Contemporary Authors

• Benjamin Constant and the Making of Modern Liberalism Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1984
• The Anatomy of Antiliberalism Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1993
• Passions and Constraint: On the Theory of Liberal Democracy University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1995
• The Cost of Rights: Why Liberty Depends on Taxes W.W. Norton (New York, NY), 1999
• The Matador's Cape: America's Reckless Response to Terror Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 2007
• The Beginning of Politics: Power in the Biblical Book of Samuel Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 2017

1.  The beginning of politics : power in the biblical Book of Samuel LCCN 2016050190 Type of material Book Personal name Halbertal, Moshe, author. Main title The beginning of politics : power in the biblical Book of Samuel / Moshe Halbertal and Stephen Holmes. Published/Produced Princeton : Princeton University Press, [2017] Projected pub date 1704 Description pages cm ISBN 9780691174624 (acid-free paper) Library of Congress Holdings Information not available. 2.  The matador's cape : America's reckless response to terror LCCN 2006039195 Type of material Book Personal name Holmes, Stephen, 1948- Main title The matador's cape : America's reckless response to terror / Stephen Holmes. Published/Created Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2007. Description x, 367 p. ; 25 cm. ISBN 9780521875165 (hardback) 0521875161 (hardback) Links Publisher description http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0617/2006039195-d.html Table of contents only http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0617/2006039195-t.html Contributor biographical information http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0729/2006039195-b.html CALL NUMBER HV6432 .H653 2007 Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms Shelf Location FLM2015 254627 CALL NUMBER HV6432 .H653 2007 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM2) 3.  The cost of rights : why liberty depends on taxes LCCN 98041491 Type of material Book Personal name Holmes, Stephen, 1948- Main title The cost of rights : why liberty depends on taxes / Stephen Holmes and Cass R. Sunstein. Edition 1st ed. Published/Created New York : W.W. Norton, c1999. Description 255 p. ; 22 cm. ISBN 0393046702 CALL NUMBER JC599.U5 H55 1999 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms CALL NUMBER JC599.U5 H55 1999 FT MEADE Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 4.  Passions and constraint : on the theory of liberal democracy LCCN 94033748 Type of material Book Personal name Holmes, Stephen, 1948- Main title Passions and constraint : on the theory of liberal democracy / Stephen Holmes. Published/Created Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1995. Description xiii, 337 p. ; 24 cm. ISBN 0226349683 (alk. paper) Links Publisher description http://www.loc.gov/catdir/description/uchi052/94033748.html Table of contents http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/uchi051/94033748.html CALL NUMBER JC574 .H65 1995 FT MEADE Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 5.  The anatomy of antiliberalism LCCN 92041387 Type of material Book Personal name Holmes, Stephen, 1948- Main title The anatomy of antiliberalism / Stephen Holmes. Published/Created Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1993. Description xvi, 330 p. ; 25 cm. ISBN 0674031806 (acid-free papr) CALL NUMBER HM276 .H744 1993 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms CALL NUMBER HM276 .H744 1993 FT MEADE Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 6.  Benjamin Constant and the making of modern liberalism LCCN 84005118 Type of material Book Personal name Holmes, Stephen, 1948- Main title Benjamin Constant and the making of modern liberalism / Stephen Holmes. Published/Created New Haven : Yale University Press, c1984. Description vii, 337 p. ; 24 cm. ISBN 0300030835 (alk. paper) CALL NUMBER JC229.C8 H64 1984 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms CALL NUMBER JC229.C8 H64 1984 FT MEADE Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• New York University, School of Law Website - https://its.law.nyu.edu/facultyprofiles/index.cfm?fuseaction=profile.biography&personid=20000

  Stephen Holmes
  Walter E. Meyer Professor of Law
  stephen.holmes@nyu.edu
  Vanderbilt Hall 506 • 212.998.6357
  Assistant: Adrian Coto

  Biography
  After receiving his Ph.D. from Yale in 1976, Holmes (b. 1948) taught briefly at Yale and Wesleyan Universities before becoming a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1978. He next moved to Harvard University's Department of Government, where he stayed until 1985, the year he joined the faculty at the University of Chicago where he taught, in both the Political Science Department and the Law School, until 1997. From 1997-2000, Holmes was Professor of Politics at Princeton University. In 2000, he moved to New York University School of Law where he is currently Walter E. Meyer Professor of Law and faculty co-director of the Center on Law and Security.
  At the University of Chicago, Holmes was Director of the Center for the Study of Constitutionalism in Eastern Europe. At Chicago and NYU he also served and as editor-in-chief of the East European Constitutional Review (1993-2003). In addition, he has also been the Director of the Soros Foundation program for promoting legal reform in Russia and Eastern Europe (1994-96).
  Holmes' research centers on the history of European liberalism, the disappointments of democracy and economic liberalization after communism, and the difficulty of combating international Salafi terrorism within the bounds of the Constitution and the rule of law. In 1988, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete a study of the theoretical foundations of liberal democracy. He was a member of the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin during the 1991-92 academic year. He was named a Carnegie Scholar in 2003-2005 for his work on Russian legal reform. Besides numerous articles on the history of political thought, democratic and constitutional theory, state-building in post-communist Russia, and the war on terror, his publications include: Benjamin Constant and the Making of Modern Liberalism (1984); Anatomy of Antiliberalism (1993); Passions and Constraint: The Theory of Liberal Democracy (1995); The Cost of Rights, coauthored, with Cass Sunstein (1998); and Matador’s Cape: America’s Reckless Response to Terror (2007).

• Amazon -

  Stephen Holmes is the Walter E. Meyer Professor of Law at New York University. His books include The Matador's Cape: America's Reckless Response to Terror.

The Beginning of Politics: Power in the Biblical Book of Samuel

264.11 (Mar. 13, 2017): p78.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
The Beginning of Politics: Power in the Biblical Book of Samuel
Moshe Halbertal and Stephen Holmes. Princeton Univ., $27.95 (232p) ISBN 978-0691-17462-4
Philosopher and legal scholar Halbertal and law professor at NYU Holmes analyze political power as depicted during the Biblical reigns of Saul and David in the Book of Samuel. Rather than present the book as a partisan narrative in favor of either king, the authors approach the work as an astute description of how leaders are made and unmade through the power of the state. Following an introduction that briefly contextualizes events in history and situates the authors' analysis in the context of previous works on the book, the facets of their argument are laid out in four chapters of densely woven exegesis. Chapter one considers how political leaders often become singularly obsessed with maintaining their own power; chapter two explores the violence of paranoid and entitlement politics; chapter three considers the dangers of continuity and disruption as power passes from one leader to another; chapter four focuses on the end of King David's life. At times, the authors' admiration for the anonymous author (or authors) of the Book of Samuel distracts from their narrative analysis. Readers also may be disappointed that women receive scant attention in this analysis of political power, except as subjects of male lust and violence. Familiarity with the Book of Samuel, or a concurrent reading of the biblical text, is strongly recommended. (May)
Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Beginning of Politics: Power in the Biblical Book of Samuel." Publishers Weekly, 13 Mar. 2017, p. 78. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA485971699&it=r&asid=b5daea9a068ff035b0fd918cc1b93807. Accessed 9 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A485971699

Game of thrones

David Wolpe
143.5 (May 2017): p52.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Jewish Committee
http://www.commentarymagazine.com
The Beginning of Politics: Power in the Biblical Book of Samuel
By Moshe Halbertal and Stephen Holmes
Princeton University Press, 232 pages
'David is the master of walking the fine line between innocence and manipulation." In that single sentence regarding King David, we can see both the strengths and failings of The Beginning of Politics, the new study of the biblical book of Samuel by Moshe Halbertal and Stephen Holmes.
Halbertal and Holmes have taken one of the most imbricated tales of history--the story of the rise of David and his protean conflicts with his mentor-predecessor-rival King Saul--and sought to deduce certain political themes from it. Some of their observations are deep and resonant. But throughout they struggle with the slippery reality that a great story resists reduction of this sort. Classic narratives defeat analysis by those who view such stories through too narrow a lens. Fairy tales have morals; more complex stories must embrace human contradiction.
The authors pay proper homage to the true hero of the book of Samuel--its author, who they defensibly claim is "the greatest author ever to write in the Hebrew language." We do not know anything about the author, but, in their view, this individual was an outsider with deep knowledge of the court and an astonishingly insightful observer of human nature and political interaction. The novelistic quality of the story attests as well to the author's artistry, a combination of gifts rare enough in any age. What makes this text so strong and yet so inconclusive is that David cannot be boiled down to an essence. His artistry and compassion are accompanied by clever ruthlessness. Several times in the story his enemies are killed, but he retains "plausible deniability." He remains far from the action and then even takes vengeance on occasion upon the slayers of his enemies. David's hands appear clean even when we suspect they are blood- and mud-soaked.
As we would expect with two such able observers--both are professors of law at NYU, with Halbertal a leading scholar on Maimonides and Holmes an expert in constitutional theory--there are many penetrating observations here about dynasties, their dangers, and the rippling effects of attaining and losing power. Halbertal and Holmes see the paranoia of King Saul less as mental illness and more as political condition: "Manipulating everyone in sight leads the sovereign to distrust those around him, since he will naturally project his own scheming and manipulative style onto his courtiers and retainers." They offer an acute analysis of the way the paranoid is shaped by schemers around him, because of paranoia's "fluid malleability, vulnerability to manipulation and tendency to uncontrolled expansion." In such moments the authors provide a careful reading that offers insight into the workings of power.
But at too many other moments Halbertal and Holmes descend into the pedestrian. They do not have much that is original to say on the subject. They observe that "when it helps consolidate rather than undermine the ruler's hold on power, justice is much more likely to be done." Well, yes. Or this: "Where the choice comes down to killing or being killed, the very distinction between the moral and the instrumental, so important to those of us uninvolved in power politics, may effectively disappear." I would hazard a guess that when it comes to killing or being killed, the distinction between the moral or instrumental disappears for those not involved in power politics
Lover, betrayer, poet and warrior, and so much more, David left a legacy that expands beyond the confines of the house of worship into art, music, literature, and political theory. David is a protean being who deployed the multitude of his gifts skillfully enough to survive and die, unlike most ancient kings, peacefully in his bed. Halbertal and Holmes have given us a read of Samuel heavy on political lessons, but as they themselves recognize, it is just a chip off an inexhaustible block that is the ongoing study of the astonishing ancient king of Israel.
David Wolpe is the Max Webb Senior Rabbi of Sinai Temple and the author o/David: The Divided Heart (Yale University Press).
Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)
Wolpe, David. "Game of thrones." Commentary, May 2017, p. 52+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA492535959&it=r&asid=44714861ac2b97769d911a813da8d632. Accessed 9 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A492535959

The Anatomy of Antiliberalism

Glenn Tinder
272.4 (Oct. 1993): p116.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1993 Atlantic Media, Ltd.
http://www.atlanticmedia.com/
Liberalism can be defined as the philosophy and practice of liberty, with liberty understood not only as protection against undue interference with an individual's life but also in terms of representative government, constitutionalism, rule of law, and other such institutions commonly found in the polities of North America and Western Europe. Liberalism began to develop as long ago as the sixth century B.C., in ancient Greece, and is arguably the main strand in the political tradition of the West. One of the principal themes advanced in The Anatomy of Antiliberalism is that opposition to liberalism is also a tradition. It is represented by figures such as Joseph de Maistre, Leo Strauss, Alasdair Maclntyre, and Christopher Lasch. The author's purpose is both to define the antiliberal tradition and to defend liberalism against it. The result is a book that sheds a good deal of light on the idea of liberty, mainly through the author's vigorous and well-informed polemic, but also partly through inadvertent disclosures by the author - a liberal - of limitations of the liberal mind.
It is noteworthy that the antiliberal tradition is defined by Holmes in a way that groups together two very different political types: violent antiliberals, such as fascists, and what we might call "liberal" antiliberals - writers who attack liberalism yet accept the established framework of constitutional government in the West. Holmes says explicitly that he is not insinuating that the liberal antiliberals are quasi-fascists. Why, then, classify them with fascist and other violent antiliberals? The answer, I think, is that Holmes is struck first of all by the common principles that bind together the two types of antiliberals; he is struck also by the failure, as he sees it, of liberal antiliberals to take note of or set themselves apart from their sinister comrades. "They make no clarifying effort," he writes, "to explain their differences from fascist philosophers whose rhetoric is often indistinguishable from their own."
Defined in this comprehensive fashion, then, what is antiliberalism? As a tradition, it contains certain typical elements. It is often pessimistic in its view of human nature and history, and attacks liberalism for naive illusions concerning human goodness and the power of reason. Antiliberalism is in many instances aristocratic, in one way or another, and criticizes the egalitarian and democratic aspects of liberalism. Typically, antiliberals emphasize the social nature of human beings and construe liberalism as "atomistic" - that is, as tending to regard each individual as a separate, self-contained universe. Finally, antiliberalism emphasizes the absoluteness of values, and sometimes asserts the reality of that supreme value God, and accordingly brings liberalism under judgment for its supposed moral relativism and its secularism. Antiliberals do not stand for any single social and political ideal, but typically they affirm tradition, authority, and "community," which is apt to be equated with some particular social unit such as the nation. They may favor an established religion, or a clerisy such as the philosophical elite that was for Leo Strauss the purpose and center of the social order. Almost always they wish to provide moral discipline and sensitivity with some kind of force and standing in the public realm.
Antiliberalism is not unattractive. Practically everyone in a society as morally and spiritually chaotic as present-day America will find congenial ideas in the antiliberal tradition. Hence the importance of the author's defense of liberalism - for it is liberal convictions and institutions that confine our chaos within humane bounds. Were liberalism to be lost, our present disorder and confusion would be turned into an irretrievable historical disaster. One of the main things Stephen Holmes (who teaches political theory at the University of Chicago) intends to do in his book, and does do very well, is to show that the great liberal writers, such as John Locke, Adam Smith, and John Stuart Mill, were acute and well-balanced thinkers who seldom made the kind of simple errors with which the antiliberals charge them. They were not, for example, so extreme in their individualism as to ignore or deny the social nature of human beings.
The chief value of The Anatomy of Antiliberalism, however, lies not in what the author does to set straight the historical record of liberal thought but rather in his clarification of certain principles concerning the character and meaning of liberty. On our grasp of these may well depend the saving of the liberal structure of the American polity.
One of these principles, for example, concerns the relationship of liberty and class. Among the oldest and most powerful prejudices against liberalism is the one embodied in the Marxist canard that, as the British socialist Harold Laski put it, liberalism is "the philosophy of a business civilization." Such an interpretation reduces values of universal import to matters of class interest. Holmes effectively disposes of this prejudice when he observes that "the liberal campaign against arbitrary arrest, preventive detention, and savage punishments cannot be reduced to a bourgeois strategy for maximizing profits." Similar points can be made concerning other liberal goals. Religious tolerance, personal liberty, and the franchise are of value not merely to members of the bourgeoisie but to all members of the human race. Some of the most tragic developments of this century might not have occurred had key leaders in the Marxist world had some sense of the universality of liberal ideals.
Another important principle skillfully dealt with in The Anatomy of Antiliberalism has to do with the political implications of pessimism. One of the most notable characteristics of the antiliberals is their tendency to criticize liberals for their unrealistic optimism yet in constructing their own social and political ideals to become optimists themselves. This happens, for example, when they treat tradition as a storehouse of wisdom rather than of prejudice (after all, slavery in the United States was a rather ancient and widely honored tradition at the time it was abolished in 1865). Their selective optimism is evident when they affirm the wisdom and moral purity of a particular elite or class, as do Strauss in the case of philosophers and Lasch in his discussion of the lower middle class. Holmes neatly brings out the more balanced understanding inherent in liberalism with his observation that "liberals are not optimists but universalistic pessimists: not the governed alone, but also the governors need to be ruled."
One of the most significant liberal principles is established in Holmes's statement that "most liberals valued freedom of thought not because they were moral skeptics but, on the contrary, because they saw such freedom as an indispensable condition for discovering the moral truth." Critics of liberalism often assume that because in a liberal society all moral issues are open to public debate, and no particular moral code has official status, liberalism involves the abandonment of all moral principles. Holmes's statement shows that this is not so. No doubt liberals sometimes have assumed that issues open to debate are inherently irresolvable and that all moral principles are therefore in doubt. But such an inference is not logically necessary. On the contrary, intellectual liberty may be based on the premise that moral truth can be discovered and securely established only through uninhibited inquiry. Moreover, it may be joined with the proposition that intellectual liberty cannot be significant unless it is a road to moral truth; otherwise it is reduced to an exchange of idle opinions. Granted, free speech in America today is used mainly for purveying advertising and entertainment and for pressing group and party interests. Nevertheless, moral inquiry does occur; the abortion controversy is evidence of this. And the idea that freedom is a condition for discovering moral truth is not insignificant from either a theoretical or a practical point of view.
Among the liberal principles clarified by Holmes, none is more important than that of individualism, which is strongly defended. Such a defense is particularly welcome in the present intellectual climate. The notion that human beings can be fully human only as members of cohesive social groups, although at least as ancient as the philosophy of Plato, has in our time reached the status of a cliche. It has been influentially represented by writers such as Alasdair MacIntyre and Robert Bellah. It is commonly accompanied by animadversions on the supposedly blind and insensitive way in which liberal individualists block the satisfaction of one of humanity's deepest needs - the need for "community." One truth ignored in such communitarian critiques of liberalism is that many cohesive social groups are quite evil, and if individualism consists in assuring that individuals are able to stand apart from such groups, then individualism is quite a good thing. Drawing a phrase from Michael Sandel, a leading critic of liberal individualism, Holmes observes that members of the Ku Klux Kian, as well as of groups more widely admired, have "a commonality of shared self-understanding." And further along he speaks ironically of racism as a "robust denial of atomistic individualism."
Also commonly ignored in communitarian critiques of liberal individualism is that individualism implies the denial only of coerced relationships, not of all relationships whatever. One of the chief errors of the antiliberals lies in the assumption that individualism is inherently antisocial, whereas the truth is that "individualism can involve a heightened concern for others [Holmes's emphasis] as individuals rather than as members of ascriptive groups." In other words, the core idea of individualism does not have to be that all true life is private and exclusive. It can be rather that all true relationships are formed in freedom.
This principle has an important bearing on the subject of civil liberties. Criticisms of liberal individualism are typically accompanied by attacks on the preoccupation of liberals with individual rights, which supposedly leads to selfishness, to uncooperative social relationships, and to a neglect of interpersonal obligations. Here again antiliberals blind themselves to the true logic of liberty. Without individual rights there is no security for lives that are unselfish, cooperative, and morally resolute, because lives of this sort very often clash with the demands of racial, national, and other social groups. In a totalitarian state a dissident - like Andrei Sakharov - is rarely if ever a selfish individualist. As Holmes puts it, with characteristic succinctness, "Liberal rights ... are facilitative. They make possible all kinds of social relations."
These are only examples of the liberal principles discussed in the Anatomy of Antiliberalism. The book is rich in insights and ideas, all of which contribute to the overwhelming impression the reader is likely to derive from the book: that liberalism is not weak and one-sided but rather takes into account, or at least is able to take into account, a wide range of fundamental human needs and desires. The liberalism sketched by Holmes is not easily relativized in either radical or conservative terms.
A serious weakness in Holmes's argument, however, is that liberalism in its traditional forms emerges from his book - contrary, perhaps, to his own convictions - as a philosophy and practice without any serious drawbacks whatever. This falsifies not only liberalism but also the situation of human beings in history. As the great liberal writer Isaiah Berlin has eloquently argued, no one set of social and political institutions can allow for the satisfaction of all legitimate aspirations, because these aspirations clash. Thus personal freedom may inescapably involve economic insecurity, and religious tolerance may lead unavoidably to spiritual uncertainty. Destroying established inequalities - however desirable in itself - will in most circumstances weaken authority and attenuate social relationships. Berlin's writings demonstrate that a defense of liberalism can be based on such incongruities, for they imply a degree of social imperfection that renders liberty imperative. Nevertheless, they also imply that even a liberal society will incorporate substantial imperfections.
Holmes's tendency to idealize liberalism is manifested in a chapter on "antonym substitution." Here it is charged that antiliberals regularly set aside the counterconcepts that liberals had in mind in setting forth liberal concepts and replace them with their own counterconcepts. For example, liberals stressed instrumental values as a way of opposing not moral values but "wastefulness and status display." Antiliberals distort liberalism by contrasting instrumental with moral attitudes and by ignoring the fact that liberal instrumentalism was a historical expedient rather than a philosophical absolute. As another example, the liberal emphasis on the subjectivity (Holmes encloses the word in quotation marks) of value judgments was intended not to deny altogether the possibility of objective value judgments, as antiliberals maintain in another act of antonym substitution, but only to "deflate moral imperialisms." But mightn't Holmes better have admitted that the great liberal writers, if only under the pressure of intellectual debate, occasionally were one-sided? Aren't there weaknesses of some sort in a philosophy that stands secure only by allowing its defenders to choose their own antonyms rather than by accepting responsibility for whatever antonyms are inherent in its major concepts? It seems fair to say that Holmes does not fully face up to the imbalances present at least in traditional liberalism, if not in liberalism abstracted from all shifting historical circumstances - in liberalism ideally defined. The liberalism suggested in Holmes's defense thus lacks the hard, realistic edge one feels in Isaiah Berlin's liberalism.
As these comments indicate, Holmes does not give antiliberals a sympathetic reading. He is fair in his treatment of them, but far from long-suffering. He does not follow the practice strongly recommended by one of the greatest of liberal writers, John Stuart Mill: that of taking care to enter fully into the minds of intellectual opponents in order to discover the element of truth that is apt to be contained even in opinions that are on the whole erroneous. It might be argued that the greatest weakness in Holmes's book derives from this failure. He becomes so engaged in countering antiliberals at every turn that he never stands back to ask what is bothering them basically. Thus antiliberalism often appears in his book as a sheer gratuitous misreading of liberalism, which is yet oddly widespread.
Nevertheless, underneath antiliberal polemics, as misdirected as they may be on the level of explicit argumentation, one can see a source of discontent that cannot be disposed of as readily as Holmes disposes of explicit antiliberal errors. This is the feeling that liberalism is somehow spiritually deficient. This feeling can assume diverse forms - that liberalism is lacking in heroic grandeur, in religious awe, in moral depth, or in tragic sensitivity. It is dry and practical and worldly. It is somehow small-minded. Antiliberals are very diverse in their political orientations. It. might be said, however, that most of them are in search of glory and see liberalism as inglorious, in thought and in action alike.
If such is an accurate characterization of the gravamen of antiliberal charges against liberalism, then it does not quite suffice to refute each of those charges singly, however effectively this may be done. It needs to be shown either that "glory" is not a legitimate common aim or that liberalism is not inglorious. Holmes does not manifest very much sensitivity to this issue, and his book contains comments that suggest he is unaware of it. He remarks, for example, that liberals admired the useful not only as opposed to the wasteful and "the merely traditional" but also as opposed to the sacred, as though this would be the attitude of any sensible person. In the same paragraph he casually observes that monks and aristocrats were "regularly derided" by liberals because they "never contributed anything useful [Holmes's emphasis] to society" - a statement one might characterize as at best too simple. In another passage he grants that some liberals "identified good and bad with bodily pleasure and pain" but excuses this on the grounds - presumably unexceptionable to anyone of normal sentiments and intelligence - that most of them were merely "hoping to channel intellectual energies away from sterile theological disputes and toward discovering medical and economic responses to the unrelenting hardships of famine and plague." (It may be noted simply that theologians, although much concerned with some of the ultimate questions of human existence, are no more favorably inclined toward sterile theological disputes, or toward famine and plague, than anyone else.) In passages such as these, and in his general neglect of the deepest sources of antiliberal discontent, Holmes displays some of the very liberal qualities - the dry practicality and worldliness, the unconcern with spiritual nuances - that disturb and anger antiliberals. It may be said, accordingly, that although he deals very effectively with the anatomy of antiliberalism, he pays too little attention to its spirit.
It is, of course, the anatomy, rather than the spirit, of antiliberalism that is Holmes's explicit topic. Nevertheless, the spiritual deficiencies of liberalism are of urgent concern to us today. This is because the inglorious character of liberalism is not merely an impression that a handful of intellectuals have derived from reading the works of Locke and Mill. It is, rather, a glaring fact of life in the most powerful of liberal nations.
More than a century and a half ago, in his study of democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that "nothing conceivable is so petty, so insipid, so crowded with paltry interests - in one word, so anti-poetic - as the life of a man in the United States." It seems unlikely that Tocqueville would appraise American liberty more positively were he able to return today and observe the impact on it of technology, industrialization, material abundance, and television. Surely one of the most significant realities of our time is that the life of free peoples contains little to stir awe or admiration in the mind of an impartial observer. Modern liberty is decidedly inglorious.
Must it be so? Is human nature so deeply inclined toward the shallow and the base that in all times and circumstances liberty will give rise to patterns of existence that are "petty" and "insipid"? Will liberty always be displayed mainly in lives "crowded with paltry interests"? Is liberalism in practice bound to leave people for whom the word "glory" stands for something of importance feeling that humanity has been diminished?
If so, the rebellion against liberalism, which (as shown in Nazism and communism) can assume forms far more terrifying and virulent than the writings Holmes discusses, will be mounted recurrently and will no doubt sometimes succeed. And if liberalism is bound to be inglorious, one may even wonder, in spite of the decencies liberalism safeguards, why the rebellion shouldn't succeed. "High abstracted man alone" may be, as Herman Melville said, "a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe." Such a man may, however, be unfit for liberty and may, wherever liberty is established, come to conform with Melville's characterization of "mankind in the mass": "a mob of unnecessary duplicates, both contemporary and hereditary."
The author of The Anatomy of Antiliberalism deals admirably with the issues that he does address; one cannot help wishing he had addressed this issue, too.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)
Tinder, Glenn. "The Anatomy of Antiliberalism." Atlantic, Oct. 1993, p. 116+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA13280713&it=r&asid=bfacd2ea96c4fd48953463722c9ce8e4. Accessed 9 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A13280713

Passions and Constraint: On the Theory of Liberal Democracy

Loren E. Lomasky
27.8 (Jan. 1996): p52.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1996 Reason Foundation
http://reason.com/about
Whether despite or because of its demonstrated ability to establish beachheads of peace and prosperity in a word where poverty and hostility are the norm, in each generation liberal democracy is assailed by clutches of indignant despisers. During the 1930s fascists and communists agreed on little other than disdain for the democracies that both declared insipid, decadent, and doomed. The flower children and New Left of the 1960s dismissed liberalism as a subservient tool of capitalism. Their tastes ran more to the "people's democracies" of Eastern Europe and Asia than to what they characterized as the compromise-ridden, indecisive regimes of the West.
Today the language of the critique has shifted, but the underlying animus against liberal democracy persists. Distinguished political theorists join with self-appointed spokespersons for those victimized on the basis of class, race, gender, or sexual orientation to preach a gospel of particularism that celebrates "cultural diversity" and "community." This most recent cohort of critics dismisses liberal toleration as either the tattered myth within which elites package repressive policies or, alternatively, decent enough but too tepid a broth to sustain the spirits of atomized individuals cast adrift in the seas of post-modernity.
A noteworthy sidelight to the protracted campaign against liberal democracy is the conciliatory meekness offered up in response by wide swaths of an intelligentsia that might instead have been expected to rise to forthright defense. There have, of course, been honorable exceptions such as John Dewey and F.A. Hayek, both of whom endured years of marginalization and exile from the mainstream of so-called progressive political discourse. They are now acclaimed, justly, as clear voices from the wilderness.
Among contemporary launchers of counterattacks against the foes of liberalism, few have been as sharp and incisive as Stephen Holmes. In a series of articles and reviews, later collected in The Anatomy of Antiliberalism, Holmes takes on the historical and, especially, contemporary icons of illiberalism. These essays wed scholarly mastery over primary texts to a hard-hitting prose that uncompromisingly explodes the fatuities, solecisms, and fuzzyminded theories of the gums of avant-garde politics. Both within and outside the academy they attracted an influential circle of admirers. Unlike other major exponents of liberal political philosophy such as John Rawls, Robert Nozick, and Ronald Dworkin, though, Holmes has been known almost entirely as a leader of counterattacks; his positive views have been much less visible.
Passions and Constraint aims to fill that gap. Sandwiched between a brief introduction and conclusion are eight previously published essays laced together for the occasion by a few connecting threads. Together they advance the following three theses: First, the canonical texts of liberalism do not embrace a view of human nature as essentially egoistic and calculating but rather depict man as a field of contending passions only sporadically governed by self-interested reason. Second, constitutional constraints of the sort that typically govern liberal regimes do not undermine the capacity of majorities to give effect to their will through democratic means; limited government can be and typically is stronger in virtue of its limitations. Third, the legitimate inheritor of the tradition of classical liberalism is not libertarianism but the welfare state.
Although Holmes is too well-informed and engaged a student of political texts not to stimulate and inform, Passions and Constraint is only intermittently successful. Its most solidly grounded discussions tend either to lack novelty or to veer away from what is philosophically central, while its boldest and most original arguments display patches of surprising clumsiness.
For example, a few evangelizing economists aside, it is hard to find any notable liberal theorist who has maintained that human beings always act as relentlessly wealth-maximizing homo economicus. Individuals coolly and deliberately plot strategies to advance their own material well-being - sometimes. But they also act from love, loyalty, rage, rancor, jealousy, whimsy, spite, superstition - often to their subsequent regret and not infrequently with concurrent awareness that they are inflicting grievous harms on themselves.
The frailty of reason when caught up in gales of passion was much commented on by the philosophers of antiquity; Holmes amply demonstrates in "The Secret History of Self-Interest" that modern moral philosophy was equally conversant with the waywardness of self-interest. Even Thomas Hobbes, that doughty champion of prudent preservation of life and limb, is shown in a companion essay to have described the English Civil War as permeated at every stage by irrational, self-destructive excesses on the part of people who should have known better.
That the great modern moralists acknowledged chasms of unreason in human life is undeniable, and Holmes's presentation of the evidence is as incisive as any I have seen. But its very comprehensiveness underscores what is missing: an account of how in the presence of such a cornucopia of indications to the contrary these liberal thinkers could ever have been read as offering a theory of human beings as self-interested rational maximizers.
The answer, as one might expect, is that important themes in the texts support a version of that interpretation. Rational self-interest may be far from ubiquitous, may suffer frequent and drastic eclipses, but it is nonetheless privileged among the springs of human action. It is the norm from which deviations are judged to be deficiencies. In this regard reason is like health. Even if almost all of us almost all the time fall short of exemplifying perfect health, that does not in any way impugn models of adequate human physiology.
What health is to the functioning of the body, prudent regard for interest is to effective agency; on this nearly all the modern liberal theorists are agreed. And not them alone. Aristotle freely acknowledges the persistence of unreason in human affairs but nonetheless takes it to be a definitional truth that man is rational animal. What modernity adds to the anthropological reflections of antiquity is the Enlightenment faith that science is destined in the long run to supplant superstition in the minds of men, and that an enlightened understanding of society will enable the design of institutions under which liberty will be enhanced, passions restrained, and prosperity generalized.
All of us, claim the architects of liberalism, have a primary stake in instituting and maintaining a regime in which voluntary transactions for mutual advantage predominate. If only individuals can be induced to retain a keen sense of where their interest lies and then to adopt instrumentally rational means to advance it, the desired end is within our grasp. Counting testimonials in the writings of classical liberals to failings of reason is accurate enough scholarship but obscures the philosophical core of the liberal project.
There is more substance to Holmes's explorations of his second theme: the possibility of enhancing government's efficacy through limitation of its scope. Via a fresh and insightful deployment of classical texts, Holmes discovers an early version of this argument in the 16th-century French theorist Jean Bodin, best known as a political absolutist. Then, in "Gag Rules or the Politics of Omission," he serves up a splendid array of instances in which governments' limitations of what will be allowed a spot on the political agenda expand their capacity to govern. Nicely complementing this informative excursion into practical politics is "Precommitment and the Paradox of Democracy," a theoretical joust between teams captained by Tom Paine as advocate for unlimited democracy and James Madison as proponent of strengthening democracy by limiting it.
Some of this is wonderfully good. Some, though, is sloppy. Holmes cites Madison's remark that "the important distinction so well understood in America between a Constitution established by the people and unalterable by the government, and a law established by the government and alterable by the government, seems to have been little understood and less observed in any other country." Holmes takes this to imply a belief by the federalists that constitutional restraints are "an instrument of self-government, a technique whereby the citizenry rules itself." And he draws the further corollary that "once it is recognized that learning capacity can be enhanced by strategic self-binding, then self-binding becomes not only permissible but obligatory."
Who, though, is this self-binder and self-ruler? It is, says Holmes, the citizenry. But that is not what Madison is saying here; indeed, it is diametrically opposed to Madison's point. In the cited passage he is intent to distinguish sharply between the people who establish through their consent the constitutional constraints under which they will be ruled and the government that subsequently exercises that rule. The matter at issue is, then, not self-restraint by a people that is to govern itself but restraint by that people over the motley collection of senators, representatives, and executive functionaries who will be their governors. It is they who are to be bound, not oneself.
To elide this distinction is to distort the most critical component of the federalist concern to establish a constitutionally limited government, a republic in which strong wire protects the hens from the foxes. For Madison as for Plato before him, the question "Who will guard the guardians?" is central to the craft of political construction. It is not resolved by the happy thought, "Well, they can guard themselves." Representative democracy is, one may agree, a form of government than which no better has been invented, but that does not sanction playing fast and loose with ambiguities latent in the term "self-government."
If Holmes's development of the second theme is a bit slipshod in places, the third is thoroughly ramshackle. There is a specter haunting Passions and Constraint; it is the specter of libertarianism. Although I don't usually speculate about the biographical minutiae that may have played a role in shaping an author's manuscript, these essays convince me that Holmes is chafing under the burden of being taken by detractors and sympathizers alike to be a singer in the libertarian choir.
And why should they not? The evidence is substantial. Holmes has made a career of vigorously, unapologetically, and confidently smiting philistine antiliberals with their own asinine jawbones. Surely, someone might reasonably conclude, no such intrepid champion could arise from the crop of diffident, desiccated, demoralized welfarists who nervously skitter away from contagion by the "L-word." Who other than a libertarian promotes such a muscular liberalism? Some of us would wear such an identification as a badge of honor. But in the academic circles in which Holmes travels it is otherwise. Quite otherwise. And so to protest his innocence he inserts gratuitous antilibertarian sneers wherever in the text he finds an apt - or not-so-apt - occasion. I counted well over a dozen. This amounts to more than a moderate haunting; it verges on possession.
By way of performing an exorcism, Holmes undertakes to redeem the soul of the liberal tradition for the democratic left. The legitimate inheritor of John Locke is, he contends, not Hayek or Milton Friedman or any of their ilk but rather John Rawls. An authentically classical liberalism suitably retooled for the circumstances of the late 20th century will, Holmes insists, be markedly egalitarian and redistributionist. If he can pull this argument off, it will be a major breakthrough for welfare liberalism, and in "Welfare and the Liberal Conscience," Holmes hauls out his biggest guns in service of these revisionist claims.
They misfire. First Holmes implausibly attempts to recast conflicts in liberal thought between freedom and equality as oppositions between different kinds of freedoms. If this were right it would conveniently transform egalitarian-inspired fetters on liberty into promotions of (other varieties of) liberty. Next he maintains that the liberal tradition defends "sovereign, centralized, and bureaucratic authority" for its "important trust-busting functions," inverting the traditional liberal critique of the state as the creator and sustainer par excellence of monopoly.
Finally, bringing this stage of the argument to what he takes to be triumphant closure, Holmes cites welfare liberalism's favorite passage from Locke (First Treatise of Government, 42): "We know God hath not left one Man so to the Mercy of another that he may starve him if he please....As Justice gives every Man a Title to the product of his honest Industry, and the fair Acquisitions of his Ancestors descended to him; so Charity gives every man a title to so much of another's Plenty, as will keep him from extream want, where he has no means to subsist otherwise." Concludes Holmes: "That this passage enunciates a universal entitlement to welfare cannot be denied" (italics in the original).
Has he succeeded after all in paving an impeccably Lockean road to the welfare state? I have often cautioned my students to be on guard when an author labels a result "undeniable" or "incontrovertible"; most likely they are encountering something that begs to be controverted. This paragraph is a paradigm of the genre. With breathtaking nonchalance Holmes utterly neglects the qualifications that Locke carefully attaches to claims for relief from indigence.
First, such claims are directed only against "another's Plenty"; no basis whatsoever is admitted for redistributing goods away from those whose stock is less than plentiful. Second, transfers are justified only in the case of "extream want"; no global principle of promotion of equality in holdings such as the Rawlsian Difference Principle can be inferred from it. Third, alms are explicitly said by Locke to be a last resort; they are forthcoming only to he who "has no means to subsist otherwise." Fourth, the entitlement is only to so much as is required to lift the beneficiary out of desperate indigence to a level of minimal subsistence. Fifth, the title is said to be one of "Charity" - and not, for example, justice or rights. But charitable provision is by its very nature voluntary, the free gift of a donor prompted by compassion or fellow-feeling. Claims to charity, accordingly, are not difficult to distinguish from a few thousand pages of IRS code or Department of Health and Human Services regulation. If we are looking for a proposition that really does not admit of being denied, this is an exemplary candidate.
What, then, does the "universal entitlement to welfare" come to? Simply put, it morally obliges the fortunate to exhibit generosity toward those who are distinctly less fortunate. The gap between this and the welfare state is immense. It is hard to believe that a scholar who has in other contexts demonstrated himself to be a remarkably perceptive and acute reader of texts could have imagined otherwise. Holmes's erratic construal of Locke stands, therefore, as a cautionary example of how an ideologically inspired fervor to come down on the side of the angels can hopelessly bedevil thought. Not everywhere in these essays, but far too often, Holmes takes a ride on the sort of spavined beast to which throughout his career he himself has so memorably applied the whip. Holmes remains one of our finest anti-antiliberals. But until he better constrains the passion to prove to the world and to himself that he is untainted by any trace of libertarianism, his excursions into the positive theory of liberalism are not likely to be auspicious:
Contributing Editor Loren E. Lomasky (llomask@opie.bgsu.edu) is a professor of philosophy at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)
Lomasky, Loren E. "Passions and Constraint: On the Theory of Liberal Democracy." Reason, Jan. 1996, p. 52+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA17779905&it=r&asid=293224f1b61d01b6f3166bdae83faeac. Accessed 9 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A17779905

The Anatomy of Antiliberalism

Steven Hayward
25.9 (Feb. 1994): p60.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1994 Reason Foundation
http://reason.com/about
LIBERALISM BEARS A HEAVY STIGMA in the popular mind today. It suffices merely to invoke liberal--with leaden emphasis on the first syllable--to produce the image of woolly-headed political incompetence embodied in Michael Dukakis or George McGovern. It is significant that the chief political aim of Bill Clinton is to avoid being perceived as a "liberal."
This is a great disservice to the grand tradition of liberalism rightly understood (or "classical liberatism"), the tradition of individual liberty, contract, and limited government. What people typically mean today when they use liberal derisively is better understood as statist. The statist impulse in Western liberal democracies derives from at least two problems. Statism can be seen as the internal degradation of liberalism through egalitarianism; the equal protection of individual rights gives way to the desire to ensure the equal enjoyment of rights through expanded state power. Statism can also be seen as the weak, inarticulate, concessionary response of liberal regimes to Marxist-based moralism.
Liberalism in the older sense of the term deserves a defense and rehabilitation. Libertarianism may be said to be the project of defending and rescuing liberalism from its modem statist impulses, and it is arguably the only such project on the scene with any vigor. It is unfortunate, therefore, that Stephen Holmes mars his otherwise helpful Anatomy of Antiliberalism with a few stray animadversions on libertarianism. These could be safely overlooked, except that these disparagements (one of which appears on the last page) might suggest to the discerning reader that would-be defenders of liberalism have a blind spot for statism, which paves the way for the projects of radical antiliberals.
It would be mistaken, though, to suggest that Holmes has written an unworthy book. To the contrary, Holmes's book is most useful in sharpening the question: What are we defending liberalism from? While libertarians focus on the visible and advancing edge of ideological statism (much of which derives from the internal corruption of liberalism), Holmes has chosen to focus on an antiliberal strain typically neglected by libertarians. His target is the intellectual antiliberalism that has as its unifying theme what might be called Non-Marxist Pre-Modernism. This kind of antiliberalism is the province of neither the left nor the right, but instead thrives nicely at both extremes. Even though non-Marxist antiliberalism is found at both ends of the spectrum, there are common threads running through both varieties.
Holmes examines six key figures and 10 fallacies of antiliberal thought. His figures are Joseph de Maistre, Carl Schmitt, and Leo Strauss on the right, and Alasdair MacIntyre, Christopher Lasch, and Roberto Unger on the left. Holmes draws a distinction between "hard" antiliberals on the right and "soft" antiliberals on the left.
Hard antiliberals reject liberalism in favor of a higher individualism within some kind of aristocratic regime. Hard antiliberals scorn both equality and the supposed unmanly softness of a peaceful liberal society. Holmes notes the incongruity of this depiction of the inherent weakness of liberal society with the fact of the British Empire's flourishing under liberal parliamentary democracy. (The triumph of liberal democracies in two world wars against theoretically stronger antiliberal regimes can also be adduced as evidence that the antiliberal portrait of the character of liberal society is overdrawn, and the examples of Lincoln and Churchill show that liberal democracies can produce vigorous leadership when necessary.)
Soft antiliberals reject liberalism, though not democracy or equality, in favor of a vaguely defined communitarianism. Their prescription for the best regime is less specific than that of the hard antiliberals. Their sentimental attacks on the way liberalism erodes warm and fuzzy community life is usually followed up with a suggestion no bolder than tightening the pornography laws a bit.
HOLMES DOES NOT MINCE WORDS IN discussing his targets, and he finds slightly contemptible the intellectual Manicheanism of antiliberal scholarship. He charges Strauss, for instance, with "bookworm heroism" for suggesting that the "crisis of the West" will be resolved through close readings of ancient texts. MacIntyre, Holmes writes, "uses the Greek polis as a large paddle for spanking modern man." And Lasch's books are summed up as glum mood pieces.
Holmes has chosen serious targets, rather than the easily dismissed reactionary conservatives who disparage Enlightenment rationality in toto and seek after "a better guide than reason." Although one may quarrel about whether Holmes has been entirely fair in his spirited treatments of each thinker, he has done a valuable service in taking up a group whose influence (with the exception of de Maistre) is increasing. Holmes's close reading strips away the familiar sound bites from most of these thinkers and reveals glaring defects in their arguments. The soft antiliberals in particular, Holmes persuasively argues, are guilty of schizophrenic self-contradiction, always shrinking back from any serious proposal to overturn liberalism or liberal institutions. "A high-pitched jeremiad fizzles into a tiptoed retreat," he writes.
The most helpful part of the book is the second half, where Holmes dissects and refutes 10 fallacies common to antiliberal thought. Chesterton remarked that heresy is not outright untruth but rather a small part of truth gone mad. Most of the antiliberal fallacies Holmes identifies are aspects of liberal thought driven to an unreasonable extreme. Liberalism, according to these fallacies, is: hostile to "community," responsible for the "atomization" of the individual, indifferent to the public good, and corrosive of authority. It sacrifices the public realm to privacy, places excessive reliance on the anthropology of "economic man," establishes a theory of rights that leads to selfishness, generates moral skepticism, and places excessive reliance on reason.
Most of these fallacies, Holmes argues, arise partly because antiliberals tend to be bad historians of liberal thought, removing liberalism and liberal ideas from their proper context. Hence, each of these fallacies tends to be manifested in Holmes's 10th and most encompassing fallacy, "antonym substitution." This is a form of intellectual bait-and-switch in which antiliberals contrast an old liberal principle with a modem problem or imperative that the principle was not originally proposed in relation to. Property rights, for example, are held up as a badge of selfishness as opposed to the idea of charity, thus wrenching property from its context as a liberal bulwark against destitution and arbitrary power. This acute analysis reveals the brutal truth that even Holmes is too reserved to speak plainly: Much antiliberal criticism is aimed at straw men and is animated by a nostalgia for a moral-spiritual-communitarian society that never was.
HOLMES RESERVES HIS MOST SUPERB scorn for the communitarians. "Communitarians invest this word [community] with redemptive significance," Holmes writes. "When we hear it, all our critical faculties are meant to fall asleep. In the vocabulary of these antiliberals, |community' is used as an anesthetic, and amnesiac, and aphrodisiac." But Holmes thinks that in addition to being theoretically weak, communitarianism is not politically dangerous--a debatable conclusion. Compulsory national service, to take a leading communitarian idea on the scene today, may not be the leading edge of jackbooted fascism, but any nation that can contemplate such a policy in the absence of some argument from necessity is clearly confused about its liberal principles.
Holmes's critique also leaves little room for acknowledging some of the points about which antiliberals are right (though usually for the wrong reasons). Alasdair MacIntyre is surely right about the disarray of contemporary moral discourse. Holmes makes a short but able defense of liberalism against the charge that it is responsible for the moral skepticism of our time, but the reader is left with the sense that Holmes may doubt the seriousness of the issue beyond the bounds of liberalism's relation to it.
And his relentless scorn for the communitarians also causes him to miss a couple of opportunities. The real enemy of inertial or traditional community structures is not liberalism per se but affluence. And it is far from certain that affluent commercial society experiences fewer genuine expressions of communal life than pre-liberal societies. Social policy, especially welfare and Social Security, has weakened some communal and familial bonds. But it is also probably true that, compared to pre-liberal society, there are today far more vital expressions of spontaneous community as well as individual charity. This practical or empirical concern may seem inappropriate for Holmes's intellectual analysis, but it is probably necessary. The vague longing for "community" that expresses itself in various romanticisms is a genuine aspect of human nature that is both politically significant and not susceptible to rational containment alone.
Finally, it ought to be noted that the liberalism and antiliberalism portrayed in this book both seem to overlook that fact that America is not simply a liberal regime; it was also founded to be a republican regime. The founding era's liberal republicans thought that self-government depended on the moral character of its citizens and also thought that Enlightenment rationality and liberalism were compatible with republicanism and a moderate concern for individual virtue. Contemporary liberalism has forgotten this, and that is part of the reason for its decay into statism and for the opening on the left to the ahistorical nostrums of "civic republicanism."
To the extent that very modem thought has discarded the classical view of human nature, as Strauss and MacIntyre argue, both liberalism and republicanism are undermined. To suggest that modem liberalism may have a blind spot about this is not to grant license for brigades of communitarian virtuecrats. It should suggest, however, that one of the things most needful for rehabilitating liberalism is a candid reaffirmation of human nature, which is under withering attack from feminism, deconstructionism, and other fashionable ideologies.
Indeed, it is the collapse of the intellectual consensus about the first principles of liberalism--a general consensus that serves as a practical substitute for unanimous consent to the original social contract--under the assault of radical ideology that constitutes the "crisis" of liberalism. John Rawls's Political Liberalism aims to develop a least common denominator above which liberalism and liberal institutions may flourish. But Political Liberalism turns out to be mostly a restatement of or series of footnotes to Rawls's 1971 blockbuster, A Theory of Justice.
Readers of that earlier work will recall Rawls's two principles of justice: First, each person has an equal claim to certain basic rights--an arrangement we would all choose in an "original position" (supposedly equivalent to the "state of nature" of old liberals) behind a "veil of ignorance" that prevents any knowledge of our particular circumstances or interests; and second, inequalities are only just if they benefit the least advantaged members of society. There have been countless critiques of Rawls from all quarters, which need not be rehearsed in the context of his present revisions.
Instead, a good starting point for thinking about this book is the often remarked upon abstraction of Rawls's style and approach. This may not stem purely from his academic orientation. In fact, Rawls's ginger and indirect approach to critical views contrasts sharply with fellow academic Holmes's spirited and at times slashing style. On close reading it appears that Rawls is chiefly concerned with the antiliberalism of the radical left, but he is also worried about giving offense to this vocal segment of our intellectual elites. (In the introduction, Rawls seeks to reassure these potential critics that although this book doesn't cover it, "the alleged difficulties in discussing problems of gender and the family can be overcome.")
This interpretation becomes more plausible when one considers that Rawls's famous. second principle rests upon an a priori acceptance of egalitarianism. His tiny rampart against leveling is inadequate to the passions of the day. When removed from abstraction and juxtaposed against the context of current political life, Rawls's project is seen as trying to moderate, accommodate, or appease radical egalitarianism.
Rawls means to be a friend of liberalism against the extremes of antiliberal thought, but the hard left is not likely to accept his appeasement. The aim of defending and reviving liberalism is better sustained through a book such as Thomas Pangle's The Ennobling of Democracy: The Challenge of the Post-Modern Age, which directly confronts radical ideology and seeks to make classical liberalism and republicanism into viable modem alternatives. (Likewise, a nice companion volume to Holmes is Paul Rahe's massive Republics Ancient and Modem, which, while situating America as a liberal republican regime midway between ancient and modern, makes the case that the ancient "communities" that some antiliberals pine for weren't so hotsy-totsy after all.)
The end of the Cold War, Holmes points out, has not necessarily left the world in the hands of liberals, Francis Fukuyama notwithstanding. Ideological antiliberalism of the kind Holmes tracks is important to recognize, but much more immediately troubling is the kind of weak Rawlsian liberalism that plays into the hands of statists and antiliberals alike. To paraphrase the old cliche, with liberals like that, who needs antiliberals?
Contributing Editor Steven Hayward is research and editorial director for the Pacific Research Institute.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)
Hayward, Steven. "The Anatomy of Antiliberalism." Reason, Feb. 1994, p. 60+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA15143296&it=r&asid=26f0f3c4d2beb1b499b477c8eb2a98a1. Accessed 9 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A15143296

THE COST OF RIGHTS: Why Liberty Depends on Taxes

246.2 (Jan. 11, 1999): p58.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1999 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Stephen Holmes and Cass R Sunstein Norton, $24.95 (224p) ISBN 0-393-04670- 2
Perhaps no subject has dominated American discourse in the past 200 years as much as the question of rights--what they are, who has them and under what circumstances Holmes (Passions and Constraint), a political science professor at Princeton and NYU Law School, and Sunstein (Free Markets and Social Justice), a law professor at the University of Chicago, argue persuasively that all rights are political. That is, rights are not moral absolutes, independent of government constraints, but "public goods," funded by taxes, administered by government and subject to distributive justice. According to the authors, no right is costless. Even so-called "negative rights," such as the right to hold property free of government inteference, must be supervised and maintained by tax-funded courtrooms, police and fire stations. The authors profess to be violating a "cultural taboo against the 'costing out' of rights enforcement." While interesting and well argued, the book isn't that bold. It's a reply to free-lunch liberals and to law-and-economics libertarians such as Richard Epstein and Charles Murray, who, in the authors' view, delude themselves with 18th-century "double-think" about their "immaculate independence" from the government. But Sunstein and Holmes don't really address how the rights debate has evolved. Instead of considering workfare or the myriad other ways rights have expanded and contracted in the 1990s, their book merely restates--albeit concisely--the old terms of the debate. (Mar)
Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)
"THE COST OF RIGHTS: Why Liberty Depends on Taxes." Publishers Weekly, 11 Jan. 1999, p. 58. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA53602000&it=r&asid=8a39347d79369c85ae29fdc376566424. Accessed 9 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A53602000

Terrorists: The Matador's Cape: America's Reckless Response to Terror

Yannis A. Stivachtis
31.3 (Summer 2008): p549.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2008 University of Hawaii Press
http://www.uhpress.hawaii.edu/t-biography.aspx
Terrorists
The Matador's Cape. America's Reckless Response to Terror. Stephen Holmes. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. 367 pp. $30.00.
"Following the events of September 11, many international relations scholars and security analysts argued that before the U.S. presidential administration decided how to respond to the terrorist attacks, it needed to think carefully about the causes of the attacks. This suggestion provides the starting point for Stephen Holmes's book, which constitutes a powerful scholarly critique of the way in which the George W. Bush administration responded. Using the metaphor of the 'matador's cape', Holmes contends that the administration responded to 9/11 in exactly the way Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda wanted the United States to react to expose it to the eyes of the Islamic world.... The Matadors Cape is an excellent book."
Yannis A. Stivachtis. Presidential Studies Quarterly 38.2 (June 2008): 366-68.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)
Stivachtis, Yannis A. "Terrorists: The Matador's Cape: America's Reckless Response to Terror." Biography, vol. 31, no. 3, 2008, p. 549+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA188159472&it=r&asid=3281d99e025c5cad4603fccd3f099fce. Accessed 9 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A188159472

The Matador's Cape: America's Reckless Response to Terror

Yannis A. Stivachtis
38.2 (June 2008): p366.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
http://www.theprisidency.org/psq/index.htm
The Matador's Cape: America's Reckless Response to Terror. By Stephen Holmes. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 367 pp.
Following the events of September 11,2001, many international relations scholars and security analysts argued that before the U.S. presidential administration decided how to respond to the terrorist attacks, it needed to think carefully about the causes of the attacks. This suggestion provides the starting point for Stephen Holmes's book, which constitutes a powerful scholarly critique of the way in which the George W. Bush administration responded. Using the metaphor of the "matador's cape," Holmes contends that the administration responded to 9/11 in exactly the way Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda wanted the United States to react in order to expose it to the eyes of the Islamic world. In this metaphor, the matador is bin Laden, who uses the cape to show what he wants the United States to do, while the bull (the United States) follows the cape without being able to reflect on its actions but only responding to the emotions that the cape produces.
Providing a balanced account and analysis of events, The Matador's Cape helps one to understand and explain the United States. The book builds on previous efforts that have sought to explain al-Qaeda's attack, the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and American counterterrorist policy. One of the most attractive features of the volume is its critical appraisal of several theoretical works related to the formulation and implementation of U.S. foreign policy.
The volume is divided into four parts and 13 chapters. The first part (Chapter 1) examines the motivations of the 9/11 organizers and perpetrators. Holmes argues that the common assumption that religious extremism alone caused the 9/11 attacks is misleading. Indeed, emphasizing religious extremism as the only motivator of the plot encourages one to view the events ahistorically and simply as an expression of a fundamentalist movement within Islam that drives its adherents to homicidal violence against infidels. At the same time, it diverts attention from the possibility that previous U.S. activities in the Middle East perhaps caused 9/11. The existence of more than one cause has important consequences for the formulation and implementation of U.S. foreign policy, as different causes may call for different targets and different policies. However, the Bush administration's adoption of the religious extremism cause fits the American self-image that it is the greatest nation on earth, always acting in the service of good. Therefore, nothing that the United States does can be questioned, whereas any action against the United States is destined to come from "evil." Holmes's excellent analysis helps one to understand and explain not only the motivations of the perpetrators who committed such acts of immense violence but also their decision to die for their cause.
The second part of The Matador's Cape identifies and explores the factors that influenced the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq, In Chapter 2, Holmes argues that the Pentagon's failure to prepare for the postwar environment reflects Vice President Richard B. Cheney's and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's pre-9/11 mindset, namely, their conviction that hostile dictatorships are the only serious threats to American security. At a time when security experts were pointing to state collapse, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, identity politics, and other issues as posing serious security challenges to the United States, Cheney and Rumsfeld chose to ignore them. In Chapter 3, Holmes shows convincingly how their indifference to the real threats posed to U.S. interests by state collapse and sectarian violence in Iraq caused them to do nothing to prevent an unprecedented proliferation disaster while destroying Saddam Hussein's regime. Fortunately, this disaster did not happen because Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction.
Chapter 4 examines how the minds of the neoconservatives in the Bush administration were trapped in the past, causing them to ignore the new security threats and to view the use of military force as the best available means to achieve U.S. objectives. As the contents of Chapter 5 indicate, the Cheney-Rumsfeld alliance created a policymaking process that was insulated from the strong doubts being expressed by many officials. As a result, the military never received a comprehensible explanation of what and how it was supposed to achieve.
The third part of The Matador's Cape explores the theoretical attempts that sought to define America's role in the world after the end of the Cold War and helped shape the U.S. response to 9/11. Chapter 6, for example, discusses how Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilizations" underpinned a deep psychological need for confrontation with a malign global enemy. One of the most significant contributions of the volume is its coverage of the role of liberal intellectuals in the run-up to the Iraq War (Chapters 8 and 9). Although antitotalitarian activists and humanitarian interventionists bear no responsibility for the American response to 9/11, Holmes convincingly shows how their positions helped muffle liberal outrage at the decision to invade Iraq. Calls for humanitarian intervention and commitment to stopping genocide at all costs assisted the Bush administration in bypassing the United Nations system in order to end evil by sending American soldiers to topple tyrants inside sovereign states that had not attacked the United States. As Chapter 9 shows, the policy of spreading democracy was quite prominent in justifying the Iraq War. What is remarkable here is that this theory implicitly acknowledges that terrorism is an understandable byproduct of American-backed autocracy in the various Middle East countries.
The final part of the book addresses the Bush administration's implicit claim that the rule of law and due process are sources of weakness, restraining the executive branch and removing the flexibility it needs to conduct the war on terror. In Chapter 10, Holmes provides a historical overview of the curtailments of liberty for the sake of security in American history. In so doing, he illustrates clearly and powerfully how often international disputes have been turned into tools of partisan politics and how an unwatched power, sheltered from outside input and criticism, will fail to perform well. Chapter 11 discusses the limitations of unilateral policies. Although frustration with international law and multilateral institutions may be justified in part, the United States cannot achieve its foreign policy objectives without international cooperation. Moreover, one need only observe how international issues are perceived and presented by other countries, Western or not, to understand that turning its back on the rest of the world may cause the United States to disconnect from reality. With reference to the use of "unconventional" methods of interrogation, discussed in Chapter 12, Holmes makes clear that such methods are not only illegal but also politically ineffective, as information so collected is usually inaccurate. In the final chapter, Holmes correctly argues that if the executive branch is freed from legislative oversight and interference, the constitutional system of checks and balances would be weakened. This, in turn, could produce a cascade of policy disasters--exactly what the founding fathers wished to prevent.
The Matador's Cape is an excellent book. It is well structured and clearly written and can be read by anyone who is interested in its subject. The book could also be assigned for courses on U.S. foreign and security policy, and it is suitable for graduate as well as advanced undergraduate students.
--Yannis A. Stivachtis
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
Stivachtis, Yannis A.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)
Stivachtis, Yannis A. "The Matador's Cape: America's Reckless Response to Terror." Presidential Studies Quarterly, vol. 38, no. 2, 2008, p. 366+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA181673380&it=r&asid=3933b95ea56813016315714f14518710. Accessed 9 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A181673380

The Anatomy of Antiliberalism

Jeffrey R. Costello
92.6 (May 1994): p1547-1555.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1994 Michigan Law Review Association
http://www.michiganlawreview.org/
By Stephen Holmes. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1993. Pp. xvi, 330. $29.95.
Stephen Holmes(1) has recently published an engaging and stimulating, though finally unsatisfying, book. At a time when modern liberalism is being assailed seemingly from all sides -- by fundamentalist Christians, conservative libertarians, critical race and feminist legal scholars, and communitarian political scholars -- Holmes endeavors in The Anatomy of Antiliberalism to defend the faith from attack by a discrete and somewhat nonobvious group of theorists. The book purports to weave the works of thinkers as diverse as Joseph de Maistre and Roberto Unger into a coherent tradition of "antiliberalism" and, in so doing, to correct the oft-repeated errors of both historiography and interpretation that run through this tradition.
That he is only partly successful in these aims reflects more on his taxonomic choices than his substantive analysis. The book is at the same time over- and underinclusive. First, it is not at all clear that Holmes has, in fact, identified a tradition of antiliberalism that is more substantial than the extremely broad definition of antiliberal he constructs to encompass the variety of views he highlights; hence the theory is overinclusive. Second, it is underinclusive in that even if the protofascism of Carl Schmitt and the communitarianism of Michael Sandel can be considered part of a unitary tradition -- without stripping such a tradition of normative weight -- Holmes has neglected to address adequately the salience that the communitarian critique, especially in legal contexts, has for liberalism.
Because he is writing about an opposition theory, Holmes begins with a thumbnail sketch of the liberal tradition. Somewhat disappointingly,(2) he defines liberalism as "a political theory and program that flourished from the middle of the seventeenth to the middle of the nineteenth century" and "continues to be a living tradition today" (p. 3). More specifically, he identifies the core practices of liberalism as religious toleration, freedom of expression, constraint on state action against the individual, broad franchise, constitutional government, and commitment to private property and freedom of contract (pp. 3-4). Four broad core norms in turn support these practices: personal security, impartiality, individual liberty, and democracy (p. 4).
Holmes then offers an overview of the tenets of non-Marxist antiliberalism.(3) Warning his readers that antiliberalism is "always a sensibility as well as an argument" (p. 5), Holmes sets forth the common attitudes he identifies in the antiliberal mind. Antiliberals decry atomization and the alienation implicit in rational self-interest (p. 6). They distrust science and technology and the Enlightenment usurpation of religious morality by secular humanism (p. 6). They are hostile to the culture of modernity and tend to conflate the theory of liberalism with the practice of liberal states (p. 6). Moreover, they are apocalyptic: society, at whatever time they write, is in a "crisis" that it can overcome only by eradicating the "virus" of liberalism (p. 7). Additionally, one might add that antiliberals systematically decontextualize liberal theory, thus positing as descriptive claims what are clearly normative aspirations.(4)
Holmes structures the book simply. Part I analyzes a series of representative antiliberal thinkers. Part 11 refutes the standard historical account of liberalism offered by these theorists and attempts thereby to deepen our understanding of the liberal tradition. Holmes makes an initial distinction in Part I between "hardline" and "softline" antiliberals (p. 88). He devotes the first portion of Part I to the former: Joseph de Maistre, Carl Schmitt, and Leo Strauss. The remaining bulk of Part I addresses the latter: Alasdair MacIntyre, Christopher Lasch, Roberto Unger, and the communitarianism associated with Charles Taylor and Robert Bellah. Apart from the substantive distinction between these two groups, the differentiation tracks historical chronology in an acknowledged way: hardline antiliberals all antedate the Nazi regime.(5) Holmes employs similar methods in dissecting each of his antiliberals: he points out their internal inconsistencies, their reliance on empirically untrue factual assertions, and their misreading of liberal theory. The method not only serves to keep the reader's attention focused on the similarities among the samples, but it reinforces the narrative structure Holmes imposes on his argument.
He begins his story with Joseph de Maistre, the counterrevolutionary Catholic philosopher of the late eighteenth century. Maistre, as Holmes portrays him, held a foundational view of man's essential bloodthirstiness.(6) Humans gathered together in society necessarily require an authority that is both final and absolute to prevent them from butchering each other. Maistre finds such authority in both a temporal and a spiritual incarnation: the monarch and the Church. Obedience to the absolute commands of these twin sovereigns provides the cement of community without which humans will descend ineluctably into depravity. Hence Maistre vociferously attacked the Enlightenment for replacing obedience with discussion, and he blamed the Reformation in particular for encouraging revolt against spiritual authority (p. 18). The direct result of this "horrifying project of extinguishing both Christianity and sovereignty in Europe" (p. 18) is the Terror (p. 15).
Maistre provides Holmes an excellent opportunity to introduce the broad strokes of his "anatomy": the necessity of unassailable political authority, or decisionism (pp. 18-19); the privileging of spiritual over temporal community -- of sacralized over secular institutions -- and the concomitant belief in the false necessity of the existing order (pp. 21-23); the characterization of the scientific method as degrading to morality (p. 23); the denigration of the individual, as compared to the group (pp. 25-27); and finally the simultaneous attitude of revulsion toward and exaltation of violence and bloodshed.(7)
From Maistre, Holmes neatly segues into a discussion of Carl Schmitt. Holmes points out that both Maistre and Schmitt experienced firsthand a "world-shaking crisis of authority" (p. 37). Schmitt's revolution was the defeat of Germany in the First World War and the subsequent political instability of the Weimar Republic. Moreover, Schmitt's earliest major work, Political Theology,(8) contains an admiring chapter on the "decisionism" of Maistre and other "counterrevolutionary philosophers of the state."(9) The context of Schmitt's work is crucial, of course. Holmes is fairly balanced in his portrayal, neither downplaying the particularly egregious aspects of Schmitt's involvement with the Nazi Party, nor dismissing him as a mere Nazi theoretician.(10)
Holmes rightly separates Schmitt's ideology from his actions and identifies the core principles of his thinking. The first principle is his famous enemy-friend distinction: that personal enmity is often crucial to politics (p. 40). The power to define this enmity is the exclusive province of the sovereign, and Holmes perceptively notes that Schmitt's hostility to communism was a product of communism's universalist posture: by positing a universal "class enemy," communism shifted the people's focus from the international to the domestic, thus weakening nationalism and encouraging internal chaos (pp. 41-43). The essential antidote to the militant pluralism that consumed Weimar Germany is for Schmitt the "decisive leader," or dictator. In contrast to the endless discussion that characterizes parliamentary democracy, Schmitt sees in dictatorship both the practical requirement of decisiveness and the theoretical legitimacy of democratic acclaim.(11) As Holmes notes, a commitment to democracy -- defined as the direct expression of popular will, unencumbered by dissent, free speech, or opposition parties -- is, at best, "perverse" (p. 49). But political legitimacy for Schmitt is a function of the crowd, of the almost mystical identification -- captured so hauntingly by Leni Reifenstahl -- between the ruler and the ruled.(12)
Holmes rightly admires much of Schmitt's thought;(13) it is the admiration one has for a beautiful monster, perhaps. He also devastatingly refutes both the descriptive aspects of Schmitt's critique and his misreading of liberal theory. As Holmes points out, liberal societies are very capable of binding decisionmaking, are aware of and able to accommodate the demands of heterogeneity, and are quite adept at mustering defensive force and effectively governing far-flung empires (p. 58). Moreover, he notes, the rule of law governing the constitutional state as envisioned by John Locke is not the "sovereignty of abstract, self-applying rules" (p. 59) that Schmitt sees as hobbling the executive power, but rather a mechanism for maintaining the personal accountability of the executive when making those "hard" political choices Schmitt so admires (p. 59).
The last hardline antiliberal Holmes examines is Leo Strauss, and, again, Holmes provides an elegant segue. Strauss first gained widespread notice in 1932 with his review of Schmitt's Concept of the Political.(14) Strauss also provides a kind of bridge between the hard- and softline schools of antiliberalism. If it is difficult to see the connection between the devotion to the Great Books of this cosmopolitan German-Jewish emigre and the hallucinatory fever of Maistre, it is easier to measure the impact of his critique of the modern West on the current cultural debate. The phenomenal success of Allan Bloom's contemporary warmed-over Straussianism(15) should lay to rest any doubts as to his continuing influence.
Holmes focuses on Strauss's reading of ancient texts as teaching that "inequality is central to the human condition" (p. 70). From this conclusion Strauss constructed his own dualistic portrait of the world: there are "philosophers," those that understand this truth and live accordingly, and "the herd," who must be fed the pablum of religion to spare them the pain of knowing this truth (pp. 64-65). This dualism provides the basis, not only of Strauss's contempt for the liberal ideal, but also of his strategy for dealing with its ascendancy. Not only is liberalism's central tenet -- the essential equality of humanity -- self-evidently wrong, indeed unnatural (pp. 81-82), but the liberal project itself is ultimately destructive of all social order. The masses, stripped of both their illusions and their capacity for obedience, will demand the satisfaction of their base desires well beyond the ability of a well-ordered society to deliver (p. 64). Moreover, the elite, equally seduced by the siren song of equality, will tend not to the ascertainment of eternal verities in service of their role but instead to the domination of nature, through science, necessary to satisfy the appetite of the polis (p. 72).
Hence the Straussian strategy of esotericism. Because of the dangerousness of the philosopher's view of the world,(16) Strauss argues that philosophers must keep silent when addressing the herd. Far from advocating a remaking of the established order, Strauss seems oddly content with the world as it is -- provided it has room for the lonely philosopher and his disciples. Perhaps it is his essential fatalism certainly an ancient sensibility -- that accounts for this. As Holmes points out, Strauss posits a realizable "good society" made up of sedated masses, gentlemen rulers, and philosophers directing the whole works, but at the same time Strauss argues that the creation of such a society depends on chance, rather than the willed intention of those who could truly appreciate such a society (p. 74).
As Holmes shows, the hardline antiliberals of his survey are just that; their attacks are not merely against the descriptive conditions of liberal societies but against their normative underpinnings as well. Like Maistre they refute the rule of law and privilege faith and obedience over reason; like Schmitt they disparage democracy by discussion and exalt the fuhrerprinzip; like Strauss, they deny any kind of political equality among persons, subscribing instead to a rigidly hierarchical social order. Holmes is at his polemic best in this part of the book. He notes the logical absurdity of Maistre's simultaneous claims that God's will is supreme and that the Enlightenment threatens to supplant God's will (p. 35). He conclusively shows that Schmitt's pose as a latter-day Hobbesian relies on a fundamental distortion of Hobbes's Erastianism to fit the peculiar contours of Nazi antisemitism (pp. 50-53). Finally, he exposes in Strauss the intellectual subterfuge of contrasting ancient philosophy with modern society, rightly chiding him for refusing to consider the conditions of ancient society as the correct comparison (p. 83). But once he turns his attention to the softliners, those who criticize liberalism but when pressed "reveal a surprising fondness for liberal protections and freedoms" (p. 88), the book, and Holmes's argument, begins to waver in focus.
The major difficulty centers on whether the inclusion of these softliners stretches the conceptual framework of antiliberalism beyond the point at which it ceases to do any interesting work. The truth is that the hard brand of antiliberalism simply does not pose a credible threat to much of anything. Although one could presumably argue that some events in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union signal a resurgence of Schmittian nationalism, those events are almost uniformly viewed as pathological by the liberal democracies; they pose no philosophical challenge to modern liberalism. So in order to raise the stakes high enough to be of interest, Holmes must demonstrate that salient internal critiques in modern states are merely the old antiliberal attacks dressed in fancy new clothes. The difference between a Carl Schmitt and a Christopher Lasch, however, may be more a difference in kind than degree.
This certainly seems to be the case with both Lasch and Alasdair MacIntyre. Softline antiliberalism seems most closely to conform to Holmes's idea of a sensibility rather than an argument. The sensibility here is primarily a generalized yearning for the prelapsarian past. For moralists like MacIntyre and Lasch -- whom Holmes describes as communitarian conservatives (p. 141) -- the failure of modern liberalism has more to do with its being modern than being liberal. For MacIntyre, the condition of modernity is the triumph of the secular over the sacred and a concomitant loss of moral authority. Holmes attempts to portray MacIntyre's response to this loss as "Schmittian" (p. 94). But unlike Maistre's privileging of religious faith as a means of enforcing obedience to the sovereign, MacIntyre seems to view religion as essential to maintaining a normative consensus (p. 97). This is a subtle, but fundamental, difference, because it goes to the establishment of criteria, rather than of authority. MacIntyre is interested in discussion; his concern is that the radical secularization of modern life has eliminated any baselines by which to judge the merits of good arguments (p. 100). Moreover, he sees in the demise of religion the unraveling of the communitarian claims that bind people to the search for common good (p. 91). Indeed it is this yearning for community valuation that arguably links him to Schmitt(17) and certainly aligns him with the cultural criticism of Christopher Lasch.
Lasch shares with MacIntyre a profound hostility to science and technology (pp. 97, 122-40). Lasch also envisions a bygone halcyon world -- in his case a community of yeoman producers, free of the parasitic consumer class -- but for Lasch science is merely an element of the lust for "progress" which he blames for the sorry state of modernity. Holmes nicely characterizes Lasch's outlook as "anti-Promethean" (p. 128) and rightly takes him to task for failing to balance the benefits -- like literacy and sanitation -- with the costs of liberal progress -- like drug addiction and impending environmental catastrophe (p. 137). What Holmes fails to achieve with his analysis of Lasch and MacIntyre, however, is a real connection between their grumblings about the modern world and the kind of sustained attack on liberal norms launched by Maistre and Schmitt. They seem, from Holmes's description, less a serious threat to the liberal order than a couple of dyspeptic curmudgeons. Moreover, they do not seem antiliberal in any meaningful sense of the word.
This difficulty is even more pronounced in the chapter on Roberto Unger. Holmes describes Unger as a countercultural radical and distinguishes his brand of antiliberalism as that which assails liberalism, not for being anarchistic, but for not being anarchistic enough (p. 141). For Unger, the sin of liberalism is not that it has loosened the bonds of community but rather that it stamps out the "spontaneity of the soul" (p. 158). Hence Unger's own self-description as a "superliberal" (p. 160). Admittedly, this is a recent stance for Unger, and Holmes capably narrates the labyrinthine progression in Unger's work from communitarianism to individualism. He also quickly exposes the vulnerabilities of superliberalism as theory, especially the assumption that context smashing can substitute for moral doctrine (p. 169). It seems odd, however, to argue that the call " 'to redeem liberalism through more liberalism'" (p. 160) is an antiliberal one. Moreover, one gets the sense in this chapter that Holmes is shooting ducks in a pond: if Unger quite simply is not a rigorous thinker, and if his grandiosity and confusion keep him firmly at the margins of academic debate, then why has Holmes devoted an entire chapter to his work?
After a too-brief chapter on the communitarian "trap" (pp. 176-84), in which Holmes takes Michael Sandel, Charles Taylor, Robert Bellah, and others to task for attaching moral significance to terms like social that are inherently descriptive (p. 178) and for, again, systematically confusing criticisms of liberal society with criticism of liberal thought (p. 181), Holmes attempts in Part II to answer the standard descriptive claims about liberalism put forward by its critics. To the charge that liberalism conceives of individuals as atomized, Holmes answers that antiliberals have misinterpreted Locke's requirement of consent to authority as a claim of presocial rationality and decontextualized social contract theory in general (pp. 193-94). Reliance on rational self-interest is a normative and not a descriptive claim: the point is not that people are necessarily the best judges of their needs but that there is no good reason to assume that their rulers necessarily are (p. 197). Likewise, liberal theory, grounded on consent of the governed, is hostile, not to authority as such, but merely to that authority that is arbitrary and capricious (p. 203). Finally, Holmes argues that liberal rights, because they carry correlative duties, are not inherently alienating (pp. 228-31) and that the elaborate procedural mechanisms that liberal states employ to channel naked preferences into political discourse reveal that liberalism has never been grounded in "moral skepticism" (p. 235).
These claims are all good, of course, but what about those community-oriented arguments? It is here that Holmes's book finally does not satisfy. In John Rawls's most recent book, he addresses the tensions between claims of individualism and claims of community by noting that "[a] well-ordered democratic society is neither a community, nor, more generally, an association."(18) This rejection of community for Rawls follows from the observation that "the diversity of reasonable comprehensive religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines found in modern democratic societies is not a mere historical condition that may soon pass away; it is a permanent feature of the public culture of democracy."(19)
I do not mean to equate Holmes's project with Rawls's, but what must follow from Rawls's assertion is that liberalism must find the means to accommodate these competing doctrines without destroying itself and that the challenges posed by various strands of contemporary legal communitarianism cannot simply be brushed off by demonstrating that such claims are based on a misreading of liberal theory. Liberalism, after all, predates modern democracy. The argument that rights generally understood as private are better conceived of as public and deriving from the political community -- implicit in advocacy for hate-speech codes, for example -- cannot be adequately answered by a narrow appeal to correlative duties (p. 228). Inappropriate preference formation in general poses particularly thorny dilemmas for liberalism. One attempt out of the thicket is the revival of republicanism, focusing on the transformative and deliberative nature of political community as a means of mediating the tensions between self-governance and governance by law -- between the needs of the individual and the needs of the community.(20) Is modern republicanism thus "antiliberal" Perhaps even more salient is the literature on preference formation itself.(21) Liberalism must develop models thick enough to account for the constitutive role of legal institutions, the presence of heuristic biases, and the impact of risk-assessment on the choices actors in a liberal society make. When those choices imply broad consequences for society as a whole, as they often do in the environmental arena, for example, it does not satisfy to note simply that Locke and Montesquieu were aware of the elementary processes of character formation.
In an earlier work, Holmes has written splendidly of the early period of modern liberalism,(22) and The Anatomy of Antiliberalism provides the same kind of thoughtful and important analysis of the rise of antiliberal thought. His chapters on the hardline antiliberals sparkle with acerbic wit and cogent criticism. But Holmes's attempt to extend his critique of these theorists to encompass contemporary softliners both robs the hard antiliberals of their rhetorical power and disserves the intentions of contemporary dissenters from the liberal orthodoxy. (1.) Professor of Political Science and Law, University of Chicago. (2.) This is disappointing because it allows Holmes to narrow the ground of legitimate criticism on the antiliberal side. Thus if an antiliberal criticizes an aspect of modern liberal practice, Holmes is able to answer with a defense of nineteenth-century liberal theory. (3.) Pp 1-2. Holmes is concerned here solely with non-Marxist theorists, noting that the antiliberal he surveys would likely assert that Marxism and liberalism are offshoots of the same tradition. (4.) Don Herzog devastatingly critiques this methodology -- especially as employed by critical legal studies scholars -- in Don Herzog, As Many as Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast, 75 Cal. L. Rev. 609 (1987). (5.) Holmes notes in the introduction that after 1945 the rhetoric of communitarianism was "radically demilitarized." P. 9. Moreover, he dryly detects a lack of martial seriousness in his postwar antiliberals:
When MacIntyre or Unger suggest en passant that killing enemies or risking one's life in the
carnage of battle provides a solution to the spiritual emptiness of commercial society, readers
cringe but then rightly dismiss the literal implications of what they say. A prewar antiliberal,
such as Schmitt, was obviously in greater earnest.
P. 10. (6.) P. 28. Holmes imputes to Maistre a description of the Terror as "just another expression of the great law of mutual slaughter that dominates all human history." Pp. 15-16. (7.) Pp. 27-32. Maistre's response to the Terror both as a horrific result of the abstract humanism of the Enlightenment and as part of a just God's plan for religious revival nicely captures the tension in this attitude. P. 15. (8.) Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (George Schwab trans., MIT Press 1985) (1922). (9.) Id. at 53-66. (10.) As an example, Holmes notes that Schmitt hosted a conference on "German jurisprudence at war with the Jewish spirit" in 1936 to counter SS accusations of insincere antisemitism. Pp. 38-39. Conversely, Holmes refers to commentators who are sympathetic to Schmitt's postwar denials of culpability in the Nazi catastrophe -- including his biographer Joseph Bendersky as "apologists." P. 42. Schmitt's role in the Third Reich may well have been less that of a true believer than that of a pragmatist, conforming his behavior to the dictates of the regime in order to advance his own ideas. See, e.g., George Schwab, Introduction to Schmitt, supra note 8, at xi, xiii (suggesting that Schmitt made "shocking" compromises with the Nazi regime in order to supplant Nazi "totalitarianism" with his own "authoritarianism" . (11.) Schmitt develops his critique of parliamentarianism in Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (Ellen Kennedy trans., MIT Press 1985) (1923). (12.) See Triumph of the Will (Riefenstahl Produktions 1934, video distributed by Embassy Home Entertainment 1986). (13.) See, e.g., p. 57 ("Schmitt's criticisms of liberalism are often interesting and sometimes persuasive." . (14.) P. 60; see Leo Strauss, Comments on Der Begriff des Politischen by Carl Schmitt, re- printed in Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (George Schwab trans., Rutgers University Press 1976) (1932). (15.) See. Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (1987). (16.) Holmes deliciously skewers the pretensions of academics by suggesting that Strauss's view of philosophers as "walking time-bombs" may explain much of his appeal. P. 78. As Holmes notes, Strauss's insistence that intellectuals must obscure their understanding of the world lest they destroy the illusions that sustain ordinary men, is "[for] desk-bound scholars . . . an extraordinarily flattering idea." P. 78. (17.) The link, however, is tenuous. For Schmitt the community serves as the means of distinguishing friend from enemy; for MacIntyre, it serves to provide a moral vocabulary. (18.) John Rawls, Political Liberalism 40 (1993) (reviewed in this issue by Professor Joshua Cohen --Ed.). (19.) Id. at 36. (20.) See generally Frank Michelman, Law's Republic, 97 Yale L.J. 1493 (1988); Cass R. Sunstein, Beyond the Republican Revival 97 Yale L.J. 1539 (1988). (21.) See, e,g., Jon Elster, Sour Grapes: Studies in he Subversion of Rationality (1983); Steven Kelman, What Price Incentives? Economists and the Environment (1981); Amos Tversky & Daniel Kahneman, Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases, 185 Science 1124 (1974). (22.) See Stephen Holmes, Benjamin Constant and the Making of Modern Liberalism (1984).
Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)
Costello, Jeffrey R. "The Anatomy of Antiliberalism." Michigan Law Review, May 1994, pp. 1547-1555. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA15735618&it=r&asid=e72d8a1d6c5abe790e1ac8b8aa72bfdb. Accessed 9 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A15735618

The Anatomy of Antiliberalism

Jerry Z. Muller
.116 (Summer 1994): p115.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1994 The National Affairs, Inc.
DURING A DECADE that produced more books about the inadequacies of liberalism than about its intrinsic virtues, among the finest unabashedly liberal works was Stephen Holmes' Benjamin Constant and the Making of Modern Liberalism (Yale, 1984). Holmes used Constant as a historical hook upon which to hang an exercise in the retrieval of liberal theory. Holmes explored the eighteenth century arguments that would later come to be known as "liberal" and showed how Constant reformulated those principles under the impact of the French Revolution, especially the experience of government terror wielded in the name of democracy and civic republican virtue. In place of either the ancient republican ideal of a state devoted to civic virtue, the aristocratic ideal of martial virtue, or the ideal of a Christian polity, Constant championed what Holmes called "the de-dramatizing of the political sphere" and the importance of a protected, non-political private sphere as the basis of modern liberty. In contrast to the Aristotelian tradition which insisted that social order is based on unity of purpose and that political communities ought be organized with a view to realizing some highest aim, such as the flourishing of man's political nature, Constant and other liberals insisted that under modern conditions of commercial society, strong but responsible government, and equality before the law enforced by an independent judiciary, social order could be achieved without an overarching moral purpose. In retrieving what he called "the anti-teleological core of liberal theory" Holmes elucidated a central strand of liberal political thought.
In his new book, The Anatomy of Antiliberalism, Holmes makes many of the same analytic points about liberal political theory, but his emphasis this time is on what he regards as the misguided, confused, and pernicious nature of those whom he dubs "antiliberals"--a remarkably heterogeneous crew which includes the Catholic Royalist and theocratic critic of the French Revolution, Joseph de Maistre; Carl Schmitt, a leading right-wing political theorist in Weimar Germany who became the erstwhile legal theorist of the Third Reich; Leo Strauss; Alasdair MacIntyre; Christopher Lasch; Roberto Unger; and recent "communitarian" theorists. Holmes claims that these writers should be understood as part of a single (if internally differentiated) tradition. The task at hand, as Holmes appears to conceive it, is not so much to anatomize that tradition as to anathematize it--if truth in packaging laws applied to works of political theory, the book would be called The Pathology of Antiliberalism. Parts of the book are of great merit and should not be missed, despite the author's Procrustean framework and occasional distortions of the claims of his opponents. The performance as a whole, however, belies the notion that liberals are open-minded--and hence capable of learning from others. For not only is Holmes predisposed against learning from his enemies, he does not learn all he might from his self-proclaimed friends either.
THE BOOK'S STRENGTH lies in its relentless effort to expose the intellectual inconsistencies and confusions of each of the authors discussed, and the inadequacies of their practical alternatives. The chapter devoted to Alasdair MacIntyre's influential book, After Virtue, points out that MacIntyre criticizes modern liberal societies on the basis of two different models of virtue which are mutually contradictory. On the one hand, MacIntyre makes a strong argument that the very idea of virtue is dependent upon participation in a shared cultural tradition and as part of a particularistic community. Yet, as Holmes shows, MacIntyre also presents a more Christian and universalistic conception of virtue, as imposed by God on the individual soul. There is a conflict, Holmes shows, between MacIntyre's commitments to the legitimacy of particularism on the one hand, and to the universal claims of Christianity on the other.
In response to Christopher Lasch and to other communitarians who criticize liberal society for a failure to provide fraternity and solidarity, Holmes argues that such critics tend to be vague about the institutional forms of community they hold to be desirable. As a result, they make it impossible to compare the advantages and disadvantages of their prospective communitarian alternative with the vices and virtues of known liberal societies. Holmes also shows that MacIntyre and subsequent communitarian critics of contemporary liberalism want to have their cake and eat it too. They seem to demand all the advantages of a supportive culture with none of the disadvantages of a parochial culture, and to envision a culture which provides shared answers to ultimate questions while still preserving the liberal structures which leave all such issues open to ongoing questioning. Holmes is devastating in exposing the contradictions in the work of Roberto Unger, a political theorist at Harvard Law School who is at once communitarian and radically individualist, though on the evidence presented, discovering the contradictions in Unger's work seems as difficult as shooting fish in a barrel.
IF THE STRENGTHS of this book come from the critical dissection of the actual claims of Holmes' opponents, one of its weaknesses is the often distorted presentation of the arguments of those whom Holmes terms "antiliberals." While Holmes complains--correctly--that the claims of classical liberals are often distorted by being taken out of context, Holmes is perfectly happy to use this procedure against his targets. He scoffs, for example, at Maistre's claim that written constitutions contrived by a few enlightened scribblers cannot transform society and provide the basis of an ongoing polity. Holmes, with the American experience of constitution-making in mind, responds that such constitutions can survive for centuries as the basis of political life. But he fails to mention that Maistre penned his critique in the mid-1790s as a reflection on the failure of the French constitutions of 1791 and especially the Jacobin constitution of June, 1793, which was indeed cobbled together in a matter of days but never applied because of ongoing political instability. In the two decades immediately thereafter, France would go through several more changes of governmental form; from 1815 through 1871, through half a dozen more. In context, then, Maistre's claim seems far from absurd. Indeed it echoes, in more extreme form (for everything in Maistre is extreme) the claim that written constitutions are only successful to the extent that they comport with the manners and mores of the nation in question: a point emphasized by Burke, as by Montesquieu before him and Tocqueville after him.
The tendency to distort the claims of his opponents is most evident, though by no means confined, to Holmes' treatment of Leo Strauss, to whom he devotes an entire chapter. In the text of that chapter, Holmes treats Strauss as a principled opponent of liberal democracy. Only in a footnote (apparently added in response to several of Strauss' students to whom he sent a draft) does Holmes mention the fact that Strauss maintained that liberal democracy was superior to any other form of government under modern conditions. Strauss did believe that the philosopher ought to respect the fundamental perspectives of the society in which he lives, while trying to improve it by calling attention to its intrinsic dangers, which, he argued, include a propensity toward leveling in democracies, and the confusion of liberty with license in liberal regimes. He therefore combined his defense of liberal democracy with warnings against its inherent weaknesses. To highlight Strauss' skepticism about the self-understanding of modern liberalism is legitimate, but to treat him as a principled opponent of modern liberal democracy seems a victory of enmity over intellectual probity.
WHILE HOLMES' CHAPTER on Strauss includes criticisms that are on target, especially regarding the dangers of esotericism, his treatment relies less upon a reasoned presentation and refutation of Strauss' claims than upon an ongoing appeal to the ressentiment of the reader in the face of Strauss' contention that there are higher and lower pursuits, and that the intrinsic danger of liberal democracy is its propensity to emphasize the lower over the higher. Time and again, Holmes characterizes Strauss' position as one of utter disdain toward those outside the tiny elite of philosophers. He does so using characterizations which are presented as Strauss' own, but upon inspection turn out to be something else. Holmes writes, for example, of "what we may call Strauss' doormat theory of the overwhelming majority. Most people are not merely inferior to the philosophical supermen. Their lives are utterly valueless and unjustifiable unless they serve to make philosophers more comfortable and secure." When the interested reader concerned to discover the source of this startling assertion looks to the footnotes, however, he finds a reference not to Strauss' writings, but rather "Cf. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 25," which is presumably intended as the antidote to the Straussian poison. Holmes' references, here as elsewhere in the book, are often difficult to look up, because he makes lengthy assertions without providing references, and lumps references together. When one does look them up, they do not necessarily say what Holmes claims they do. In another example of dubious attribution, Holmes asks "If philosophers are truly autonomous, why should they stoop to 'despising people whose horizon is limited to their consumption of food and their digestion'"--where the quoted phrase is meant to convey Strauss' view of his fellow citizens. The reader who makes the effort to turn to the text cited, however, will find that the quoted words are found in the midst of an argument about values in social science which reads:
It is not necessary to enter here and now into a discussion of the theoretical weaknesses of social science positivism. It suffices to allude to the considerations which speak decisively against this school. (1) It is impossible to study social phenomena, i.e. all important social phenomena, without making value judgments. A man who sees no reason for not despising people whose horizon is limited to their consumption of food and their digestion may be a tolerable econometrist; he cannot say anything relevant about the character of a human society.
Other quotations are similarly misleading.
In other chapters too, Holmes quotes phrases, which, taken out of context, may seem ridiculous, while in context they may be persuasive. He ridicules communitarians, for example, for suggesting that their intellectual insights into the characteristic pitfalls of modern liberal culture may contribute to improving our lot by improving our understanding. He quotes Charles Taylor, who promises "to uncover buried goods through rearticulation--and thereby ... to bring the air again into the half-collapsed lungs of the spirit." Taylor's argument in the book in question (Sources of the Self), an argument which Holmes does not mention, is that there is a:
tendency of modern moral theory to be concerned purely with what it is right to do rather than with what it is good to be. In a related way the task of moral theory is identified as defining the content of obligation rather than the nature of the good life.... [A] powerful array of motives converges ... to discredit qualitative distinctions, to make them appear as intellectually suspect and morally sinister, and to establish a model of moral thinking which tries to do without them altogether.
This insight, taken seriously, may in fact open our mind to possibilities which our dominant intellectual traditions tend to overlook: possibilities to which Holmes, as we will see, remains tone-deaf.
THE LAST THIRD of Holmes' book, entitled "Misunderstanding the liberal past," is incisive and flawed by turns. Here, Holmes attempts to refute the claims of critics of liberal thought and society by quotations from those whom he terms "classical liberals," among whom he includes Spinoza, Voltaire, Montesquieu, David Hume, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, James Madison, and John Stuart Mill. This conceptual bed is itself rather Procrustean, and Holmes takes from each thinker only those portions of their thought with which contemporary liberals are most comfortable. As a result, contemporary liberals are protected from having their assumptions challenged by their purported historical forefathers as well as by those whom Holmes deems their enemies. By conflating liberalism and democracy, Holmes ignores entirely the tension between the two, a tension which led earlier liberal thinkers to reject democracy and led later thinkers such as Madison and Mill to focus on mechanisms by which the potential negative effects of democracy could be obviated. The emphasis on the importance of elites in classical liberal thought goes similarly unmentioned.
ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF trimming liberalism past to fit liberalism present is evident in Holmes' references to Adam Smith. Holmes quotes Smith to buttress his point that classical liberals opposed martial values. But he leaves unmentioned Smith's acute historical awareness of the link between national defense and the preservation of civilization, which led Smith to characterize the art of war as "certainly the noblest of the arts," and to insist on the primacy of defense over economic considerations in trade policy. Because they are at odds with the predilections of contemporary liberalism, Smith's works on the moral education of the passions and the institutions through which men learn self-control, prudence, and benevolence are ignored by Holmes. Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments is mentioned once, though in a manner which misses Smith's point. To contradict the claim that liberals ignored duties and obligations, Holmes quotes Smith's statement that "a sense of duty is the only principle by which the bulk of mankind is capable of directing their actions," but its significance escapes him. In context, Smith's statement meant that most men acquire a tolerably moral character less through rational reflection than through social interaction, through "discipline, education, and example," and that intellectuals concerned with creating a decent liberal society ought therefore to pay attention to the sorts of moral rules and models that are conveyed by social institutions.
Holmes makes the excellent point that the arguments of past liberal thinkers are often misunderstood by the process he calls "antonym substitution." Classical liberal arguments are distorted, he shows, by failing to consider the polemical context in which they appeared and the claims which they were originally intended to oppose. Antiliberals, Holmes writes, view the purportedly liberal maxim "I can do whatever I want" as nihilistic self-indulgence, by contrasting it to the precept "I shall do whatever morality requires." But the original antonym of "I can do whatever I want" was "I must do whatever my master or my social rank demands." The point is well taken. What Holmes fails to note, however, is that the conception of liberty among contemporary liberals too often reflects precisely the understanding that antiliberals mistakenly attribute to eighteenth-century liberals.
Indeed, Holmes too falls into this trap. After providing his improved genealogy of classical liberal claims, one assumes Holmes would address the question, "What are the social institutions through which the appropriate morality is to be inculcated in a society without legal inequality and inherited rank?" This is the tack taken by an important, but lamentably overlooked work of contemporary liberal thought, namely William Galston's Liberal Purposes: Goods, Virtues, and Diversity in the Liberal State (Cambridge, 1991). Holmes, by contrast, does not address such questions, in keeping with an influential strand in contemporary liberalism which deems such issues fundamentally illiberal, since they imply discrimination among different ways of life.
RATHER THAN assuming that contemporary liberalism might have something to learn from its present critics or from earlier liberals, Holmes proceeds as if the most reliable means of avoiding the faults of one extreme is to embrace its opposite. Holmes rightly reminds us that classical liberals had an instrumental attitude toward the state: it was to provide peace, security, welfare, and equitable justice not because these are the only goals of life, but because these are "the preconditions for the pursuit of other goals in various nonpolitical but nevertheless social domains." But from the self-evident statement that "A politics aimed at transforming souls is not always benign," Holmes appears to conclude that it is always malign. Classical liberals, he writes, "denied state authority the right to suppress all moral differences"--from which he appears to conclude that the state is illiberal when it suppresses any moral differences, fosters some social institutions over others, or fosters any sort of consensus. As a result, there is no room in Holmes' conception of liberalism for the state to concern itself with the institutions that play a role in the education of desire.
Among the early modern liberal thinkers, Holmes writes, "An egalitarian emphasis on the 'subjectivity' of value judgments ... helped deflate moral imperialisms.... It was not meant to destroy morality itself." Holmes is right about the intentions of early modern liberals, but critics of contemporary liberalism are concerned as much with the unintended consequences of liberal thought. What does unite thinkers such as Strauss and MacIntyre is their skepticism about the following argument, which Holmes makes no effort to refute, and that he seems to accept. "All men," goes this familiar form of contemporary liberal reasoning, "have equal political rights; that is because all men are equal; but men have different preferences, and so those preferences too must be equal; since to favor one set of preferences over another would be to deny the equality of individuals, we have no way of deciding between those preferences; moreover, once we favor some preferences over others, we show a lack of respect for diversity, and for keeping our mind open to other arguments."
Holmes quotes Montesquieu's contention that "liberty can consist only in the power of doing what we ought to will, and in not being constrained to do what we ought not to will." But Holmes leaves this point entirely undeveloped, as indeed he must, given an understanding of liberalism which differs from that of many of the early modern thinkers whom he claims as his forebears. Holmes defines the cultivation of shared norms as "moral imperialism," and defines liberalism (as John Stuart Mill did, but as earlier liberals would not have) as "the equal right of others to be different"; the Lockean principle of religious tolerance is transformed into "the acceptance of diversity." (Though this tolerance has its limits: in Holmes' book, the word "religion" is variously paired with "bigot," "fanatics," "Inquisition," and "Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre." His true master is Voltaire.) From the substance and tenor of Holmes' argument, the alternatives that lie before us are either a liberal state which cultivates only virtues such as "reasonableness, independence, reluctance to resort to violence, tolerance for diversity, a refusal to humiliate others publicly, and a willingness to listen to the other side of the argument"--or fascism. Indeed it is this implicit choice of alternatives which gives Holmes' book its structure and much of its polemical force.
THE FIGURES CHOSEN by Holmes for his genealogy of anti-liberalism are selected tactically, rather than for their representativity or intrinsic importance. In his earlier book on Benjamin Constant, Holmes traced "the permanent structure of antiliberal thought" to Maistre's less flamboyant contemporary, Louis de Bonald. Maistre, while certainly an antiliberal thinker, is more noteworthy for his fanaticism than for his representative status, and he is a highly idiosyncratic thinker. (Holmes himself remarks on "the eccentricity of his mind.") The next chapter, on Carl Schmitt, begins and ends with Schmitt's most anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi writings, between which his critiques of liberalism are sandwiched. He is described as "Maistre's most original twentieth century admirer," though in fact Schmitt's infatuation with dramatic political conflict, upon which Holmes focuses, owes little to Maistre and much to the French radical Georges Sorel. The chapter on Strauss insists upon his purported agreements with Schmitt. The subsequent chapters, on MacIntyre, Lasch, and others, recall time and again that their criticisms of liberalism echo those of these earlier figures. Though in his preface Holmes claims that his purpose "is not to indulge in guilt by association," the very structure of the book, the choice of figures, and the portions of their work chosen for discussion convey precisely that message. Holmes' implicit premise is that any argument made at one time by a fascist is a fascist argument, a strategy of reductio ad Hitlerum. The fact that many of the same criticisms were made before and after fascism by non-fascists is underplayed. And, though Holmes promises in his introduction to distinguish antiliberalism from conservatism, he never gets around to it. The effect of these tactical choices is recaptured on the book's back cover by Holmes' colleague at the University of Chicago, Richard Posner, who tells us that the book "lays bare the structure of the nonmarxist antiliberal tradition [and] exposes its roots in the soil that nourished fascism."
HOLMES' POLEMICAL PURPOSE accounts for the least convincing element of this book: the construct of "nonmarxist antiliberalism" which he claims to anatomize. The "antiliberal" thinkers to whom Holmes devotes individual chapters turn out to have very different fundamental criticisms of liberalism, and attack it from differing angles. What they have in common, in other words, is less a shared critique of liberalism than the fact that all (to varying degrees) are critics of liberalism. But to portray them all as part of a single tradition called "antiliberalism" is much like writing a book on "the anti-Jewish tradition," with successive chapters on Greek philosophy, Christianity, Islam, communism, Nazism, and libertarianism--the coherence of the "anti"-tradition comes only from the point of view of the tradition purportedly under attack.
One can agree with Stephen Holmes that a liberal democratic regime is better than any realistic alternative and still acknowledge that some liberal democracies are more decent than others, and that the extent of their decency, their stability, and their ability to defend themselves may lie in elements either beyond the horizon of the liberal tradition, or beyond the typical concerns of contemporary liberalism, though not of some of the earlier thinkers regarded by Holmes as liberals. Unfortunately, Holmes' treatment of thinkers such as Locke, Montesquieu, Hume, and Smith too often recalls the observation of the late Jacob Viner: "It is the nature of historians of thought to manifest a propensity to find that their heroes had the same views as they themselves expound, for in the intellectual world this is the greatest honor they can confer upon their heroes." The result is a spirited defense of liberalism, but a premature closing of the liberal mind.
JERRY Z. MULLER is associate professor of history at the Catholic University of America.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)
Muller, Jerry Z. "The Anatomy of Antiliberalism." Public Interest, no. 116, 1994, p. 115+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA15657959&it=r&asid=d1c877eb9e3aa79f9f4d9eaa5ce6306e. Accessed 9 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A15657959

The Anatomy of Antiliberalism

Jean Bethke Elshtain
120.19 (Nov. 5, 1993): p30.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1993 Commonweal Foundation
http://www.cweal.org/
This is it slash-and-burn book. Stephen Holmes, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, sets out to slay the dragons of antiliberalism wherever they may be lurking. Holmes does try, from time to time, to give a bit of credit here and there to the thinkers he is busily dispatching, but his heart isn't in it. The result is a terribly uneven effort. Given the intensity of his wrath - and his prose - Holmes is bound to hit his targets from time to time and when he does one is riveted by the spectacle. But the book doesn't hold together.
In his preface, Holmes ponders why "some of America's leading intellectuals revile a tradition devoted, among other things, to freedom of thought?" A provocative but misleading opener for several reasons. First, a good bit of Holmes's riposte aims to do in Joseph de Maistre, a French Catholic writer and diplomat who died in 1821, and whose own ire was leveled against the assumptions and excesses of the French Revolution. Carl Schmitt, a fascinating but morally dubious theorist, a critic of Weimar Germany but a defender of representative government, who was too close to Nazi doctrine for comfort ("residual sympathy" is the way Holmes describes it), also gets scrutinized. These are easy targets compared to the American thinkers Holmes goes after.
Second, those American intellectuals - or intellectuals whose lives were spent primarily in an American context - people like Leo Strauss, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Christopher Lasch - scarcely "revile" freedom of thought. Rather, they challenge the sort of freedom that gets encoded in encomiums to free thought and ponder whether or not that understanding of freedom is itself open to critical scrutiny.
Holmes knows he is open to the charge of making folks like MacIntyre and Lasch "guilty by association" with antidemocrats like Maistre or Schmitt. He tries to get out of the conundrum by claiming that MacIntyre and others are not quasi-Fascists but that "they have absorbed and reproduced rhetoric whose history and implications they have failed to ponder." Fortunately, they "benefit from historical circumstances that make them politically harmless." So: if they are so harmless and so unconscious (that is, they pay little or no attention to the "origins and political abuse of their fondest ideas"), why take them seriously? Because they are there and they annoy the hell out of Holmes. Moreover, in some transformed context these folks Holmes describes as thinkers who "declare the entire Western world except for themselves to be depraved and diseased..." might not be so harmless. Better to slay the dragons now!
Many of the discrete essays loosely joined together in this book began life as reviews of the works of particular thinkers. This may help to account for the somewhat jerky and disjointed feel to the volume. Holmes strives mightily to associate his crew of antiliberals one with the other, but the harder he tries the more tendentious it seems. Better, I should have thought, just to state at the outset - "I don't like any of these people very much, and here's why" - than to devise awkward categories that are of little help. I have in mind, for example, "hard" and soft" antiliberals to which Holmes appends "hard" and soft" superindividualists and the like. Clearly he knows he's got a problem on his hands fusing a radical democrat or populist like Lasch with an aristocratic defender of the ancien regime like Maistre. He struggles to find identical claims in similar words but too often this winds up being a linkage rather on a par with, say, "Hitler opposed eating meat; therefore, all vegetarians are proto-Hitlerites - or their ideas might become such if the circumstances were ripe." Now I'm being unfair, but not by much.
Let me give a sense of how Holmes constructs his deposition against the antiliberals. He defines liberalism in the usual way - as a political order devoted to "religious toleration, freedom of discussion, restrictions on police behavior, free elections, constitutional government based on a separation of powers, publicly inspectable state budgets to inhibit corruption, and economic policy committed to sustained growth on the basis of private ownership and freedom of contract." By definition this eliminates Maistre - as it does his opponents, the French revolutionaries, scarcely liberals by Holmes's definition. It would eliminate Schmitt, too. Indeed, many important Western political theorists associated, variously, with "the liberal tradition," most importantly, Hobbes, must get axed as well if Holmes means to be consistent.
I didn't quite recognize either MacIntyre or Lasch in Holmes's characterizations of them. MacIntyre's After Virtue becomes "a summa of the postwar antiliberal mind"; Lasch's works easily umnask him "as a cultural conservative cloaked in a leftish fleece." MacIntyre is taken to task primarily for his defense of authority and religion, a defense Holmes finds incompatible with liberal verities. "Liberalism," Holmes claims, "is as antagonistic to authority as to community." Indeed, "liberal culture aims to outlaw the very idea of authority."
But this cannot be right. All the founders of this liberal polity were mightily concerned with authority and legitimacy, vexed by how to distinguish the rightful from the illegitimate exercise of power. In his critique of MacIntyre, Holmes uses a tactical nuclear weapon that demolishes many important liberal thinkers who helped to constitute our own tradition. Without some sort of authoritative adherence to, say, constitutional doctrine, constitutionality will falter. Can there be "constitutional government with separation of powers" without legitimate authority? Maybe what Holmes means to indict here is independent authority within "liberal culture" by contrast to a liberal constitutional polity. If so, he should have said so. However, I would still disagree, for one cannot tidily sever the culture from its definitional political framework.
The great Hannah Arendt lamented the disappearance of authority from the modern world and tied it to the fateful assumption - on the part of Protestant reformers, among others - that "unguided individual judgment" would suffice to hold intact much that Luther, and others, cherished. For Arendt, the loss of authority is not something to be celebrated but, rather, a modern reality to be confronted. She writes: "For to live in a political realm with neither authority nor the concomitant awareness that the source of authority transcends power and those who are in power, means to be confronted anew, without the religious trust in a sacred beginning and without the protection of traditional and therefore self-evident standards of behavior, by the elementary problems of human living-together." It is impossible to address that problem without relocating authority, even if in some rough-and-ready way, in beliefs that are widely if imperfectly shared - beliefs in the very liberal truisms Holmes endorses, for example.
Whatever one thinks of where MacIntyre comes out, the fact that authority is one of his central concerns does not, in itself, suffice to indict him as beyond the pale. There is much more going on in MacIntyre's work than a hankering after settled agreements. Where Holmes falters, I believe, is in his failure to recognize that MacIntyre is not primarily a political thinker so much as an epistemological protagonist. Thus, when Holmes claims that MacIntyre regrets the lost "harmony of the past and the long-lost |framework of medieval agreement,"' he misplaces the accent of MacIntyre's work. MacIntyre is not calling for restorationism but for recognition that a "framework" within which disputations of a certain sort could flourish - disagreements, not comforting harmonies - seems unavailable to us. It isn't so much that we should all agree, by no means, but that we increasingly lack the means whereby we can disagree robustly because those who most strenuously adhere to the epistemology MacIntyre associates with the liberal establishmentarians - emotivism, subjectivism, utilitarianism - refuse to recognize their own epistemological commitments. Thus they make universal a view that is, in fact, partial and open to contestation. To be sure, MacIntyre has his own case of polis envy, but what he is about is primarily an epistemological account of traditions, not a political screed against liberal society in toto. If you want to take on MacIntyre at his strongest, that is where you must begin.
Now, to Christopher Lasch, arguably one of the most important voices in American public discourse over the past three decades. Lasch is a polemicist and a provocateur. He no doubt overstates his case for emphasis, as do we all from time to time. But, again, the Lasch whose work I know is quite a different and far more interesting fellow than the Lasch Holmes trounces. Lasch is "easily unmasked" as a culturally conservative? Hell, Lasch makes no bones about it. Lasch is a "popular American writer...[who] entertains no great philosophical pretensions." Agreed: Lasch is, after all, a historian, not primarily a philosopher. But to put Lasch in a world in which he is seeing "eye-to-eye with Heidegger, Schmitt, Strauss" and the like is not to see him at all. That there may be a convergence of concerns between these folks and Lasch, at points, is no doubt true. But Lasch's sources are not Heidegger; they are very much home-grown.
Here Holmes would have been well-instructed to take a look at Jackson Lears's No Place of Grace (Pantheon), a provocative study of "antimodernism and the transformation of American culture." Lears lifts up for our consideration the long concern on the part of many of our most original thinkers that American culture was becoming banalized, in large part because of a growing tendency from the nineteenth century on "to equate material and moral progress." His interpretation of this alternative American tradition and its chief spokesmen - Henry Adams is highlighted - is powerfully instructive for it reminds us, as does Lasch, that an American can cherish the Constitution, believe in separation of powers and free elections and accountability and all the rest, and yet find much that has gone awry, much that raises legitimate concern.
Lasch is a democrat and an egalitarian. He is not antiscience; he is opposed to technological triumphalism. He does not believe one must simply trust in blind faith, but he accepts the fact that not everything is, or should be, under our control. Perhaps closest to Lasch in this regard, among major European thinkers, is none other than Vaclav Havel who sounds positively Laschian in his attacks on the "arrogant anthropocentrism of modern man" who believes he can control and define everything. For Havel, it is precisely this attitude that lies at the root of a contemporary crisis in human consciousness, culture, and politics. When Lasch criticizes feminists for disparaging motherhood, he does so from a deep and wide recognition of an alternative feminist - or socially conscious woman's - tradition in America, one that helped to create a vast array of social provision during the Progressive Era based precisely on the needs of mothers and children. When mainstream and radical feminists trashed motherhood, finding it a state of abjection and dependency - and they did do this - Lasch's ripostes always drew upon an alternative, and, arguably, feminist set of possibilities.
When Holmes begins to build his own positive case, having dispatched his foes, the book is a letdown. Michael Sandel is treated offhandedly as "perhaps the best-known disciple of MacIntyre and Unger," but Sandel, in fact, is critical of MacIntyre and shares not much at all with Roberto Unger, being most indebted to the philosopher Charles Taylor, who is not discussed save haphazardly by Holmes. "Communitarians" to the man (no female communitarians are discussed) are softhearted nostalgists pining for the lost harmony of a mythic past. The issues that critics of contemporary liberalism take on get rather short shrift from Holmes: three pages devoted to the common good; five pages to the loss of authority; another five to the diminution of the public realm. More compelling are Holmes's defense of the liberal "self" against critics who see it as a version of "acquisitive individualism," following the lead of C.B. MacPherson and others; his defense of moral skepticism and of rights against those who claim rights are selfish. But each of these interventions is by way of a starter, not a meal. If Holmes wants us to partake from the entire liberal menu, we need more than he has given us. Let it be said, finally, that the contemporary antiliberals he discusses in detail - Strauss, MacIntyre, Lasch, and Unger - were and are prepared to defend a democratic polity against anti-democrats. But Holmes's particular sort of liberal polity is not the only democratic option. Admittedly, it may be the best we can do, but that is another argument.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)
Elshtain, Jean Bethke. "The Anatomy of Antiliberalism." Commonweal, vol. 120, no. 19, 1993, p. 30+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA14553740&it=r&asid=d332939c9e9595bf4fb0e4823234599f. Accessed 9 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A14553740

The Matador's Cape

(Sept. 2007):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2007 Midwest Book Review
http://www.midwestbookreview.com
The Matador's Cape
Stephen Holmes, Ph.D.
Cambridge University Press
32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10013-2473
9780521875165, $30 www.cambridge.org 1-800-872-7423
New York University School of Law research director Stephen Holmes presents The Matador's Cape: America's Reckless Response to Terror, a scholarly examination of the failures, mismanagement, and worse rampant in the Bush-Cheney administration's response to the September 11th attacks, especially the deleterious ramifications of the war in Iraq. The Matador's Cape strongly condemns acts of terror and genocide, yet examines with equal suspicion the Bush-Cheney's administration's insistence in sequestering its intelligence and decision-making process from the public--and therefore from any solid opportunity to vette or cross-check its ideologically driven conclusions, with disastrous results. Also discussed is the significant yet by no means unilateral role of religious fundamentalism in propagating terrorism, the impact of rising birthrates in the Islamic world contrasted with falling birthrates in the Western world, the harmful and psychologically twisted effects of the Bush-Cheney administrations embrace of torture, and much more. A measured, well-reasoned and deftly persuasive treatise about the need for an immediate reexamination of America's current administration and foreign policy. Highly recommended.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Matador's Cape." Internet Bookwatch, Sept. 2007. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA168663882&it=r&asid=e1e0162340c13d48a0a7cc5d1b8cc002. Accessed 9 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A168663882

"The Beginning of Politics: Power in the Biblical Book of Samuel." Publishers Weekly, 13 Mar. 2017, p. 78. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA485971699&asid=b5daea9a068ff035b0fd918cc1b93807. Accessed 9 Oct. 2017. Wolpe, David. "Game of thrones." Commentary, May 2017, p. 52+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA492535959&asid=44714861ac2b97769d911a813da8d632. Accessed 9 Oct. 2017. Tinder, Glenn. "The Anatomy of Antiliberalism." Atlantic, Oct. 1993, p. 116+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA13280713&asid=bfacd2ea96c4fd48953463722c9ce8e4. Accessed 9 Oct. 2017. Lomasky, Loren E. "Passions and Constraint: On the Theory of Liberal Democracy." Reason, Jan. 1996, p. 52+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA17779905&asid=293224f1b61d01b6f3166bdae83faeac. Accessed 9 Oct. 2017. Hayward, Steven. "The Anatomy of Antiliberalism." Reason, Feb. 1994, p. 60+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA15143296&asid=26f0f3c4d2beb1b499b477c8eb2a98a1. Accessed 9 Oct. 2017. "THE COST OF RIGHTS: Why Liberty Depends on Taxes." Publishers Weekly, 11 Jan. 1999, p. 58. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA53602000&asid=8a39347d79369c85ae29fdc376566424. Accessed 9 Oct. 2017. Stivachtis, Yannis A. "Terrorists: The Matador's Cape: America's Reckless Response to Terror." Biography, vol. 31, no. 3, 2008, p. 549+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA188159472&asid=3281d99e025c5cad4603fccd3f099fce. Accessed 9 Oct. 2017. Stivachtis, Yannis A. "The Matador's Cape: America's Reckless Response to Terror." Presidential Studies Quarterly, vol. 38, no. 2, 2008, p. 366+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA181673380&asid=3933b95ea56813016315714f14518710. Accessed 9 Oct. 2017. Costello, Jeffrey R. "The Anatomy of Antiliberalism." Michigan Law Review, May 1994, pp. 1547-1555. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA15735618&asid=e72d8a1d6c5abe790e1ac8b8aa72bfdb. Accessed 9 Oct. 2017. Muller, Jerry Z. "The Anatomy of Antiliberalism." Public Interest, no. 116, 1994, p. 115+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA15657959&asid=d1c877eb9e3aa79f9f4d9eaa5ce6306e. Accessed 9 Oct. 2017. Elshtain, Jean Bethke. "The Anatomy of Antiliberalism." Commonweal, vol. 120, no. 19, 1993, p. 30+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA14553740&asid=d332939c9e9595bf4fb0e4823234599f. Accessed 9 Oct. 2017. "The Matador's Cape." Internet Bookwatch, Sept. 2007. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA168663882&asid=e1e0162340c13d48a0a7cc5d1b8cc002. Accessed 9 Oct. 2017.

• Church Times
  https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2017/4-august/books-arts/book-reviews/chapter-and-verse-on-people-in-power
  Word count: 647

  The Beginning of Politics by Moshe Halbertal and Stephen Holmes

  04 August 2017
  AddThis Sharing Buttons
  Share to Facebook

  Share to Twitter

  Share to Print

  Share to Email

  Share to More

  Anthony Phillips finds political relevance in the Old Testament

  FOR those enjoying political power and for those aspiring to exercise it, the Book of Samuel provides salutary reading. Indeed, Moshe Halbertal and Stephen Holmes argue that this narrative is the first and greatest work of Western political thought.
  The two protagonists in the Book of Samuel exhibit dramatically different personalities. While Saul is “self-doubting, unambitious and insecure”, David appears “generally entitled, ambitious, and self-assured”.
  Halbertal and Holmes outline the circumstances that led up to the inauguration of the monarchy and the prophet Samuel’s part in both promoting and destabilising Saul. The authors indicate the bitterness of God in compromising his authority in providing a king. Indeed, his ambivalence towards the political realm permeates the narrative. As the central feature of the Book, Halbertal and Holmes highlight the connection between treating ends as means and means as ends.
  While Saul may have been reluctant to assume power, once he holds it, he becomes intoxicated with it, even to the extent of madness. On the other hand, David is pictured as a thoroughly political figure, no more so than in the way he deals with the survivors of Saul’s family. Nor is he afraid to prejudice others in pursuit of his own ends, to contrive publicity if it serves his purpose, or to countenance morally unsavoury actions, maintaining his distance from them. Politics is not for the squeamish.
  Halbertal and Holmes forensically analyse two very different political crimes: the paranoid Saul’s massacre of the priests of Nob, and the over-confident David’s murder of Uriah. Both instances ironically illustrate that those who wield power can find that that power can wield them.
  Turning to the importance of continuity of sovereignty, the authors show that a hiatus or lapse of sovereignty is something that no state can afford. But the narrative of David’s family clearly indicates the tension that arises when power politics impinges on family life. The logic of power and the logic of love are incompatible, as the accounts of the rape of Tamar and Absalom’s rebellion and their consequences illustrate.
  Advertisement

  Finally, Halbertal and Holmes consider David’s will and last words, a tutorial on how Solomon is to consolidate political power, a lesson that he dutifully follows up. Even if appeal is made to justice to legitimise political action, in the end it remains a question how much is pure political expediency. In politics, mixed motives appear inevitable.
  While the anonymous author of the Book of Samuel focuses on the dark side of sovereignty, he does not reject it. What came before was worse. Indeed, the exercise of political power is vital if the common good is to be achieved, however flawed are those who exercise it.
  For all who seek power, this analysis of the psychology of sovereignty as wielded by these early kings of Israel is as relevant today as when the Book of Samuel was written. While those who enjoy power will hang on to it at any price, those who aspire to it are unlikely to avoid moral ambiguity in their quest. Is it too much to hope that this novel work finds its way into the Library of the House of Commons?
   
  Canon Anthony Phillips is a former headmaster of The King’s School, Canterbury.
   
  The Beginning of Politics: Power in the biblical Book of Samuel
  Moshe Halbertal and Stephen Holmes
  Princeton University Press £22.95
  (978-0-691-17462-4)
  Church Times Bookshop £20.65

• 
  http://freebeacon.com/culture/what-we-can-learn-from-the-book-of-kings/
  Word count: 1501

  What We Can Learn From the Book of Kings
  Review: 'The Beginning of Politics: Power in the Biblical Book of Samuel' by Moshe Halbertal and Stephen Holmes
  Share
  Tweet
  Email

  Getty Images

  BY: David Isaac
  October 8, 2017 5:00 am
  A more dramatic story than that of Israel's first kings as told in Samuel I and II is hard to imagine. But law professors Moshe Halbertal and Stephen Holmes in The Beginning of Politics take an unusual approach in viewing Samuel as "a profound work of political thought" in which the absorbing narrative is constructed in order to highlight the central structural themes about the nature of political power and its effects on those who wield it. In their reading the hero is neither Saul nor David but the anonymous author who has "produced what is still the best book ever written in the Hebrew language" embodying lessons as relevant today as they were then.
  Halbertal and Holmes point out the sharp contrast between the ambivalent, if not outrightly hostile, attitude of the Book of Samuel toward kingship compared with that of surrounding cultures. They note that "in the political theology typical of the great land powers surrounding ancient Israel, the king was either a God, an incarnation of a God, or a semi-mythic human king who was elected by the gods to serve as a necessary mediator between the divine order and the human world."
  Unlike these cultures, the Jews had relied on charismatic warrior-chieftains to lead them against foreign threats. But these leaders did not become dynastic rulers. As Gideon, one of these divinely appointed deliverers, says when the people ask him to rule over them: "I will not rule over you nor will my son rule over you. The Lord will rule over you."
  When the Jews, threatened by repeated invasions, ask the prophet Samuel for "a king to rule us, like all the nations," he practically mourns. The Lord says, "Heed the voice of the people in all that they say to you, for it is not you they have cast aside but Me they have cast aside from reigning over them." In fact, God compares the request for a king to idolatry. "Like all the deeds they have done from the day I brought them up from Egypt to this day, forsaking Me and serving other gods…"
  The author of Samuel does not confine objections to kingship to religious grounds. In one of Samuel's most famous passages, the people are warned that a king will take their sons for himself to man his army and to harvest his fields, and will take their daughters "as confectioners and cooks and bakers." In other words, the king they see as a guardian against foreign attack will ultimately hurt them—"as for you, you will become his slaves." Halbertal and Holmes show how Samuel's author uses the stories of Saul and David to reveal the dangers.
  Chief among them is what Halbertal and Holmes call "the grip of power," as the aim of those who attain sovereignty "is often reduced to nothing more exalted or idealistic than staying in power." They see Saul as a prime example, for he is introduced in the story as an unassuming, unambitious, and considerate young man who hides when he is called to be anointed king. He turns into a madman bent on power, who repeatedly tries to kill David in order to preserve himself and his lineage on the throne.
  When power's main end becomes preserving power, it leads to what Halbertal and Holmes refer to as "instrumentalization," a bulky term that refers to turning what should be ends into means. Such ends as love, justice, duty, loyalty, and morality become useful tools. For example, Saul is delighted when his daughter Michal falls in love with David because he thinks he can use her love as a means to kill David. According to the writers, David instrumentalizes the sacred when, fleeing Saul, he persuades the priest Ahimelech to help him by pretending he is acting as an agent of Saul, thus making the priest complicit in his escape and leading to the massacre by Saul not just of Ahimelech but of all the priests of Nob.
  Halbertal and Holmes, moreover, argue the dynastic solution to the problem of succession is inherently unstable for it "leads to the next generation being entitled, competitive and impatient." David's problems with his sons pitted against each other and against him illustrate the difficulties.
  To Halbertal and Holmes, "what makes the [Samuel story] so alive to the touch even today" is "its analysis of political power, an analysis that we believe to apply not only here and now but whenever and wherever structures of power exist."
  But while this interpretation of Samuel will appeal to political scientists, to the believer, Jewish or Christian, or even a secular reader drawn by the rich humanity of the narrative, it will seem simplistic and reductive. For example, for Halbertal and Holmes, Saul's madness is fully explained by Samuel's warning to him that the kingship would be torn from his hands. They write: "So thoroughly does hereditary sovereignty captivate the one who wields it that the fearful anticipation of losing it, even for one who did not originally seek it, suffices to unhinge the mind." Maybe. The text makes it seem more likely that Saul was mentally ill—"an evil spirit from the Lord began to terrify him." If Saul was sick, it puts his behavior in a different light. There is a problem with mining the story of someone who suffers from mental illness for political lessons.
  As for "instrumentalizing" the sacred in misleading Ahimelech, David is a young man running for his life in desperate need of food and a weapon. You don't need to be a power-seeker to deceive a priest if the alternative is death. David will later take responsibility for the deaths of the priests of Nob, telling the sole survivor, "I am the one who caused the loss of all the lives of your father's house." This is because he had seen Doeg, a member of Saul's court, in Ahimelech's entourage and knew he would report back to the king. But what Halbertal and Holmes fail to note is that David had no way of knowing that Doeg would lie in his report, making it appear that Ahimelech had been a knowing co-conspirator against Saul. Had Doeg reported honestly, Saul would have known that Ahimelech had been deceived. David might well have assumed Saul would do no more than rebuke the innocent priest for his gullibility.
  While they caution that "attempts to unmask David as nothing but a cynical opportunist fail to do justice to the many ambiguities woven artfully into his story," Halbertal and Holmes do not begin to do justice to what David Wolpe in his David: The Divided Heart calls "the most complex character" in the Bible. David sins repeatedly—having his loyal soldier Uriah killed to cover up David's adultery with his wife is the most blatant of those sins. But Wolpe is right that the evidence in Samuel is that David’s central character trait is faith. God repeatedly forgives him, says Wolpe, because "one of David's most distinguishing features was the sin he avoided: idolatry." And so, when Nathan tells David of God's displeasure at what he had done to Uriah the Hittite, Wolpe writes, "Here is what David did not do: He did not have Nathan put to death." His reaction is acknowledgment and penance: "I stand guilty before the Lord!"
  David's behavior in other critical matters suggests he acts out of genuine religious conviction. Once king, he wants to build a temple to the Lord, which would certainly have expanded his prestige and power, but when Nathan tells him his hands are too bloody for the task. David relents without question. And there are, of course, David's writings, his Psalms, which are full of praise for God, to whom he gives all the credit for his successes. The message King David seems to be sending throughout his reign is that not he, but God is king.
  Halbertal and Holmes bring a valuable added dimension to the reading of the Book of Samuel. But it will be a distorted one if the reader does not take care to explore other studies that focus on the human understanding and subtlety of this great narrative.
  Saul and David were both believing kings. This was true of only a handful of Israel's rulers. Most did "what was displeasing to the Lord." Even King Solomon turned away from God in the end, incredibly building altars to a variety of gods to please his foreign wives. To minimize the faith of Saul and David, to distill down their reigns chiefly to cold political calculation does a disservice to their legacy.

• Englewood Review
  http://englewoodreview.org/habertal-holmes-the-beginning-of-politics-review/
  Word count: 1058

  Habertal / Holmes -The Beginning of Politics [Review]
  August 23, 2017 — 1 Comment
   32  57  0  91
   
  An Obsession With Gaining
  and Keeping Power
  A Review of 
  The Beginning of Politics:
  Power in the Biblical Book of Samuel.
  Moshe Halbertal and Stephen Holmes.
  Hardback: Princeton UP, 2017.
  Buy Now: [ Amazon ]  [ Kindle ]
   
  Reviewed by James Honig
   
  My Sunday School memories of the David stories are full of heroics. David, the cheeky adolescent who slew a giant.  David, the brilliant warrior who pillaged the pagan Philistines. David, the great King who made God’s people into a great power. David the poet who wrote so many of the psalms, giving testimony to his strong and reliable faith.
  In seminary, while David was still an icon of godly leadership, his dalliance with Bathsheba was also used as a cautionary tale for would-be pastors “not to get yourselves in trouble.” I still remember the lessons from David’s life and leadership that Eugene Peterson extracted from the pages of First and Second Samuel in Leap Over a Wall. In all of it, David was lifted up as a godly man after whom one could model one’s life.

  David fell a few notches after reading Geraldine Brooks’s novel, The Secret Chord. Brooks didn’t uncover any biblical stories that I didn’t already know. Instead, her treatment of the stories pulled down some of the curtains of piety through which I had filtered those stories. I began to see David’s actions as cunning, violent, and abusive towards some of the people closest to him.
  Then comes this book: The Beginning of Politics: Power in the Biblical Book of Samuel. In it, Moshe Halbertal and Stephen Holmes, both professors of Law, take a careful look at the lives of Saul and David through the stories in First and Second Samuel with an eye towards uncovering insights into the nature of political power. Neither Saul nor David come across as heroic; rather they are portrayed as two potentially great kings who became obsessed with gaining and keeping power.
  Beginning with the Israelites’ fateful longing for a king in the manner of the other nations, and the shift from “God is the king,” to “the king is not a God,” Halbertal and Holmes argue that the author of First and Second Samuel chronicles the insidious nature of human political power and the idolatry that follows when humans transfer their allegiance from God to human leaders. Through an analysis of the Saul and David stories, they argue that though politics is an overpowering human necessity, we humans will never escape the self-defeating betrayals that lie at the heart of political power. Over and over, the authors demonstrate how the gain of political power by individuals leads to decisions that are not necessarily the right course of action for the subjects, but are precisely the required action to consolidate and strengthen the hold on political power.
  Saul is portrayed as a relatively innocent young man who was unwittingly thrust into the kingship. Once he became king, he became obsessed with keeping the power, and later in his reign became paranoid that everyone around him was out to get him. For instance, Halbertal and Homles analyze at length the story of Saul and his massacre of the priests of Nob. After a frustratingly unsuccessful attempt to capture David, Saul eventually arranges for the execution not only of the principal players in David’s escape, but others whose only crime was that they happened to be present when David escaped. “Focused exclusively and obsessively on clinging to the throne, Saul treats those around him as nothing more than means for shoring up his power.”
  With regard to David, the authors draft an argument that David engulfed his entire household in death and violence as a means to ensure dynastic succession. Yet the very death and violence that David both actively and passively unleashed virtually had the opposite effect,  leading to the death of nearly all of David’s male offspring other than Solomon, and eventually to the chaotic, unstable, and violent struggle for the kingship of Israel and the eventual divided kingdom.
  As a Christian pastor whose only way of coming at the biblical text is to gain insight into how God is at work in the world and what that might mean for me and the faith community I serve, it was initially a little jarring to read a book based on the biblical text that was uninterested in lessons for the faithful. Those looking for insight into how Saul, David, or the stories from First and Second Samuel fit into and inform the covenant history of God and God’s people likely will be frustrated.  It just doesn’t have much to say about salvation history or the community of the faithful.
  But those interested in insights into human nature, the drive to gain and to keep political power will find incisive commentary. Halbertal and Holmes mine the depths of these ancient stories and in their razor sharp analysis draw conclusions that are not only timely, they help understand the nature of politics as it unfolds in the daily news feed. What’s uncanny and a little frightening is the sharp parallels between these ancient stories and what we see playing out on the screens of our televisions and the pages of our newspapers. While the stories of how political power gets played are relevant around the globe, they are particularly relevant to readers who live in the U.S. We are experiencing a time of extreme political partisanship and blatant strategies to gain and consolidate power. Neither red nor blue are free from blame. Politicians never tire of claiming they are acting on the will of “the American people,” yet their actions betray that they are far more concerned with gaining the political upper hand and strengthening their political power.
  Once I got past the reality that this commentary was unlike any other I’ve read and accepted it on its own terms, I found the book to be rich and insightful. And from that perspective, the incisive analysis of these two authors will reward the careful reader with understanding as fresh as the new day.

Word Count