Bleak Liberalism [Hardback]

Why is liberalism so easily dismissed by thinkers both to its left and its right? To radicals on the left calling for wholesale transformation and conservatives claiming a monopoly on pessimistic or realistic” conceptions of humanity, liberalism’s assured progressivism can seem like thin gruel. By these accounts, liberalism is unable to register the complexities of lived experience or to speak to the need for meaningful forms of belief and affiliation. Amanda Anderson’s study makes the case for a renewed understanding of the liberal tradition, demonstrating that liberalism has a more complex and thick” array of attitudinal stances and political objectives than the conventional contrasts admit. Throughout its history, she argues, liberalism has engaged sober and even stark views of historical development, political dynamics, and human and social psychology. Anderson draws on a wide range of political thinkers, from John Stuart Mill to Judith N. Shklar, but emphasizes the ways in which literature reflects the ambitions and difficulties facing liberalism. Her discussion encompasses canonical works of high realism (Dickens’s Bleak House,” Eliot’s Middlemarch,” and Trollope’s The Way We Live Now”), a representative constellation of political novels from England and the United States (Dickens’s Hard Times,” Gaskell’s North and South,” Forster’s Howards End,” Trilling’s The Middle of the Journey”), and two works of modernism (Ellison’s Invisible Man” and Lessing’s The Golden Notebook”), which themselves dramatize the ideological conflicts of the twentieth century in striking ways. Anderson’s deft combination of intellectual history and literary analysis discloses a richer understanding of one of the most important political ideologies of the modern era.

Why is liberalism so often dismissed by thinkers from both the left and the right? To those calling for wholesale transformation or claiming a monopoly on “realistic” conceptions of humanity, liberalism’s assured progressivism can seem hard to swallow. Bleak Liberalism makes the case for a renewed understanding of the liberal tradition, showing that it is much more attuned to the complexity of political life than conventional accounts have acknowledged.

Anderson examines canonical works of high realism, political novels from England and the United States, and modernist works to argue that liberalism has engaged sober and even stark views of historical development, political dynamics, and human and social psychology. From Charles Dickens’s Bleak House and Hard Times to E. M. Forster’s Howards End to Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, this literature demonstrates that liberalism has inventive ways of balancing sociological critique and moral aspiration. A deft blend of intellectual history and literary analysis, Bleak Liberalism reveals a richer understanding of one of the most important political ideologies of the modern era.