So when Lippmann’s Essays in the Public Philosophy appeared in 1955, his call for a return to natural law was weighted with so much cultural baggage that it easily triggered alarms disproportionate to what he had actually said. Even though he attempted to address the issues in the light of the long sweep of Western history, in 1955 the horizons of most liberal Americans were dominated by very recent memories of McCarthyism that were still smolderingly hot. Lippmann had opposed McCarthy, and he always thought of himself as a political liberal and a champion of free society, but to his great chagrin, a number of his mainstream contemporaries saw his ideas as a step toward authoritarianism. It did not help that he advocated, as a counter to enthusiasms of the masses, not only a rational search for natural law, but also a stronger executive. The New Republic characterized his book as the work of a “badly frightened man.” The Saturday Review called it “eloquent but unconvincing.” Reinhold Niebuhr acknowledged Lippmann’s “profundity” but did not have much else good to say. Not all the reviews were negative, but the gist of most of them was, as The Nation put it, that it was “not the great book of distilled wisdom on the ultimate problems of political organization and human destiny for which we have been waiting.”12
The most scathing attack came from Archibald MacLeish. The poet, who also had been Librarian of Congress during the FDR administration, had come under some fire himself from McCarthy because of some minor left-wing associations. In a long review, he took Lippmann to task for not sufficiently countering McCarthyite threats to basic freedoms. Lippmann, said MacLeish, was motivated by “the conviction that the idea of full individual freedom and the idea of effective community are irreconcilable ideas and that there is therefore an ineluctable choice between them; that in that choice community must be preferred.” According to MacLeish, Lippmann had mistaken the direction of history. “The flow of human life is not backward toward closer and closer association but forward toward greater individuality.” MacLeish believed that artists were on the cutting edge that pointed to the direction in which civilization was headed. “In all the modern arts of words, in modern painting, in modern music, a common impulse is at work,” he wrote, “an impulse, almost a compulsion, to penetrate the undiscovered country of the individual human consciousness, the human self.” Lippmann, by contrast, by stepping away from the priority of freedom and looking toward the past, was playing into the hands of McCarthyites and other authoritarians.13
Lippmann offered a rejoinder in which he could barely contain his anger that MacLeish had accused him of somehow abetting McCarthyism. MacLeish had opened with a lengthy exposition of the implications of the McCarthyite menace, and only when he was well into his polemic did he get around to mentioning that Lippmann had a long record as an editorialist of speaking out forcefully against McCarthyism. Lippmann retorted that he would have to have a personality as split as that of Jekyll and Hyde to truly have advocated such opposites. He was just as much a genuine liberal and a champion of the free society as he had ever been. MacLeish, he continued, had confused categories regarding human freedom. MacLeish had declared that since the eighteenth century, Americans had been committed to “the boundless liberty of the individual human spirit.” But then MacLeish had equated that with “the modern democratic belief in the greatest possible individual freedom.” Lippmann could affirm the ideal of “the boundless liberty of the individual human spirit” as an ideal truly for the individual. But in the public sphere it was not “possible” that freedom could be boundless for everyone. The best we could do would be to work for the greatest freedom possible within the bounds necessary for community. Freedom in the public domain, said Lippmann, must necessarily be limited (even while it should be maximized). MacLeish had defined “the basic philosophy of liberalism” as “the belief in the liberation of the individual human spirit to find its own way to enlightenment and truth.” With this Lippmann could agree. But that ideal for inward individual self-fulfillment was hardly a complete standard for a public philosophy that would adjudicate the hard questions that arise when individual interests conflict.14
Alan Dunn, June 17, 1950, The New Yorker
In Walter Lippmann and His Times, a tribute from a dozen of the leading thinkers of the day published in 1959 for Lippmann’s seventieth birthday, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. offered a piercing analysis of what, from a liberal perspective, was Lippmann’s fall not only from pragmatism, but also from pluralism. In his books of the 1920s, said Schlesinger, Lippmann had addressed the irreducible pluralism of modern societies with a procedural solution of “the maintenance of a regime of rule, contract, and custom.” But since then, and especially in Essays in the Public Philosophy, these practical rules had somehow taken on a sort of cosmic essence for Lippmann. Due process had grown into “a universal order on which all reasonable men were agreed.” These rules were to be objectively discovered and had to be obeyed. Rather than seeing pluralism as a reason to back away from absolute claims, Lippmann had declared that “in this pluralized and fragmenting society a public philosophy with common and binding principles was more necessary than it had ever been.” Moreover, Lippmann had insisted that the truths of such a philosophy would have to be such that they could be “proved to the modern skeptic” so that “only the willfully irrational can deny” them. Schlesinger did not think himself irrational, “yet for those brought up in the tradition of James, Lippmann’s conception of natural law, for all its nobility, cannot help seem an artificial construct.” Schlesinger even asked, with a mix of hope and condescension, whether, in some of Lippmann’s very recent statements, there were “perhaps signs that he is swinging back to a more vivid appreciation of the reality of pluralism?”15
Schlesinger represented the antidogmatic liberal consensus of the era as well as anyone. He had, in fact, been one of the first to define it in his 1949 book, The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom. Liberals of his generation (he was born in 1917), he explained, had not grown up with the romanticism of utopian Marxism that had captured the hearts of so many progressives, but rather, with the ugly realities of the Soviet Union and the hopeful experimental politics of FDR’s New Deal. Influenced by theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (Schlesinger became a prime example of “atheists for Niebuhr”), he affirmed that radical reformers had naïvely optimistic views of human nature and hence of its reformability. Democracy supported a healthy balance between individual fulfillment and community responsibility and was “a process, not a conclusion.” It needed to be characterized by “empiricism and gradualism.” Such centrist liberal views, built around “the spirit of human decency,” said Schlesinger, could in fact be characterized as a “new radicalism” opposing the extremes of tyranny. It “dedicates itself to problems as they come, attacking them in terms which best advance the human and libertarian values, which best secure the freedom and fulfillment of the individual.”16
Sociologist Daniel Bell encapsulated much the same outlook in the much-noted title to his 1960 book of essays, The End of Ideology. Marxism was no longer an option for intellectuals, but that was only a symptom of a larger phenomenon, that all ideologies were exhausted. Analysts needed to give up searching for global schemes and recognize that reality was too complicated for that, and so needed to be studied one problem at a time. What was needed, Bell counseled, was the scholar rather than the intellectual. “The scholar has a bounded field of knowledge, a tradition, and seeks to find his place in it, adding to the accumulated, tested knowledge of the past, as a mosaic.” The scholar’s work was much more down to earth and empirical than the intellectual’s. And the practical, down-to-earth challenge for Western society was the same as it had had been for “the last two hundred years: how, within the framework of freedom, to increase the living standards of the majority of people and at the same time maintain or raise cultural levels.”17
Scholarly public intellectuals such as Schlesinger and Bell were not rebels without a cause, but moderate reformers with many causes. They ar
ticulated the widely held view that the strength of the American democratic system lay in the very feature that worried Lippmann, its relativism and lack of dogmatism. Dogmatic ideologies had been the bane of the twentieth century. Forward-minded American thinkers could look to the New Deal as providing a refreshing contrast that they saw as capturing the genius of the American way. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who bridged the two eras by being both the preeminent historian of the New Deal and a special adviser to President Kennedy, described the ideal. “The whole point of the New Deal,” he wrote, “lay in its belief in activism, its faith in gradualness, its rejection of catastrophism, its indifference to ideology, its conviction that a managed and modified capitalist order achieved by piecemeal experiment could combine personal freedom and economic growth.” Daniel Bell, in an introduction to a 1955 volume analyzing McCarthyism and the new American right, found similar traits throughout American history. Americans, he observed, long had been given to extremism in morality, but they had seldom extended such moral dogmatism to politics, where instead they displayed “an extraordinary talent for compromise.” That talent for “bargaining and consensus” grew out of “the historical contribution of liberalism,” which was “to separate law from morality.”18
Yet the fact was that, despite such disclaimers, the champions of a pragmatically based consensus were themselves moralists. They were passionately committed to principles such as individual freedom, free speech, human decency, justice, civil rights, community responsibilities, equality before the law, due process, balance of powers, economic opportunity, and so forth. And they were morally indignant at those who might subvert those principles. Yet their justification for these principles was not that they were fixed in a higher law or derived from an ideology. Rather, it was that these principles had evolved historically in the give and take of human experience in free societies and had proven themselves as contributing to human fulfillment. Mainstream liberal thinkers could thus, on the one hand, be consistent believers in a purely naturalistic universe that did not furnish any absolute first principles, yet on the other hand have a dedicated faith in the shared principles of the current American consensus. They were, as one commentator characterized them, “believing skeptics.”19
In retrospect, the striking thing to notice about mainstream liberals’ faith is that they believed that their pragmatically based relativistic democratic principles might lead to a pluralistic or inclusive mainstream cultural consensus that, at least ideally, might be resisted only by reactionaries and ideologues on the fringes. By the end of the 1960s, any such hopes, even as just an ideal, had proven fanciful. Rather than America being an ever-broadening consensus society, drawing peoples of all ethnicities, races, and religions into the mainstream, it became glaringly apparent that the nation was made up of many subcommunities and interest groups, and that, despite many shared beliefs, some of their fundamental principles were incompatible with those of others. Young and old, white and black, pacifist and patriot, religious and secular, liberal religious and conservative religious, women and men, gay and straight, were all contending with each other, and there was no single set of principles by which to adjudicate the differences.
How was it possible for so many liberal thinkers of the midcentury to retain their faith in what amounted to the enlightenment conclusions of the founders (“liberty and justice for all,” and the like) while dismissing the enlightenment foundations on which those conclusions rested? Why did they not, like Lippmann or conservative thinkers of the day, see that the edifice on which they were building their pluralistic consensus was about to collapse? How could they be both skeptics regarding fixed first principles and believers in the principles of the American way?
The answer is that at the time the outlook seemed to make good sense as a comparative matter. Compared to the alternatives, especially compared to the incredible brutalities of twentieth-century totalitarianism, the prevailing American principles had indeed proved themselves. Unprecedented prosperity, moreover, had validated that the American capitalist system, for all its faults and inequalities, worked; it was even subject to incremental improvements. World War II had generated patriotism, loyalty to the American way, and dedication to freedom, and these shared ideals persisted in the Cold War. Furthermore, if one accepted the premise that natural scientific assumptions and methods provided the closest thing to objectivity that could be obtained, and the corollary that no religious or metaphysical creed could plausibly claim universality, then the nondogmatic relativistic pragmatic method of testing beliefs seemed the best hope for building a unified society.
In an era when World War II and the Cold War had created an unusual sense of unity, it seemed plausible not to worry about first principles. As Yale political scientist Robert Dahl put it in his 1956 book A Preface to Democratic Theory, “the assumptions that made the idea of natural rights intellectually defensible have tended to dissolve in modern times.” Still, that was no great concern, because the “strange hybrid” of the American political system had proven remarkably adaptable in its evolution over time. Or, as Dahl’s Harvard counterpart, Louis Hartz, put it: “We have made the Enlightenment work in spite of itself, and surely it is time we ceased to be frightened of the mechanisms we have derived to do so.”20
At a time when such was the standard wisdom, Walter Lippmann appeared rather old-fashioned, at least when in the company of other liberals, in seeing the lack of foundations as so fundamental a problem as to demand a collective rebuilding of philosophical first principles. In many respects, the enlightenment still reigned in America, yet it continued to reign only by default. Lippmann’s disagreement with his peers was not over whether a unifying consensus based on the founders’ enlightenment principles should continue—they all agreed on that—but over whether it could long endure without the foundations on which the founders had built.
Such debates regarding pragmatism versus natural law might seem abstract and theoretical, but their implications were no better illustrated than in the greatest domestic political struggle of the late 1950s and early 1960s: the civil rights movement.
Looking back from the twenty-first century, it is easy to see that there was a lot missing from the inclusive pluralism of the midcentury public intellectuals. The insiders were almost all white males; most were secularists; some had a Protestant background, but more were Jewish; and almost all lived in the Northeast. Catholics were useful because of their urban political power, but they were only barely beginning to gain a voice in national discussions and were not a discernible presence in major universities. Fundamentalists and evangelical Protestants were off the radar of most academics and cultural observers, except as reminders of anti-intellectualism in the nation’s hinterlands. Those observers also regarded the South as largely a cultural backwater. Ethnic Protestants, even some with considerable intellectual traditions, received no more hearing than ethnic Catholics. Hispanic and Asian Americans likewise were not thought of except as among those who would be drawn into the consensus.
African Americans, however, were a glaring absence. Unlike most other outsiders, they were not only largely ignored, they were often excluded, and that exclusion permeated almost every dimension of their lives. Many liberal intellectuals accordingly recognized racial discrimination and lack of “Negro” civil rights as the most flagrant reproach to American democracy. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., for instance, in his 1949 manifesto The Vital Center, declared that “the sin of racial pride still represents the most basic challenge to the American conscience,” and that even though we cannot “transform folkways and eradicate bigotry overnight,” we must “maintain an unrelenting attack on all forms of racial discrimination.”21
With the 1954 US Supreme Court decision mandating school integration, and President Eisenhower’s use of federal troops to enforce integration in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957, everyone had to include racial issues as being among the top challenges facing the nation. Where one stood on th
e question of how fast the nation should move on the question of civil rights was a pretty good index of the degree of one’s liberalism. In an era when liberals, with their emphasis on incremental changes, often looked like conservatives on many social issues, ending racial injustice was a matter on which they were typically dedicated to advocating substantial social change.22
Despite such dedication, one great shortcoming of the approach of consensus liberals to civil rights was that they, like the federal government itself, had no real solution to the problem of southern white intransigence. In general, the liberal political establishment held a view of human nature that was too naïvely optimistic to overcome the entrenched power and deeply held racial prejudices that undergirded southern public segregation. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who may be taken as prototypical of the most thoughtful of such centrist liberals, partook in this naïveté. Despite being an admirer of Reinhold Niebuhr, Schlesinger did not take to heart the degrees to which human perversity could disrupt the operations of the pragmatic vital center. Thus, Schlesinger was so confident in the incremental problem-solving approach of the American experience that he could declare, “I am certain that history has equipped modern liberalism . . . to construct a society where men will be both free and happy.” His hope, which was typical of the liberalism of the time, was that prejudice would eventually yield to education. Already in 1949 he could claim with ungrounded optimism that “the South on the whole accepts the objectives of the civil rights program as legitimate, even though it may have serious and intelligible reservations about timing and methods.”23
The Twilight of the American Enlightenment Page 8
