Last spring, in The New Statesman, Samuel Moyn reviewed Revolutionary Spring, Christopher Clark’s massive new history of the revolutions of 1848. Like most everything Moyn writes, the review was witty, insightful, and provocative — another illustration of why Moyn has become one of the most important left intellectuals in the United States today. One thing about it, though, puzzled me. In the Carlyle lectures that he delivered at Oxford the year before, now published as Liberalism Against Itself, Moyn argued that liberalism was, before the Cold War, “emancipatory and futuristic.” The Cold War, however, “left the liberal tradition unrecognizable and in ruins.” But in the New Statesman review, Moyn claimed that liberals had already lost their way a century long before the Cold War. “One lesson of Christopher Clark’s magnificent new narrative of 1848,” he wrote, “is a reminder of just how quickly liberals switched sides…. Because of how they lived through 1848, liberals betrayed their erstwhile radical allies to join the counter-revolutionary forces once again — which is more or less where they remain today.” Perhaps the contradiction is not so puzzling. Much like an older generation of historians who seemed to glimpse the “rise of the middle classes” in every century from the thirteenth to the twentieth, Samuel Moyn today seems to find liberals betraying their own traditions wherever he looks. Indeed, this supposed betrayal now forms the leitmotif of his influential writing. This was not always the case. The work that first made Moyn’s reputation as a public intellectual, The Last Utopia, in 2010, included many suggestive criticisms of liberalism, but was a subtle and impressive study that started many more conversations than it closed off. Yet in a subsequent series of books, from Christian Human Rights (2015), through Not Enough (2018) and Humane (2021), and most recently Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and The Making of Our times, Moyn has used his considerable talents to make increasingly strident and moralistic critiques of contemporary liberalism, and to warn his fellow progressives away from any compromises with their “Cold War liberal” rivals. In particular, as he has argued in a steady stream of opinion pieces, his fellow progressives should resist the temptation to close ranks with the liberals against the populist right and Donald Trump. Liberalism has become the principal enemy, even as his definition of it has come to seem a figure of increasingly crinkly straw. Moyn does offer reasons for his critical focus. As he now tells the story, the liberalism born of the Enlightenment and refashioned in the nineteenth century was capacious and ambitious, looking to improve the human condition, both materially and spiritually; and not merely to protect individual liberties. It was not opposed to socialism; in fact, it embraced many elements of socialism. But that admirable liberalism has been repeatedly undermined by backsliding moderates who, out of fear that overly ambitious and utopian attempts to better the human condition might degenerate into tyranny, stripped it of its most attractive features, redefined it in narrow individualistic terms, and all too readily allied with reactionaries and imperialists. The logical twin endpoints of these tendencies, in Moyn’s view, are neoconservatism and neoliberalism: aggressive American empire and raging inequalities. His account of liberalism is a tale of villains more than heroes. This indictment is sharp, and it is persuasive in certain respects, but it is also grounded in several very questionable assumptions. Politically, Moyn assumes that without the liberals’ “betrayal,” radicals and progressives would have managed to forge far more successful political movements, perhaps forestalling the triumph of imperial reaction after 1848, or of neoliberalism in the late twentieth century. Historically, Moyn reads the ultimate failure of Soviet Communism back into its seventy-year lifespan, as if its collapse was inevitable, and therefore assumes that during the Cold War the liberals “overreacted,” both in their fears of the Soviet challenge and in their larger concerns as to the pathological directions that progressive ideology can take. In addition, Moyn, an intellectual historian, not only attributes rather more influence to intellectuals than they may deserve, but also tends to engage with the history of actual liberal politics only when it supports his thesis. He has had a great deal to say about foreign policy and warfare, but much less about domestic policy, in the United States and elsewhere. He has therefore largely sidestepped the inconvenient fact that at the height of the Cold War, at the very moment when, according to his work, “Cold War liberals” had retreated from liberalism’s noblest ambitions, liberal politics marked some of its greatest American successes: most notably, civil rights legislation and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. The key moment for the ascent of neoconservatism and neoliberalism in both the United States and Britain came in the 1970’s, long after the start of the Cold War, and had just as much to do with the perceived failures of the modern welfare state as with the Soviet threat. Finally, Moyn has increasingly tended to reify liberalism, to treat it as a coherent and unified and powerful “tradition,” almost as a kind of singular political party, rather than as what it was, and still is: an often inchoate, even contradictory collection of thinkers and political movements. Doing so allows him to argue, repeatedly, that “liberalism” as a whole could make mistakes, betray its own past, and still somehow drag followers along while foreclosing other possibilities. As he put it bluntly in a recent interview, “Cold War liberalism… destroyed the potential of liberalism to be more believable and uplifting.” If only “liberalism” had not turned in this disastrous direction, Moyn claims, it could have defended and extended progressive achievements and the welfare state — weren’t they themselves achievements of American liberalism? — rather than leaving these things vulnerable to the sinister forces of market fundamentalism. Whether better liberal arguments would have actually done much to alter the directions that the world’s political economy has taken over the past half century is a question that he largely leaves unasked.
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