On The Frontlines of Democracy – Season 3, Episode 4 SPEAKERS Sanjay Ruparelia, Samuel MoynSanjay Ruparelia
This is On The Frontlines of Democracy, a podcast about the challenges facing democracies around the world. My name is Sanjay Ruparelia. Each month, I sit down with scholars, writers and journalists to analyze what ails our democracies from economic inequality and social polarization to political violence and attacks on the rule of law. We'll also explore how we can realize the promise of democracy in an evolving post Western order. Today, we're looking back at the Cold War and the type of liberalism that grew from it. Before the war, we saw that liberalism was an emancipatory project.
Samuel Moyn It was fraught with risk, but it was mainly about hope in the future of freedom and equality. And it's this central commitment that I think the Cold War liberals, in a sense, betrayed. We also reflect on how cold war liberals extended their pessimism to a global context viewing the rest of the world as beyond hope. Samuel Moyn
It is too bad I think that the Cold War liberals, in a sense, gave up the cosmopolitanism which was rooted in the enlightenment of the earlier liberals, and in a sense, stuck to an Atlanticist, especially Anglo American, geography for freedom. That doesn't mean that we should go back to imperialism, but it does mean that any liberal with universal values should care about freedom and equality everywhere.
It's a great pleasure to welcome our guest today, Samuel Moyn, trained in modern European thought. Sam is a Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and history at Yale University. A prolific scholar, Sam has written many celebrated books analyzing human rights and international law. He's also a frequent contributor to prominent media venues, from the Boston Review, The Guardian and The New York Times to The Nation, the London Review Books and The Washington Post. His most recent book, which is the topic of our conversation today, is Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times. Sam, thanks so much for joining us.
Samuel Moyn Thanks for having me. Sanjay Ruparelia
Your new book is an intellectual history that examines the Cold War and particularly how it changed the meaning of liberalism and Western democracies in the post war era. It provides a series of portraits of key Anglo American thinkers that catalyze this transformation. Some of them are widely read, such as Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, Hannah Arendt. The others are perhaps better known amongst students of the humanities, figures like Judith Shklar, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Lionel Trilling. Your book opens with a really bold statement: Cold War liberalism was a catastrophe for liberalism. That's the focus of the book. But first, we need to understand what defined liberalism before the Cold War.
Samuel Moyn
Well, that is the right place to start. A lot of people would look for a definition as if there's some set of principles that all liberals believe in, and I'm sure we could come up with some, you know, they'd be generalities, like all liberals believe in freedom, or all liberals believe in limits to the state. But I've thought it much more productive to think of liberalism as a kind of struggle over an evolving tradition. And the main idea in the book is that there's, you know, a mutation in this tradition. In the middle of the 20th century, there were antecedents for what happened then, but there's still a big change. And as I see it, liberalism, for the founding thinkers of that movement after the French Revolution, like Alexis de Tocqueville or John Stuart Mill, was an emancipatory project, and it was fraught with risk, but it was mainly about hope in the future of freedom and equality. And it's this central commitment which has a few other features, which can get into that I think the Cold War liberals, in a sense, betrayed.
Right. And can you just say a little bit more when you say that they believed in an emancipation, and, of course, both freedom and equality? Samuel Moyn
Well as you know, there's a debate about when liberalism started, and it, you know, it has its own pre history. The most common thing that people say is that it it starts in the Renaissance or reformation or the aftermath of it, and its leading founder would be someone like John Locke and 17th century England. The trouble is that none of these earlier figures use the term liberalism, or called themselves liberals. The first people who did so are living after the French Revolution in the early 19th century. And when we look at them, they they basically think that there's no going back, and the promise of the French Revolution is a free community of equals, citizens, maybe humans, on a global scale. And then the liberal challenge is how to make it work, how to make it durable, how to make sure that claims to emancipation don't empower some terroristic elite. But regardless, what is at the center of the thought of someone like John Stuart Mill is, how can we make more people free in more ways, on equal terms with others?
That really sets up nicely the next question I had, which was this relationship between freedom and equality the Cold War, liberals, in your book, generally ranked freedom above equality and democracy, and they had a specific conception of freedom in mind. Isaiah Berlin famously distinguished two concepts of liberty, positive liberty, the freedom of citizens to rule themselves and shape their history, as you've just been describing, versus negative liberty, the freedom of individuals from non interference, whether that be other individuals or their communities or, most importantly, the state. Most of the Cold War liberals in your book champion negative liberty, what they shared, you argue, was a hostility to certain figures of the Enlightenment, especially Rousseau, Hegel and Marx. They also condemned the French Revolution, which you just been talking about. Why? Why the hostility?
Samuel Moyn
Well, I think the the Cold War liberals came by their reaction to what came before, honestly, they were living at a time when the Weimar Republic collapsed and there were two totalitarian powers at war with each other. Liberals eventually had to settle that war, and it was reasonable to think that freedom, most of all, needed protection against hypertrophic states, states that could not be contained. And yet, what the Cold War liberals did, it was something I think dishonorable, because their response to this situation was really an overreaction. They looked and said, the Soviet Union is claiming all the things liberals used to claim, emancipation, reason, the science progress and, in a sense, the Cold War, liberals decided to let the Soviets have those ideals and said, what we will stand for now, an almost you know, basic and spare conception of freedom, very different from the kind of freedom liberals had once championed, and it's defined by non interference, especially by the state. And this was outlined, as you mentioned, most classically, in Isaiah Berlin's late 1950s inaugural lecture called two concepts of liberty. And he said, It's not that the other kind of liberty, positive liberty, isn't attractive, or that liberals in the past hadn't embraced it, but Berlin said, Now we know it's dangerous because it will be a rationale for terror, and so liberals should, If you like, retreat to negative liberty, liberty as non interference.
Right. So they gave up the fight. In a sense, they, as you say, that there's a heritage that they that they abandoned or disowned exactly the threats that they perceived. Samuel Moyn
Exactly. And I just wonder what would have happened had they, you know, owned that. And my book is really about wondering what would have happened had the liberals in the middle of the 20th century, you know, in a sense, owned or reclaimed these ideals and said it was the Soviets who were, you know, the the traitors to them. And, in a sense, said liberals are the true beneficiaries of all of these old ideals, like reason, science, emancipation, progress. That brings me to another question I had, which was the question of romanticism, which is another major influence on the Cold War liberals that you study. Philosophers and artists in the romantic tradition, of course, worried that scientific rationality, the Industrial Revolution, would undermine human creativity. Some of the liberals that you study, most famously, Berlin, were sympathetic to the anxieties of the Romantics, but most of his contemporaries believed that romanticism ultimately led to totalitarianism and the great political disasters of the 21st century you've just been talking about. Nazi Germany, Soviet Union, the concentration camps and the Gulag. Why did they hold this view, given the tensions themselves between thinkers and the romantic tradition and the Enlightenment. So it's absolutely true that maybe of all those sources you listed earlier, the Enlightenment and the French Revolution and Rousseau and Hegel and Marx, maybe, I think the most misunderstood and neglected resource for liberals in the beginning that the Cold War liberals expunged is the commitment to the Romantic movement. And yet, when we look back, we see that all of the founding liberals, including those I mentioned, Mill and Tocqueville, were profoundly influenced by romanticism in art and literature and philosophy, and that's why they both said, they all said that the point of liberal emancipation is to allow us to be creative beings and not conformists who copy one another, and a liberal society will be characterized by originality, both of individuals and of groups and really of the collective society, building and re imagining a different future than the present. And what is very interesting is that almost all of the Cold War liberals said no romanticism is the source of nationalism, and indeed nationalism and socialism, whether combined or separate, and that's the thing that they really wanted to rip out from the liberal tradition. Sometimes they pretended it had never been there. Others just called for reorientation. And Berlin interested me, because even though he's most renowned for his libertarian conception of freedom as non interference, he embraced romanticism, and he understood how central it had been to liberals like Mill, his predecessor, and so that caused a lot of tension in Berlin's project, because, on the one hand, he embraced the moral ideal that liberals had always held dear, kind of free self creation, and yet he also felt that if that meant empowering the state to help us become free and interesting, it would lead to totalitarianism. And that's not totally without any basis. I mean, as you say, romantics were often conservative or even reactionary in their politics, and did help make possible nationalism. That's not the only source of nationalism. And so the Cold War, liberals had some basis on which to worry that romanticism would be a recipe for repression, not emancipation. And what interested me about Berlin is that he had more subtle views, but because he wasn't willing to consign romanticism to the flames and the way that all the rest were.
Yeah, that really struck me, too. Isaiah Berlin was also my introduction to political philosophy and political thought. And I was really struck both, of course, by those very famous essays, Two Concepts of Liberty and Historical Inevitability. But then also his writings about figures like de Maistre, where, as you say he he's remarkably sympathetic to what is driving their anxieties. Samuel Moyn Yes, Sanjay Ruparelia
about the Enlightenment, about the Industrial Revolution, about scientific rationality, and there's a great deal of tension in his in his thought. And the other figure, who you described as the muse of your book, is Judith Shklar. And you say, in many ways, she's well, that the hero, the heroine of of this set, although her thought also transforms. Can you talk a little bit about that? Samuel Moyn
She was younger than all the others in the book and and I think the least famous because Trilling, whom you mentioned at the beginning, actually probably sold the most books, was a household name in the 1950s United States, although his reputation has lapsed since. Shklar was just a professor, and yet I thought she was interesting, because at the very end of the Cold War, in 1989 she produced maybe the most beautiful defense of a Cold War version of liberalism. It's an essay called The Liberalism of Fear, and it says liberalism is about keeping cruelty at bay, especially the state's horrendous forms of cruelty, which so marked the 20th century, and she'd actually had Isaiah Berlin as a teacher.
right? I mean, that's another remarkable thing about your book, is that although there are separate chapters that focus on on these individual thinkers, of course, many of them, not all, but many of them had the connection, some quite deep, some less so, but, but there's sort of a tapestry in the book that talks about their various relationships and influences upon each other. I think that's very striking, but what you've been saying is how you know these are huge intellectual movements, and not just simply intellectual, but artistic and social, the enlightenment, romanticism, and what's very striking, as in any great movement, there are multiple strands, maybe internal tensions. And what these figures do is, you know, as you've been saying, they they abandon, how should I put it? Was using the gang of a trap of a tapestry. You know that there are many strands, and somehow they fix on some of them and let go of others in a way which oversimplifies what, what each of these movements and traditions and moments in history actually signified. That's really striking as well, and is that under the pressures of, in a sense, the interwar period and its legacies?
Samuel Moyn
I think so. You know, there were some more simple minded Cold War liberals, like there are in any era. And I'll mention not just Karl Popper, at least in his views about history and progress, but also the Anglo Israeli intellectual, Jacob Talmon, but absolutely, I wanted to, in a sense, appreciate some aspects of the subtlety of Cold War liberals, and that's why I give, let's say, most attention to the more sophisticated ones, like Berlin, schlar, Trilling, Trilling, I thought, in the end, was the most searching, because he had, in a sense, lived through a conversion, and he understood the power of what he was called on to reject in the Cold War. And in some ways, I try to argue, he refused to hew to the very Cold War liberalism that he also epitomized, and so recognizing the tensions in the liberal tradition and in the Cold War liberal phase of it is is also to recognize that we also have choices. And you know, we should avoid being simple minded and appreciate, you know, the pull, pushes and pulls that we experience intellectually, because these traditions can be reconfigured, and that's why I chose characters. But I also wanted to use them to get at how there are these kind of legacies of the past, Hegelianism, romanticism, and everything depends on, you know what we take and leave. And the same is true of liberalism itself.
Right, now all of these, all of these figures that we've been talking about the focus of your book, are Anglo American in the sense of obviously being based either in Britain, in the United States, and certainly being influenced by by both countries. And that's a good segue into the next set of issues I wanted to talk about, which was their views, their reactions to things that were happening during the Cold War. You've described them as Cold War liberals. The Cold War, of course, is the United States and NATO against Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. Mainstream international scholars typically call this era The Long Peace, so to speak, because these military blocs avoided direct confrontation. But as we know, there were many political interventions and proxy wars in the post colonial south that crushed nationalist movements that upheld brutal dictatorships, costing the lives of millions. Many in the West justified these actions by claiming that Soviet communism would otherwise spread the so called domino theory. Yet the liberals in your book, at least as you write about them, had little to say about these crimes, or they actually thought that decolonization in Asia and Africa was even a Road to Serfdom, to use the title of hayek's book. Indeed, you argue that many of them believed that expanding freedom beyond the West was a lost cause, and this strikes me as quite paradoxical, given at least the official justifications from the West during the Cold War. So why did they believe this? How do you make sense of this?
Samuel Moyn
Well, I took up this issue, not. Just because it's important, but because, you know, one reason why 19th century liberals have fallen into disrepute is that all of them were imperialists, and that includes Mill and Tocqueville, whom I spoke glowingly about earlier, and so I just wondered whether the Cold War liberals improved on that record. Now we know that in the 1960s especially Cold War liberals like Walt Rostow really became Neo imperialists. But what interested me about the Cold War liberals who are thinking in the later 40s the loss of China and the communist coups and in the eastern what becomes the Eastern Bloc of Europe is that they they extended their pessimistic attitude towards the prospects of even the kind of bare bones liberalism they prized on a global scale. It's as if, instead of imperialism, they, in a sense, give the rest of the world beyond the Atlantic a zone of freedom up for lost. And I wonder, first of all, why did they do so? And I make some suggestions about their kind of implicit racialism or racism. But I also wonder, kind of from our own perspective, is it worse to have a bad global project or a bad local project? It is too bad. I think that the Cold War liberals, in a sense, gave up the cosmopolitanism which was rooted in the enlightenment of the earlier liberals, and in a sense, stuck to an Atlanticist, especially Anglo American, geography for freedom. That doesn't mean that we should go back to imperialism, but it does mean that any liberal with universal values should care about freedom and equality everywhere, and not give certain people and places up for lost.
Yeah, so you're seeing this transformation from 19th century, as you say, where liberalism was equated with Empire and imperialism, probably best embodied in the sort of Kipling's notion of the White Man's Burden, Sanjay Ruparelia
And it's sort of Imperial racism that fueled that project. But then, as you're saying, you know this strange turn in the beginning of the Cold War, when the architects of the Cold War, and since the political architects, are saying, we're going to we're in this struggle and fight against the Soviet Union. And the issue is the spread of freedom. But the key intellectuals are saying, as you say, the sort of the draw line was the geographic line, that it's really the preserve of the West, that the West has to be a bastion of this notion of freedom that they champion. And that itself really striking, really striking term. That actually raises of the issue that you also talk about in the book, which is that there's an exception to this geographical morality, as you put it, and that is the establishment of Israel. Cold War liberals feared political violence in a lot of their writings, or they talked about it in their writings, because it accompanied nationalist movements and social revolution. But Israel proved the exception for many of them. And part of that, of course, can just simply be explained by who they they were. Many of these intellectuals were Jewish in terms of their family heritage, and they were also exiles and refugees from interwar Europe, and this experience led all of them to defend Zionism. Only Hannah Arendt changed her mind for them, freedom was the preserve of the transatlantic West and the State of Israel. So how do you try to justify this exception to this geographical morality, as you put it?
Samuel Moyn
Right. Well, it's indefensible. I mean, I don't, I don't think they ever did defend this exception. But what I try to do in looking into their Jewish identity in general, and their Zionist politics in particular, is to try to kind of reflect on the meaning of that exception, and what, what, in a sense, appealed to me about their Zionism is that, as Berlin was very open about, they thought that Israel hearkened back to the old kind of liberalism that they themselves were overthrowing. So obviously, Israel involved nationalism, and it involved, if necessary, when push comes to shove, violence in defense of the nation and a national founding for freedom and equality. And what is striking then is that we could take this exception for those Zionist projects that Cold War liberals made, and ask, well, why not everyone? And I don't just mean Palestinian. Or people trying to engage in their own forms of decolonization the world over past or present, but also Anglo Americans so the Cold War liberals suppose that this libertarian notion of freedom and a non intrusive state suffice now for Anglo Americans. But what if the very 19th century forms of liberalism that these these commentators embraced when it came to the Zionist project should have led them to embrace it for the sake of everywhere, including the global north, not just the global south. So what I tried to do in that chapter is is kind of locate in their very contradiction some ways in which their own rejection of the better liberalism that came before them survived in their own thinking.
And that's another great irony of their thought that it happens this sort of championing of a non intrusive state. The dangers of pursuing social justice through state action. This happens precisely when liberal democracies are creating social welfare regimes in the north, as you say, that expand freedom and equality. Samuel Moyn Yes, Sanjay Ruparelia
for their citizens. So by the 1970s two new ideologies are on the horizon. One was neoconservativism, which championed family values and social order through a Christian prism. The other was neoliberalism, which deregulated markets and sought to recreate government and society in their image. So how did Cold War liberalism encourage the rise of these ideologies which have created such massive inequalities you you describe it in the book as as a hinge between, you know, between that earlier liberalism and then these two dominant ideological forces?
Samuel Moyn
Well it's worth noting that the kind of last form of of the more emancipatory liberalism that the Cold War liberals overthrew was known as the new liberalism in England and the progressive movement in the United States, and later Franklin Roosevelt inherits and and implements those ideas which are about also, you know, liberalism and economics and trying to build a state that isn't intruding so much as it is redistributing, so that people have rough equality and life chances and Freedom doesn't come at the price of equality. And of course, as we've discussed, the Cold War liberals found that proto totalitarian. But what is interesting is that they they didn't then justify the welfare states they personally often supported. Certainly Berlin did. And so I try to argue that they cast the die for the future in two ways. First of all, they overlapped a lot in their priorities with Neo liberals of their own time, like Friedrich Hayek, who argued that the state itself risked totalitarian excess, and that included not just the communist state, but the welfare state, or at least the planning version of the welfare state, and someone like Berlin, who could be quite contemptuous of Hayek, nonetheless, wrote that the whole point of politics is to keep the state within bounds and at Bay. And didn't ever write an essay defending the like very high levels of taxation that his country had at the time and that the United States had, and like many other places. And then I think when in the 1970s Hayek disciples kind of break through politically, thanks to Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan liberals don't have a lot to say, because they've now been schooled on this Cold War idea that what they defend is freedom, but that's what Neo liberals defend. It's just Neo liberalism mean by that, freedom from taxation and regulation. Now the Neo conservatism is a little bit more intricate, because I explore that through Gertrude Himmelfarb, who was the partner of Irving Kristol, who's routinely credited as the inventor of neoconservatism, including by himself. But actually I think she may have been more important, and I try to show how her ideas about how to reform liberalism, since she gets her start as a Cold War liberal, kind of leave her just a step or two away from Neo conservatism, which, of course, she later embraces, and she really did believe in a form of liberalism that she associated with Christianity that would be very moral and focus on individual responsibility, which really became the neoconservative vision, a kind of indirect way of justifying a minimal state in the name of virtue of citizens, and so that also then arises from Cold War liberalism as this Hinge Movement.
Yes, I mean, there's this very famous or infamous quote by Kristol, a neoconservative, if I remember correctly, a neoconservative is a liberal mug by reality, right? Samuel Moyn Yes, exactly. Sanjay Ruparelia And, and then this, this doctrine of this ethos of individual responsibilities, uses a cudgel to attack the welfare state. And this notion certainly United States so of those who who need and seek social assistance as somehow being dependent and therefore not fully responsible?
Samuel Moyn Yeah, absolutely. Sanjay Ruparelia So neoliberalism has been the dominant ideology for since the 1980s as you say, and it's suffered Well, the societies have embraced it have suffered tremendously in terms of rising inequalities, as we know from and it all blew up in the 2008 great financial crash, the austerity of the last decade, certainly in Western Europe. Samuel Moyn Yes, Sanjay Ruparelia
and there are many issues we can talk about, but this brings us sort of to the close of your book, which is, which is, again, there's been this intellectual history of key thinkers. And in the project, your project is to sort of think anew, to think afresh. So your book ends by examining the current political moment. That's your last chapter, when authoritarian populists have upended major democracies around the world, including, of course, most recently, the return of Trump in the United States. And you say too many of those who prayed it in our time about saving liberalism, and we hear it now, have really been interested in saving it as it was. The only hope for liberalism, you conclude, is to reinvent it beyond the terms we have known. So what does a reinvented liberalism look like today, and what are its prospects?
Samuel Moyn
Well thanks for that question, because it really does get at the motivation for this book. I'll just say as background that when I was a young student in the 1990s it was very fashionable to kind of say the Cold War liberals were right, and we should follow them more than ever. And I think some features of the 90s were missed or rationalized by the kind of fame of the Cold War liberals, for people like Michael Ignatieff or Tony Judt or many others and and in particular, I think the Neo liberalism, which really did climax in the 1990s but also I think American militarism, which I think has also cast the die for our times. But when, when I came to give the lectures in this book, it was after Donald Trump's first election, and in the face of claims that he showed that liberalism was exhausted, which in turn elicited claims that it wasn't. And I kind of got exasperated by this debate, because those are both bad options. And what I wanted to say in this book is that we need to understand where liberalism went wrong and where its own advocates betrayed it in order to save its emancipatory impulses. And I'd say we're living through a repeat of that Cold War history in a different way, since, as you suggest, there was an attempt, in response to Donald Trump, to, in a sense, fail, to figure out what where liberalism went wrong, and how it could be rescued from its its own mistakes, you know, I, I'm a, you know, fan of the Frankfurt School thinker T. W. Adorno, and at one point he wrote an essay called JS Bach Defended Against his devotees, meaning, sometimes you have to rescue something from its own fans, and I think that's never been truer than in the case of liberalism, whose whose advocates, in a sense like caused the damage that liberalism has been facing. And we don't need to get into detail about how Neo liberalism and militarism paved the way for Trump twice now, but once we see that that's what happened, then we we would do need to imagine a reorientation of liberalism. I think it would go back to the 19th century, but back to the future, like the old movie title had it. And you know, figure out what was worth, you know, reviving from those old thinkers like mill and Tocqueville, but also facing our time and creating a liberalism that that they might not recognize. Yeah,
Yeah so, a liberalism that's emancipatory, as you say, that that strives to maximize freedom and equality for all citizens and a global project, that's stripped of its racism and its imperialism. Samuel Moyn Absolutely. Sanjay Ruparelia
And as you were saying, you know, in Trump himself, you see the contortions or the contradictions. On the one hand, saying that globalization of a certain variety has, of course, you know, led to de industrialization and decimated communities in the United States. But then, of course, says you need to deregulate markets and lower taxes. And so this moment is a real struggle intellectually to define this liberalism, as you say, Samuel Moyn
I think that's the challenge of our moment, and I think that the election of Trump, unless it it leads to a kind of repeat of a lot of of the tired debates of 2016 20 does get, you know, provide an opportunity to think more critically and self critically, and Instead of having four years where liberals just say that, you know, if they could just get beyond Trump, all will be, well, I think they have a huge incentive to say, well, the only way to get beyond Trump is to face the diseases of which he's a symptom, and that those are liberal diseases and liberal choices that we could reverse in the name of liberal emancipation.
Sanjay Ruparelia It's a very provocative book, and a good note to end on. Sam, I want to thank you so much for joining us today. I've learned so much from your books in the past, and it was great to speak to you about your latest. Samuel Moyn Thank you. It's such a privilege.
This podcast is produced in partnership with the Faculty of Arts and the School of Journalism and sponsored by the Jarislowsky Democracy Chair at Toronto Metropolitan University. If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe to On the Frontlines of Democracy on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. For more information on the history of liberalism, human rights and international law and how they have shaped democratic politics today, please visit the shownotes. I'm Sanjay Ruparelia, thanks for listening.