Content area
Full Text
Putting Liberalism in Its Place, Paul W. Kahn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 336 pp., $29.95 cloth.
Many liberals in the United States have felt themselves to be living in a foreign country of late. Indeed, since September 11,2001, they have witnessed their politicians and their fellow citizens respond to the external threat of terrorism in ways they find not simply wrong but contrary to hitherto shared assumptions about the acceptable boundaries of political discourse and action.
On closer inspection, however, the crisis of liberalism has been on the horizon for a long time, perhaps even since the 19705, as liberalism began its slow decline just as its principal "theorists," such as John Rawls, emerged. By the 19905, anticipated by academic communitarianism, religion as a persistent form of cultural belonging had solidified its rude reappearance in public life.
The aftermath of September 11 suggests that American liberalism's challenges have only begun. Paul W. Kahn, an unorthodox Yale law professor whose basic project is to introduce political and legal thinkers to the richer methods of humanists, writes that the real difficulty is that liberals also rely on a long tradition and an encumbering set of commitments-but are unable to see that they do so. Making the reality of liberalism visible, Kahn argues, will help its partisans understand the world of politics the September ii trauma only made seem new. Kahn's project of "putting liberalism in its place" does not mean rejecting it, but rather exploring the larger worldview it really is-usually unbeknownst to those who most passionately espouse it. But this book provides an image of liberalism so different from the one its partisans have customarily entertained that it is doubtful they will easily accept it.
Kahn begins with an analysis of the conceptual "architecture" that makes liberalism possible, one he thinks also makes familiar attacks on it equally and endlessly possible. For Kahn, human reasoning and language are both dependent on locale and tradition and also afford the possibility of rising above them. This "antinomy," which is to be found at every level of linguistic complexity, from the individual sentence to the narrative tradition, explains how the possibility of the autonomous liberal subject came about and why it is forever precarious. But only a "genealogy"...