The New Republic

Is the future of liberalism in the past? And of the past, as of the present and the future, will words become whatever we are able to twist them into...in order to convince others to embrace them in turn?

Wolfe is the classic liberal idealist. He speaks of equality and liberty and autonomy and God as though these were actual material entities we can hold in our hands, point to, pass back and forth, link ourselves to as we reconfigure the words of the past into the words of the future.

He seems to be first and foremost the liberal Inntellectual---the man of ideas.

For Wolfe the world seems to be reflected in the words he chooses to tag [or name, as Rand would put it] in noting the relationships between the means and the ends, the parts and the whole.

And yet in implicating Kant in the discussion he focuses on human autonomy without noting in turn the manner in which Kant came to link human autonomy itself to a political and ethical font that was anchored "categorically" and "imperatively" to a deontological assessment of human behavior.

You can't have it both ways, however. You can't embrace the autonomy of individual choice on the one hand and then insist that, on the other hand, we can know our moral duty as citizens. Either we can grasp the ethical parameters of, say, abortion and torture, or each individual citizen will approach them subjunctively from many vast and varied vantage points.

It's never one or the other; instead, it's always an existential assessment of both... through an ever fluid, evolving stream of contingency, chance and change.

Basically, Wolfe's "liberalism" is analogous to reconciling the proposition "be true to yourself" with the propostion "do the right thing." Does he not grasp the entrenched paradox embedded is this philosophical antinomy?

But above all else, Wolfe exposes himself as a hapless idealist when introducing the absurd assumption that liberalism can be discussed in the forum above without referencing political economy, without exposing how deeply embedded the relationship between wealth and power and ideas is.

This is sheer sophistry. You may as well discuss and debate the nature of lions by visiting zoos.

To speak of liberalism [classical or modern] using the language of Adam Smith and the Enlightenment without speaking of it in turn using the language of Marx and Engels is nothing short of preposterous. Wolfe cherishes his words because they are so much more important to him than the world the words must eventually function in.

This is liberal "intellectualism" in its most deluded form. And it's just as feeble as conservative "intellectualism" on the other end of the "political philosophy" continuum.

george walton

- iambiguous

April 26, 2009 at 8:52pm

I keep being told the video is not available.

- timteeter

April 26, 2009 at 11:04pm

Defusing The Biden Bomb: What's Going To Happen When The Vice President Says Something Untoward?

- Anonymous

April 27, 2009 at 10:20am

george, I think Wolfe sees Marx/Engels as embodying something different, i.e. the separate tradition of socialism/social democracy that he does in fact discuss in his talk, if my memory serves.

- ironyroad

April 27, 2009 at 1:18pm

Un  ambiguous double talk

"Is the future of liberalism in the past? And of the past, as of the present and the future, will words become whatever we are able to twist them into...in order to convince others to embrace them in turn?

George thinks he is being clever when he tries to create "ambiguity"  All he is doing is showing how twisted his brain is.

- jacksondyer

April 27, 2009 at 1:58pm

Unambiguously monotonous George strikes again:

"Wolfe cherishes his words because they are so much more important to him than the world the words must eventually function in."

George has said the same thing to other posters. He has said it to me. Someone gave him the quip and keeps using it indiscriminately whether it fits or not. To call Alan Wolfe, one of the few publicly engaged intellectuals, a solipsist is like calling Obama a deaf mute.

It makes on sense, but then George isn’t here to make sense he is here to be GEORGE an unambiguous fool.

"To speak of liberalism [classical or modern] using the language of Adam Smith and the Enlightenment without speaking of it in turn using the language of Marx and Engels is nothing short of preposterous."

The sentence is syntactically weird, semantically incoherent, and historically off the wall.

George’s syntax: “…speaking of it in turn using the language of…”

Marx and his keeper Engle’s were anything but liberals. As usual George did not offer any textual citation that would support his off the wall claim.

Here is one that contradicts it:

“None of the supposed rights of man, therefore, go beyond the egoistic man, man as he is, as a member of civil society; that is, an individual separated from the community, withdrawn into himself, wholly preoccupied with his private interest and acting in accordance with his private caprice... Thus man was not liberated from religion; he received religious liberty. He was not liberated from property; he received the liberty to own property. He was not liberated from the egoism of business; he received the liberty to engage in business.”   Marx, “On the Jewish Question”

For Marx liberalism meant “bourgeois liberalism” which he hated.

I wouldn’t even bother replying directly to anything the fool George Walton wrote except that Irony to my surprise took what he said seriously.

- jacksondyer

April 27, 2009 at 5:03pm

Simon Johnson, professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute

- Anonymous

April 27, 2009 at 6:16pm

irony:

I think Wolfe sees Marx/Engels as embodying something different, i.e. the separate tradition of socialism/social democracy that he does in fact discuss in his talk, if my memory serves

george:

You know me, I always start with political economy. Then I squeeze crony capitalism into that. Finally, I inject this into the anthropolgy of Marvin Harris, the psychology of Reich and Freud, the philosophy of Camus, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and the political philosophy of the Frankfurt School.

Plus Danny and Annie have persuaded me to step back into the darkside again: polemics!!

george

- iambiguous

April 27, 2009 at 11:04pm

TNR contributing editor Yossi Klein Halevi explains why there's no chance that a Palestinian state

- Anonymous

April 28, 2009 at 6:20pm

In the second part of a TNR Live event, novelist and playwright A.B. Yehoshua sat down with TNR literary

- Anonymous

April 29, 2009 at 11:44am

TNR contributing editor Alan Wolfe discusses his new book, The Future of Liberalism , with TNR writer

- Anonymous

May 1, 2009 at 1:31pm