Abstract
Amanda Anderson’s Bleak Liberalism aims to intervene within the debates surrounding liberalism. And in doing so, it wades into an expansive field of suspicions, defenses, and challenges. For some commentators, liberalism fails to grapple adequately with conditions of difference and agonism. For others, this political model courts a thin proceduralism that is complicit with economic or social violence. And these charges have given rise to a robust counter-literature that seeks to salvage the liberal tradition from its challengers. Bleak Liberalism charts a distinct path within these debates. For where many scholars pursue the true core (whether historical or normative) of liberalism, Anderson seeks to preserve its complexity by salvaging some of its energies that have gone unrecognized or underappreciated by observers.
The objectives of the book press beyond an appeal to historical fidelity. Rather, Anderson’s gambit is that these suppressed moments will help complicate some standard narratives, in order to demonstrate that “liberalism has a more complex and ‘thick’ array of attitudinal stances, affective dispositions, and political objectives” than is typically recognized (p. 2). To sketch this argument, it will be helpful to begin with the central threads of the study. First, the book situates itself on a terrain that is insufficiently explored within debates on liberalism. Where the scholarly literature persistently mines the work of political philosophy, such efforts typically “refuse or at least evade the development of a liberal aesthetics” (p. 11). At bottom, then, Anderson proposes that the aesthetic productions of liberalism will yield a vision more attuned to those features of political life that liberals are typically charged with ignoring or sidestepping. For the central authors of the study, “literature and art were seen as better poised to register, and give voice to, the existential challenges of political life” (p. 29). Accordingly, the book negotiates its account not only through some prominent liberal theorists (e.g., Mill, Dewey, Hobhouse, Schlesinger, Hook), but also through a variety of literary figures who give aesthetic voice to core liberal ideals (e.g., Ellison, Dickens, Eliot, Trollope, Forster).
Such an approach would seem natural to Anderson, a literary theorist by training. And, indeed, the chapters of the book tour through a variety of literary forms, stretching from the Cold War novel (chap. 1) to the political novel (chap. 3), to the realist novel of the nineteenth century (chap. 2). The upshot of these aesthetic involvements, however, extends beyond disciplinary concentration in order to yield some substantive political insights regarding the resources and possibilities of liberal thought. By taking seriously the lessons embedded in these literary texts, Anderson distills what she evocatively terms a “bleak” liberalism—one whose name already suggests some fruitful complications for received narratives.
Minimally, this characterization pushes against one familiar criticism of liberal “optimism”: its ostensible lack of engagement with the darker elements of social practice and its attendant faith in the domain of rules, justification, and procedure. Here, critics typically target an unstinting commitment to the progressive tendencies of reason, which leaves liberalism at odds with Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History—the one who looks at the historical record and sees, instead, the accumulated record of catastrophe. In the face of such reservations, Anderson contends that these undertheorized literary records yield “an entirely different facet of the liberal character that has been present since the beginning—a pessimism or bleakness of attitude that derives from awareness of all those forces and conditions that threaten the realization of liberal ambitions” (p. 22). To develop this vision, the book pursues a liberalism founded not in perfectionist impulses, but rather in the damages routinely generated by social and economic institutions. This is a politics that “dwells as much in the existential register of crisis and repair as in the normative regions of principle and procedure” (p. 24).
Such claims recall some familiar precedents—for instance, Richard Rorty or Judith Shklar—for whom the impetus of liberalism is to avoid the consequences that follow from unrestrained cruelty or violence. 1 Where the book stakes its own path, however, is by taking seriously another dimension of these literary works—how this orientation toward crisis is manifested through a distinct, bleak character. If these aesthetic works do not offer a philosophical justification for liberal institutions, they nevertheless stage a form of political engagement, situated in the tension between aspiration and disappointment. The turn to character works at multiple levels. Minimally, it permits Anderson to challenge one longstanding criticism of liberal positions: that their commitment to procedure or justification overlooks the existential heart of citizenship (e.g., feeling, affect, ethos). In a line of reading that evokes work by Lars Tønder or Sharon Krause, Anderson proposes that this bleak character suggests a more nuanced psychology than is characteristically ascribed to liberal ideals. 2 This subject is not simply a giver of reasons, a rational evaluator, a holder of preferences, or a proponent of “comprehensive moral doctrines” (to speak Rawlsian for a moment). Rather, she or he is troubled by how social institutions betray their practical ideals and how even the best normative commitments might misfire or go astray. Accordingly, this bleak character twists between (a) the positive aspirations of a liberal politics and (b) the recognition that social conditions persistently undermine or deform the projects that might result. In Anderson’s terms, political agency is “so enmeshed with circumstances, and our lives are so intertwined, that action without some negative consequences for others is essentially impossible” (p. 69).
The book’s emphasis on character resonates productively with current debates over citizenship. Where a recent strain of critical literature likewise interrogates structures of feeling and ethos, such approaches are often charged with ignoring the political exigencies of engagement, mobilization, or world-building. 3 What is noteworthy, then, about Anderson’s reading is how this subject resists any such “turn inward” in order to stage a form of practical engagement: “a fundamental insistence on eliminating wrongs that reach beyond the individual case” (76). This means that the bleak liberal refuses the quietism that might seem a natural corollary to foundational experiences of disenchantment. Rather, the central figures of this study hew to a tempered project of social-democratic reform, chastened by the terror and catastrophe that attends political efforts to perfect the human condition, complete history, or fulfill the potentials of justice in some final form.
The ambitions of the book are considerable and there is much that the reader will take away from it. What is perhaps most compelling is how Anderson’s nuanced attention to these aesthetic texts reveals a more psychologically sensitive practice of liberal ideals—one that presses the moral core of liberal theory into the contested work of citizenship. Indeed, this bleak character stands in stark contrast to the “thin” subject that communitarians have long challenged in neo-Kantian liberal forms. 4 Or, from another scholarly perspective, Anderson’s readings yield fruitful links to the canonical works of critical social theory (what she terms “bleak radicals”). In a line of thought that resounds with Theodor Adorno’s diagnosis of “false” life, bleak liberals offer a politics in a tragic vein. Such figures pursue repair, even as social conditions and embedded forms of power threaten to undermine or malform their projects. And though the implications are only hinted in the text, this tragic insight might ultimately yield a broader caution against rationalized political models that would purify agency of the contingency it faces in a world we do not wholly control, make, or master.
There is something importantly right in this pursuit of a different liberal subject than is often presented by either the critics of liberalism or its more thinly rationalized proponents. And Anderson’s readings are illuminating throughout. That said, the book leaves the reader with a number of questions that would need to be addressed for its argument to be fully compelling. Some of these moments stem from the ambitions of the book’s central thesis: by taking seriously the lessons of these aesthetic texts, a different form of liberalism will come available—one that reaches to the historical and normative heart of the liberal tradition. And where the reader finds rich material in the literary works engaged by the study, it is not always evident how this trajectory extends beyond these specific texts and authors, so as to characterize a strain that has “fueled the liberal commitment throughout its history” (p. 38, emphasis added). Here, the thesis offers a promissory note that would need a more expansive, historically committed approach to be fully redeemed.
There are more significant political questions, however, that reflect a classic tendency of revisionist projects: in their efforts to challenge received narratives, they often generate just as many difficulties of their own. For instance, at the broadest level, Anderson proposes that some prominent critiques of liberalism are unwarranted—particularly those who charge that the thin, proceduralist commitments of liberal positions render them complicit with social or economic violence. And where this “bleak” lineage succeeds in highlighting the historical nuance of liberal thought, it leaves the reader wanting grounds to justify this more strongly redemptive claim. For instance, does this vision speak to longstanding concerns over the violence embedded within the public–private divide? If the bleak liberal resists the temptation to quietism and maintains an “insistence” on social reform, does this tradition offer resources to think the worldly engagements necessary to deliver on these ideals? That is, is there a meaningful politics to these “commitments” (a term that does heavy lifting throughout the book) or do they offer something closer to a preparation for a politics—while leaving unexplored the intersubjective entanglements and forms of association necessary to press such commitments “beyond the individual case”? 5 Such questions take on greater bite in the final chapter (and chap. 3), which leans on another feature of the liberal aesthetic: a politics founded within discursive exchange, justification, dialogue, and argumentation. Upon noting the parallel, the reader is left to wonder how this strong commitment to discourse could address another prominent critique left unexamined by the book: that discursivist schools of liberal thought too often privilege the exchange of speech over concerns for power and the forms of agency necessary to contest its material effects. On all such points, the politics of bleak liberalism call out for fuller elaboration.
In the end, the book has much to offer students of political theory. The creative readings that move the study help to recapture the vital energies that often go unrecognized within the history of liberalism. And the study focuses some much-needed attention on the literary texts that capture the liberal moral imagination. One of the great strengths of the book, then, (a) is how it stages these debates on a terrain that is often passed over within the debates of political theory, and (b) it demonstrates how these resources can help to enrich and problematize some all-too-common (and all-too-reductive) presumptions regarding a contested political tradition. What merits greater elaboration, however, are the political conclusions that the book draws when it attempts to redeem liberalism from its challengers. Where the book sketches some of the existential urgency that mobilizes a wing of liberal thought, the abiding question is just what role this trajectory plays within the larger field of liberal theory and why it has persistently gone underutilized by observers of the tradition. Is this “bleak” lineage a central strain of the liberal tradition that has been unjustly neglected? Or should it be viewed as a minority report that has been eclipsed by more fundamental dynamics in both the history and practice of liberalism? And to what degree do the moral commitments of bleak liberalism yield a meaningful politics of repair? Whatever the reader ultimately decides, the book opens a question and direction for thought that is well worth pursuing.