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EVERYONE WHO HAS BEEN subjected to an elementary course in philosophy has run up against some of the tricky paradoxes that have been used by philosophy teachers since the time of the Greeks to try to provoke the minds of students into active operation. One well-known example goes like this: Epimenides, the Cretan, declared that all Cretans are liars. Run through a computer, that will block the circuits. Then there are the famous paradoxes of Zeno, which prove that change and motion are impossible. At any given moment an arrow must be either where it is or where it is not. But obviously it cannot be where it is not. And if it is where it is, that is equivalent to saying that it is at rest. Zeno invented three or four others along the same line, proving that Achilles could never catch the tortoise, and so on.
Socrates was especially concerned with one other of these classical paradoxes which, as a matter of fact, can be understood as a starting point for Plato’s philosophical system. In a number of the Platonic dialogues, Socrates proves, apparently to his own satisfaction, that it is impossible to learn, or to teach, the scientific truth about anything. His reasoning, in brief, is this. Unless you knew the truth beforehand, you would have no way of recognizing it when you found it.
Let me translate this into a practical problem. Suppose that I want to find out the scientific truth about dogs. I will get it, presumably, by studying a lot of dogs: by observing their behavior, dissecting them, performing experiments on and with them. It sounds straightforward enough. But suppose someone asks me: how do you know those creatures you have assembled for study are really dogs? Maybe they are coyotes or wolves or cats or a missing link. You are just reasoning in a circle. Unless you already knew the truth about dogs, unless you had in advance of your observations a scientific definition of what a dog is, you would have no basis for bringing these particular creatures rather than others into your laboratory. Let us add that this is not just juggling with words. There is a very difficult philosophical issue at stake here, which has come up repeatedly in the history of thought from Socrates’ day to our own.
In the analysis of American liberalism that we here begin, we face the same initial problem as our student of dogs. We have got to get our dogs into the laboratory, even though we haven’t yet learned exactly what a dog is. That is to say: we, author and reader, setting out on a scientific examination—as I hope it will prove to be—of the meaning and function of liberalism, have got to place before our mental eye examples—specimens, we might call them—of individual liberals and of particular liberal ideas, writings, institutions and acts, before we have defined what a liberal or liberalism is. How do we know that Eleanor Roosevelt—let us say—was really a liberal, if we don’t yet know what liberalism is? Maybe, scientifically examined, Mrs. Roosevelt was a fascist or reactionary, a communist or conservative or a political missing link. How can we talk, in short, if we don’t know what we are talking about?
Whether in pursuit of dogs or liberals, it is best to take a rather crude, common-sense way out of this logical blind alley. The plain common-sense fact is that everybody knows Eleanor Roosevelt was a liberal, just as everybody knows that Fido, who runs around the yard next door, is a dog. We all know that Mrs. Roosevelt was a liberal even if we have no idea what liberalism is. Whatever liberalism is, she was it. That’s something we can start with.
And this is our usual procedure in inquiries of this kind. In learning, we never really start from scratch. We always know something about the subject-matter to begin with, whether dogs or liberals or chemical compounds. Plato expressed this fact through his beautiful myth of recollection. The soul, he said, knows the truth in an existence before the birth of the body, so that all learning in this life is in reality only remembering. In humbler terms, we can note that day-by-day experience provides us with preliminary, rough-and-ready ideas. The job of rational thought and science is to take these over in order to refine, clarify and systematize them. In doing so, science may conclude that common sense had made some mistakes: that this particular Fido is in truth a wolf and not a dog; this supposed fish, a whale; and this particular avowed liberal, a communist in free speech clothing.
WELL, THEN, EVERYBODY KNOWS that Mrs. Roosevelt was a liberal; and that Democratic Senators Hubert Humphrey, Paul Douglas, Wayne Morse, Joseph Clark, Maurine Neuberger, Stephen M. Young, Eugene McCarthy, yes, and Republican Senators Jacob Javits, Thomas Kuchel and Clifford Case are liberals; Supreme Court Justices William O. Douglas, Arthur J. Goldberg and Hugo Black, and Chief Justice Earl Warren; Chester Bowles, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., John Kenneth Galbraith, Orville Freeman, Averell Harriman, Adlai Stevenson, Thomas Finletter, Edward R. Murrow, G. Mennen Williams, Theodore Sorensen, James Loeb; Ralph McGill, Drew Pearson, James Wechsler, Dorothy Kenyon, Roger Baldwin, William L. Shirer, David Susskind, James Roosevelt, Herbert H. Lehman; Harold Taylor, Norman Cousins, Eric Goldman, David Riesman, H. Stuart Hughes, Henry S. Commager, Archibald MacLeish; cartoonists Herblock and Mauldin; the editors of The Progressive‚ The New Republic, Harper’s, Look, Scientific American, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Washington Post, New York Post, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Baltimore Sun; the larger part of the faculties—especially within the humanities—of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, of the other Ivy League colleges and their sister institutions, Vassar, Smith, Bryn Mawr, Radcliffe, Barnard, Bennington, Sarah Lawrence, and in fact the majority of all the larger colleges and universities outside the South; the officers, staffs, directors and members of the American Civil Liberties Union, Americans for Democratic Action, the Committee for an Effective Congress, the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions and its parent, the Fund for the Republic, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the League of Women Voters, the Association for the United Nations, the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy . . .
Everyone knows, and no one will dispute, that all these are liberals. But the line stretches further out. These that I have been naming are the purebred, pedigree-registered, blue-ribboned, Westminster liberal champions. We must include in the species not only these show performers but all the millions of others who may be a little long in the haunch or short in the muzzle for the prize ring, or may show the marks of a bit of crossbreeding, but are honest liberals for all that.
The New York Times may not have quite the undiluted liberal blood line of the Washington Post, and it admits a few ideological deviants to its writing staff, but no one who reads it regularly—as do most of those persons who run the United States—will doubt its legitimate claim to the label; and its owners would have cause to bring suit if you called it anti-liberal. There may be more Democratic Party liberals than Republican liberals; but Republicans like Jacob Javits, Clifford Case, Paul Hoffman, the late perennial New York City Councilman Stanley Isaacs, Representative John Lindsay, and a good many of those who have followed Professor Arthur Larson’s suggestion to call themselves “modern Republicans” can hardly be denied entrance at the liberal gate.
It can be argued, with some cogency, that certain parts of Roman Catholic dogma are not easy to reconcile with liberal doctrine. Nevertheless, California Governor Pat Brown, New York Mayor Robert Wagner, at least a few Kennedys, Supreme Court Justice William Brennan and many another prominent Catholic are surely to be numbered, as they number themselves, in the liberal army. The best-known magazine published by Catholic laymen, The Commonweal, describes itself, accurately, as “liberal.”
Though few other daily papers are so quintessentially and uniformly liberal as the Washington Post, few of the larger papers outside the South, except for the Wall Street Journal, New York Daily News and Chicago Tribune, stray very far from the liberal reservation; and even in the South there is the Atlanta Constitution. The mass weeklies do not use quite the same doctrinaire rhetoric as The New Republic; but among them only U.S. News and World Report is openly and consistently anti-liberal—though, it must be granted, no prudent liberal could regard Time and Life as the staunchest of allies. Some teachers at the big state universities may not repeat the liberal ritual with quite the practiced fervor of an Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. in his Harvard days, a John P. Roche at Brandeis, a Henry Commager at Amherst or Eric Goldman at Princeton; but in the liberal arts faculties you will not find many confessed heretics to the liberal faith—though a few more today, perhaps, than a decade ago. In book publishing, radio-TV, professional lecturing, theater, movies and the rest of the “communicative arts,” there are a few non-liberals, but you could make plenty of money by giving five to one that any name drawn at random would be a liberal’s.
In sum, then: liberalism rather broadly designated—ranging from somewhat dubious blends to the fine pure bonded 100 proof—is today, and from some time in the 1930’s has been, the prevailing American public doctrine, or ideology. The predominant assumptions, ideas and beliefs about politics, economics, and social questions are liberal. I do not mean that a large majority of the population is, by count, liberal. Perhaps a majority is liberal, but that is hard to determine accurately. What is certain is that a majority, and a substantial majority, of those who control or influence public opinion is liberal, that liberalism of one or another variety prevails among the opinion-makers, molders and transmitters: teachers in the leading universities—probably the most significant single category; book publishers; editors and writers of the most influential publications; school and college administrators; public relations experts; writers of both novels and non-fiction; radio-TV directors, writers and commentators; producers, directors and writers in movies and the theater; the Jewish and non-evangelical Protestant clergy and not a few Catholic priests and bishops; verbalists in all branches of government; the staffs of the great foundations that have acquired in our day such pervasive influence through their relation to research, education, scholarships and publishing.
When I state that liberalism is the prevailing American doctrine, I do not, of course, suggest that it is the only doctrine, even among those who make or influence public opinion. In order to understand what a thing is, as Spinoza insisted, we must know what it is not. In trying to understand what liberals and liberalism are, it is useful to take note of the unambiguous examples around us of non-liberals and non-liberalism. We are not quite all liberals, not yet at any rate.
Senators Barry Goldwater, John Tower and Harry F. Byrd maintain their non-liberal seats alongside Hubert Humphrey and Jacob Javits. David Lawrence and John Chamberlain write their daily columns as well as Marquis Childs, James Wechsler and Doris Fleeson. Fulton Lewis, Jr. continues, on the provincial air at any rate, and no one has ever accused him of liberalism. Lewis Strauss, who has never even pretended to be a liberal, occupied several of the nation’s highest appointive posts under both Democratic and Republican Presidents—though it is worth noting that even when he was supported by all the power of the Presidential office and the seldom-broken tradition of American governmental procedures, his liberal critics won a majority in the Senate for his dismissal. U.S. News and World Report does exist and even flourish among the mass weeklies; among the magazines of opinion, as they are somewhat deprecatingly called, there is also William F. Buckley, Jr.’s National Review; and the quarterly, Modern Age, founded by the unapologetic conservative, Russell Kirk, manages to penetrate a number of academic ramparts. The Richmond Times-Dispatch, Arizona Republican and Indianapolis News provide contrasting if provincial background for the Washington Post.
Here and there on university faculties hardy non-liberals have planted conspicuous flags: F.A. Hayek, Leo Strauss, Milton Friedman at Chicago; David Rowe at Yale; Warren Nutter at Virginia; Karl Wittfogel at Washington; Robert Strausz-Hupé at Pennsylvania; Hugh Kenner at California; Walter Berns at Cornell; at Harvard itself, Edward C. Banfield. The company of retired generals and admirals seems to be rather an assembly point for non-liberals: Generals Douglas MacArthur, Albert C. Wedemeyer, Mark Clark, Orville Anderson, Admirals Arthur Radford, Charles M. Cooke, Arleigh Burke—indeed, a random gathering of ex–general officers, even with a number of active generals and admirals included, would be one of the few occasions on which a liberal might not feel altogether at home: a fact that perhaps has a certain symptomatic importance. He would be lonely, too, though not isolated, at conventions of the National Association of Manufacturers or the United States Chamber of Commerce. At the extreme wings there are small sects of communists, anarchists, fascists, racists and crackpots outside both liberal and conservative boundaries.
And finally—though I should perhaps have listed it first—there is the Deep South, much of which is still, in a more general and institutionalized way, non- and indeed anti-liberal. There are liberals in the South, and their tribe has been increasing, as there are non-liberals in the North, East and West; and a fair amount of liberal doctrine has seeped gradually into the Southern mind, a good deal of it in fact on matters other than the South’s peculiar problem. But the South as a whole, or at any rate the Deep South, remains for elsewhere ascendant liberalism a barbarian outpost, under heavy siege but not yet conquered, in spite of manifestos, court orders, freedom riders and paratroops.
II
IN ASSEMBLING THIS SIZABLE mass of particular data, both positive and negative, I have stayed within American national limits. The ideology that Americans call “liberalism” is, however, by no means confined to the United States. It, and the typical sorts of persons who believe it—“liberals,” that is to say—are found in every nation outside the communist empire; and no doubt liberals are present, if silent, within the communist regions also.1 The ideology and its adepts bear different names in different places. Except where the American usage has become accepted, they are usually not called “liberalism” and “liberals,” terms that retain elsewhere a greater portion of their nineteenth-century laissez-faire, limited-government meaning. Still, the type, the species, is easily enough recognizable across the barriers of geography and language.
In political and ideological range, the tendency that Americans call “liberalism” corresponds roughly to what the French call “progressisme” and bridges what are known in Europe and Latin America as “the Left” and “the Center.” It covers most of the Left except for the communist parties and those dogmatic socialist parties that have not, like the German Social Democratic Party and the British Labour Party, abandoned orthodox Marxism. In the other political direction, it covers the left wing and much of the center of the Christian Democratic parties and the modernized (welfarist) Conservative parties like the British. The similarity between American liberalism and the corresponding tendencies found elsewhere is indicated by the interchangeability of rhetoric. No reader of the American New Republic would feel uneasy with a copy of the British New Statesman or the French L’Express. A Washington Post or New York Times editorial writer would need no more than a week’s apprenticeship to supply leading articles for the London Sunday Observer or, if he knew French, for the Paris Le Monde. At the international gatherings on all conceivable subjects that have become a feature of our era, the liberal professors, writers, journalists and politician-intellectuals from North America discover quickly that they speak the same ideological language as their progressive confreres from other continents, however many simultaneous translations must be arranged for the vulgates.
The American variety of this worldwide ideology—whatever name we may choose to give it—has certain special features derived from the local soil, history and intellectual tradition. It is somewhat more freewheeling, less doctrinaire, than the European forms; it bears the imprint of more recent frontiers, and of the Americanized pragmatism of William James and John Dewey. But the differences are secondary in terms of either basic doctrine or historical consequence. With only a few exceptions, which I shall note in each case, the analyses that I shall be making hold for the global ideology, not merely for the American variety. This is natural enough, because the categories of the ideology are universalistic, without local origin or confinement.
Though most of the analysis and the conclusions will thus be unrestricted, most (though not all) of the specific examples and references will be American, in order that we may not get lost in trackless mountains of data. I have stated as my underlying hypothesis the proposition that liberalism is the ideology of Western suicide. My Americanized procedure might suggest narrowing the proposition to: liberalism is the ideology of American suicide. On two grounds I think that the wider assertion may be retained: first because of the fact just noted, that American liberalism is only a local variety of an ideology (and historical tendency) present in essentials in the other Western nations; and second, because Western civilization could not survive as a going concern, as more than a remnant, without the United States. I take it to be too obvious to require discussion that, if the United States collapses or declines to unimportance, the collapse of the other Western nations will not be far behind—if it won’t have occurred beforehand.
III
HAVING GATHERED TOGETHER a laboratory load of specimens, it becomes my duty to get out the scalpels and begin more refined dissection. What, more exactly, is this “liberalism” that I have been writing about rather cavalierly so far, this prevailing doctrine which, I must have been assuming, all these many individual liberals and liberal institutions share?
The individual liberals I have named—I should more properly say, the individuals whom I have named as liberals—do not, certainly, share identical ideas on all things, even on matters political, economic and social. They differ among themselves, and they are notably fond of debates, panels, discussions and forums in which they air their divergencies. Some of them feel that a 91 percent top limit on the American progressive income tax is about right; some, that it should be 100 percent above a certain maximum income; others, that it might be lowered to, say, 60 percent. But all liberals, without any exception that I know of, agree that a progressive income tax is a fair, probably the fairest, form of taxation, and that the government—all governments—ought to impose a progressive tax on personal incomes.
Liberals dispute just how speedy ought to be the deliberate speed with which schools in the United States should, under the Supreme Court’s order, be racially integrated; whether the next summit meeting to negotiate with the Kremlin should be held before or after a Foreign Ministers’ meeting; whether private schools should or should not be granted tax exemption; whether the United Nations should or should not retain the veto power in the Security Council; whether the legislature, courts or executive should play the primary role in guaranteeing equal rights to all citizens in housing, employment, voting, education and medical care; whether Communist Party spokesmen deserve equal time with Republican and Democratic Party spokesmen in public forums; whether the legal minimum wage should be $1.25 or $1.50 or $1.75 an hour.
All liberals agree, without debate, that racial segregation in any school system is wrong and that government ought to prevent it; that in one way or another, whether at the summit or the middle, we ought to negotiate with the Kremlin, and keep negotiating; that, whether private schools are to be permitted to exist or not, the basis of the educational system should be universal, free—that is, tax-supported—public schooling; that whatever changes may be theoretically desirable in its charter and conduct, the United Nations is a worthy institution that deserves financial, political and moral support; that all citizens possess equal rights and deserve equal treatment guaranteed by the central government; that whatever the times and forums made available to communists, they should be allowed to speak their piece freely; that government should define and enforce some minimum level of wages.
In short, liberals differ, or may differ, among themselves on application, timing, method and other details, but these differences revolve within a common framework of more basic ideas, beliefs, principles, goals, feelings and values. This does not mean that every liberal is clearly aware of this common framework; on the contrary, most liberals will take it for granted as automatically as pulse or breathing. If brought to light, it is likely to seem as self-evident and unquestionable as Euclid’s set of axioms once seemed to mathematicians.
It is a matter of what seems open to rational discussion, to discussion among reasonable men. It is rational that Leon Keyserling, let us say, should dispute with John Kenneth Galbraith or Walter Heller whether the initial appropriation under a newly proposed federal school program should be $2.3 billion or $3.2 billion. Reasonable men, that is to say liberals, differ on such points, and negotiate their differences through the discussion process. But it is a waste of time for Mr. Keyserling, Ambassador Galbraith, Mr. Heller or other reasonable men to try to argue a contention by, say, Senator Tower that there should not be any federal school program at all. That sort of talk is reactionary nonsense, eighteenth-century thinking, outside the limits of rational discussion. In such cases there is no sense relying on persuasion; it will have to be settled by rounding up the votes, and, if the reactionaries keep asking for trouble long enough, by calling out the paratroops. “In our day,” it seems to a liberal, “nobody but a madman, fascist or crackpot would really question whether democracy is better than aristocracy and dictatorship, whether there ought to be universal education and universal suffrage, whether all races and creeds deserve equal treatment, whether government has a duty to the unemployed, ill and aged, whether we ought to have a progressive income tax, whether trade unions are a good thing, or peace better than war.”
Whether or not all liberals understand the principles behind their own judgments, attitudes and actions—and some of them undoubtedly do—and whether these principles are self-evidently true or just plain true or even plain false, the principles are nevertheless there, logically speaking. They can be brought to light by a consideration of what is logically entailed by liberal words and deeds: by answering the question, “What would a liberal have to believe, in order to make logical sense of the way he talks, judges, feels and acts about political, economic and social affairs?”
Present-day American liberalism is not a complete system of thought comparable to, say, dialectical materialism, Spinozism, or Christian philosophy as taught by the Thomist wing of the Roman Catholic Church. Liberalism has no single, accepted and authoritative book or person or committee that is recognized as giving the final word: no Bible, Pope nor Presidium. Liberalism is looser, vaguer, harder to pin down; and permits its faithful a considerable deviation before they are pronounced heretic. Nevertheless, liberalism does constitute in its own terms a fairly cohesive body of doctrine, cluster of feelings and code of practice. This is indirectly demonstrated by the fact that usually—not always, but usually—it is easy enough to tell the difference between a liberal on the one hand and a conservative on the other; between a liberal proposal in politics or economics and a conservative proposal. (And still easier, it goes without saying, to tell the difference between a liberal and an outright reactionary.) There are troublesome intermediary cases, but surprisingly few, really. A political journalist seldom has any trouble identifying the public figures he writes about as liberal or not. The ideological spectrum between the leftmost wing of liberalism and the rightmost wing of conservatism is not an evenly graduated gray continuum. The L’s and the C’s are bunched; and we can usually tell the difference intuitively. A connoisseur, in fact, can tell the difference intuitively just from a momentary sample of rhetoric at a Parent-Teacher meeting or a cocktail party, even without a specific declaration or proposal to go by, much as a musical connoisseur can distinguish intuitively a single phrase of Mozart from a phrase of Brahms.
IV
IT IS NOT TOO DIFFICULT TO DEVISE a fairly accurate diagnostic test for liberalism. In individual and group experiments over the past several years I have often used, for example, the following set of thirty-nine sentences. The patient is merely asked whether he agrees or disagrees with each sentence—agrees or disagrees by and large, without worrying over fine points.2
1. All forms of racial segregation and discrimination are wrong.
2. Everyone is entitled to his own opinion.
3. Everyone has a right to free, public education.
4. Political, economic or social discrimination based on religious belief is wrong.
5. In political or military conflict it is wrong to use methods of torture and physical terror.
6. A popular movement or revolt against a tyranny or dictatorship is right, and deserves approval.
7. The government has a duty to provide for the ill, aged, unemployed and poor if they cannot take care of themselves.
8. Progressive income and inheritance taxes are the fairest form of taxation.
9. If reasonable compensation is made, the government of a nation has the legal and moral right to expropriate private property within its borders, whether owned by citizens or foreigners.
10. We have a duty to mankind; that is, to men in general.
11. The United Nations, even if limited in accomplishment, is a step in the right direction.
12. Any interference with free speech and free assembly, except for cases of immediate public danger or juvenile corruption, is wrong.
13. Wealthy nations, like the United States, have a duty to aid the less privileged portions of mankind.
14. Colonialism and imperialism are wrong.
15. Hotels, motels, stores and restaurants in the Southern United States ought to be obliged by law to allow Negroes to use all of their facilities on the same basis as whites.
16. The chief sources of delinquency and crime are ignorance, discrimination, poverty and exploitation.
17. Communists have a right to express their opinions.
18. We should always be ready to negotiate with the Soviet Union and other communist nations.
19. Corporal punishment, except possibly for small children, is wrong.
20. All nations and peoples, including the nations and peoples of Asia and Africa, have a right to political independence when a majority of the population wants it.
21. We always ought to respect the religious beliefs of others.
22. The primary goal of international policy in the nuclear age ought to be peace.
23. Except in cases of a clear threat to national security or, possibly, to juvenile morals, censorship is wrong.
24. Congressional investigating committees are dangerous institutions, and need to be watched and curbed if they are not to become a serious threat to freedom.
25. The money amount of school and university scholarships ought to be decided primarily by need.
26. Qualified teachers, at least at the university level, are entitled to academic freedom: that is, the right to express their own beliefs and opinions, in or out of the classroom, without interference from administrators, trustees, parents or public bodies.
27. In determining who is to be admitted to schools and universities, quota systems based on color, religion, family or similar factors are wrong.
28. The national government should guarantee that all adult citizens, except for criminals and the insane, should have the right to vote.
29. Joseph McCarthy was probably the most dangerous man in American public life during the fifteen years following the Second World War.
30. There are no significant differences in intellectual, moral or civilizing capacity among human races and ethnic types.
31. Steps toward world disarmament would be a good thing.
32. Everyone is entitled to political and social rights without distinction of any kind, such as race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.
33. Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and expression.
34. Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression.
35. The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government.
36. Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security.
37. Everyone has the right to equal pay for equal work.
38. Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions.
39. Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
A FULL-BLOWN LIBERAL WILL mark every one, or very nearly every one, of these thirty-nine sentences, Agree. A convinced conservative will mark many or most of them, a reactionary all or nearly all of them, Disagree. By giving this test to a variety of groups, I have confirmed experimentally—what is obvious enough from ordinary discourse—that the result is seldom an even balance between Agree and Disagree. The correlations are especially stable for individuals who are prepared to identify themselves unequivocally as either “liberal” or “reactionary”: such self-defined liberals almost never drop below 85 percent of Agree answers, or self-defined reactionaries below 85 percent of Disagree; a perfect 100 percent is common. Certain types of self-styled conservatives yield almost as high a Disagree percentage as the admitted reactionaries. The answers of those who regard themselves as “moderate conservatives” or “traditional conservatives” and of the rather small number of persons who pretend to no general opinions about public matters show considerably more variation. But in general the responses to this list of thirty-nine sentences indicate that a liberal line can be drawn somewhere—even if not exactly along this salient—and that most persons fall fairly definitely (though not in equal numbers) on one side of it or the other.
These sentences were not devised arbitrarily. Many of them are taken directly or adapted from the writings of well-known liberals, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, or the liberal questionnaires that have been put out in recent years by the American Civil Liberties Union. The last eight are quoted verbatim from the United Nations’ “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” adopted in 1948 by the United Nations General Assembly. That entire document is an impressive proof of the global nature of liberalism and its prevalence that I have remarked among opinion-makers.
A number of articulate liberals—university professors, as it happens—who have become acquainted with this set of thirty-nine sentences have objected to it. I am not sure that I have understood just exactly what the objection comes down to; actually, it is rather mild compared to objections that have been made to other portions of this book. No one has stated that these thirty-nine, give or take a couple and disregarding verbal details, are not liberal sentences—that is, sentences that most liberals would agree to. I gather that some critics feel the sentences are not distinctively liberal: that not only liberals but all normal and reasonable persons nowadays agree with them; that they express no more than the “universal modern consensus,” or something of that sort.3
Of course it will seem so, if one is interpreting and judging them as a liberal, from the perspective of liberalism. It will seem so because the conceptions of a “normal” and “reasonable” person, of “rationality,” are then derived from the implicit basic assumptions of liberalism. I must report, however, that though these sentences are undoubtedly agreed to by the presently prevailing trends of opinion in the United States and in most other advanced Western nations—less widely so in some, perhaps, than in the United States and Britain—there nevertheless remains a fair number of persons, doubtless irrational but still not quite the fascist mad dogs of Herblock’s or Low’s cartoons, who disagree with many, with a majority, even in some cases with all of these thirty-nine self-evident truths.
The evidence seems to show that liberals share a common stock of ideas and that they agree on at least the main lines of practical programs: and that many or most of these liberal ideas and programs are recognizably different from non-liberal ideas and programs. We might thus call liberalism a Weltanschauung, a world-view and life-view; the dominant Weltanschauung of the United States and much of the West in the past generation. Or we may use a now familiar term and call liberalism, as I have been doing, an “ideology.” It might be still more convenient, as I have suggested elsewhere,4 to borrow a term from medicine, and to call liberalism a “syndrome”; more specifically, an “ideological syndrome.” A syndrome is a set of symptoms or elements that are observed to occur together, as a group. Thus doctors find it useful to define certain diseases as syndromes—Parkinson’s disease, for example. It is not necessary that every element or symptom should be present in each instance of a given syndrome. It is enough if most of them are there, in a certain relation to each other.
By designating liberalism a syndrome we avoid trying to assign it more systematic order and rigidity than it actually displays. There is the further advantage of leaving open the question of causation. As a pattern or collection of symptoms, a syndrome may be observed to exist and recur, even if we have no idea what causes it.
We can verify by observation that each of the persons whom I earlier listed as typical liberals exhibits all or most of a certain cluster of symptoms. Suitably analyzed, we may call this cluster or set the “liberal syndrome.” When we discover it latent in the ideas, words and acts of a hitherto unobserved individual, we may call him a “liberal.” In a similar way, we might also discover different clusters—different not in every symptom but in most, and very different in general pattern—that we might name “the conservative syndrome,” “the fascist syndrome,” “the communist syndrome,” and so on.
1. There are persons in every country who may be appropriately called “liberals,” and who regard themselves as liberals (or the equivalent). I shall show later on, in the discussion of the dialectics of liberalism, that the existential meaning of the liberalism found in the new and underdeveloped nations is radically different from liberalism within older and more advanced nations.
2. Readers of this book might be interested, or amused, to give themselves the test.
3. In the New York Times Magazine, April 19, 1959, Chester Bowles, one of the most forthright of liberal oracles, declared: “To paraphrase a Victorian Tory statesman, we are all liberals now.”
4. In Congress and the American Tradition (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1959).
