

Amanda Anderson is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities and English at Brown?University. She is the author of several books, including, most recently, The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory.