Liberals are theoretically bound by their own principles not to act like their more ruthless opponents, even though a failure to do so may significantly hamper their ability to successfully counter antiliberal movements. Where opponents of liberalism, unimpeded by such self-imposed constraints, may be more than willing to override individual rights or liberties in the pursuit of their goals, possibly even at the expense of inflicting untold suffering on others, liberals cannot follow suit without betraying their principled commitments to those same rights and liberties. This creates what Joshua L. Cherniss calls liberalism’s “predicament.” Either liberals stop being so squeamish and match the ruthlessness of their opponents—running the risk that they will need to act in ways that leave them no longer liberals at all—or they hold onto their principles, despite the disadvantages this puts them at. What is a liberal to do?
There is not anything peculiarly liberal to this predicament, of course. Any political agent with principles may find themselves in a position where they must choose between sacrificing those principles for political efficacy or holding onto them when it would be advantageous not to. It is a general issue of political integrity. But it is a familiar predicament for liberals, given their strong self-professed commitments to the rule of law, individual rights, mutual respect, and the tolerance of a diversity of views and ways of life. The paraphrase of Robert Frost’s famous definition of the liberal as someone unable to take their own side in an argument is almost endearing were it not for the possibility that it potentially leaves liberals unable to act when they need to in the defense of liberal values or principles.
In this terrifically rich, scholarly, and stimulating book, Cherniss seeks to recover a way of thinking about liberalism as a response to the problem of ruthlessness. Being a liberal is not so much about the values or principles one holds, the institutions one supports, or the ideals thought worthy of pursuit, although it is about those. It is ultimately about developing and sustaining a particular sort of ethos, one that enables liberals to find ways of living with the liberal predicament, rather than coming down on either horn of the dilemma. This “tempered liberalism,” exemplified in the thinkers Cherniss explores—Weber, Aron, Camus, Niebuhr, and Berlin—puts front and center questions of the appropriate dispositions, sensibility, and attitudes toward others that liberals should cultivate at both the individual and social level. It is a question of character, how one faces up to the liberal predicament, and the sort of social spirit that nurtures the right sort of individual characters and is, in turn, strengthened by them. It is an ethos in which individuals recognize the temptations of ruthlessness in the pursuit of their ideals but are imbued with the fortitude to resist them.
The recovery of this ethos- and character-focused liberalism is timely. The suspicion that we may have an impoverished, if not deeply mistaken and distorted understanding, of our own liberal tradition, as explored in recent years by the likes of Helena Rosenblatt, Edmund Fawcett, Samuel Moyn, Greg Conti, and others, has obvious practical implications for those engaged in the endeavor of defending liberalism against its contemporary detractors. Cherniss makes a valuable contribution to aiding a better self-understanding, and although he sensibly leaves the reader to make the connections themselves, few are likely to finish the book without a clear sense that our societies lack the ethos of tempered liberalism and are all the worse for it.
The notion that liberals should refocus their attention on the political ethics of ethos and character is an exciting and provocative one. Liberals would do well to take it very seriously, and one can see several potentially fruitful lines of inquiry that could be developed from Cherniss’s work, either in terms of exploring additional “tempered liberals” —regular mentions of the likes of Trilling, Shklar, and Williams, for instance, suggest this category plausibly includes thinkers beyond those explored here—the nature of a liberal ethos, and the individual characters and social practices or institutions that support it. The contrast between a liberal and ruthless ethos is another such area. How far we should go, how ruthless we must be, in the pursuit of our ideals and values cannot be separated from the question of the place of those ideals and values in our sense of the sort of lives we think worth living. This is likely an issue of ethos also. But insofar as it is, recognizing it as such means that drawing the relevant distinction between a ruthless and tempered ethos might not quite identify the right contrast—or at least not the contrast in all its complexity. Cherniss rightly notes, “Liberalism regards politics as important, but not all-important. Politics should be pursued in such a way that allows participants to do other things; indeed, the goals of politics include securing conditions that allow most people to do other things” (p. 217). This instrumental view of politics has often led liberals to view individuals’ private lives as the sphere in which we pursue what is truly meaningful or noble: politics merely provides the conditions under which such pursuits become possible. Antiliberals, in contrast, “seek a more inspiring, fulfilling sort of politics” (p. 217). This certainly is a difference between liberals and antiliberals. Liberals want a limited politics because what is of value in human life is pursued outside the political; (many) antiliberals see politics as the sphere that deals with the most supreme values and ends of human lives. That difference profoundly colors our sense of the sort of character we should be cultivating and, importantly, what is going to count as ruthlessness in pursuit of our values and ideals. Scruples, and the ethos that cultivates and supports those, defend those parts of our ethical lives that we must in some sense think we could not betray while still being able to live with ourselves. From the liberal perspective, antiliberals are prone to ruthlessness because they care too much about politics: they assign it too central a place in a meaningful human life. Which is, of course, why part of the liberal project has so often been, explicitly or not, to try and take the heat out of politics, to downplay its significance. Antiliberals see squeamishness where liberals put scruples not just because of their propensity toward political purism or absolutism, though that is clearly an important factor, but also because they have a fundamental and deep-seated disagreement as to the sort of lives worth living (or not) and the place of politics within those.
The cultivation of a tempered ethos does not and cannot resolve the liberal predicament. The best we can hope for is that it offers liberals a way of continuing to live with it. It may turn out that the permanence of such irresolvable tensions—and the problem of ruthlessness that Cherniss identifies is but one of them—makes liberalism too demanding of human beings for it to endure much longer. Liberalism in Dark Times is a vital book for those who are not willing to give up on it quite yet.
