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For decades, liberalism has served as a constant foil for the theoretical and political position-taking of the academic Left. Associated with “two faulty ideals, the autonomous individual and the free market” (19), liberalism has been frequently treated as coextensive with humanism, capitalism, even modernity itself, while also routinely being demeaned as strictly procedural, a politics abstracted from social life, embodied experience, and ethical commitment. Pushing back against these lasting misrepresentations of the liberal tradition in literary and cultural studies, and building on her incisive theoretical interventions in The Way We Argue Now, Amanda Anderson’s latest book shows how liberalism’s political thought and character has consistently demonstrated a reflexive awareness of the social, moral, and psychological limitations of its guiding principles of deliberative debate and procedural rationality. The title Bleak Liberalism principally denotes a period of acute self-criticism in the 1930s and ’40s, when intellectuals such as Hannah Arendt, Reinhold Niebuhr, Lionel Trilling, and Arthur Schlesinger responded to the catastrophes of midcentury history by insisting upon the tragic constraints facing all rational argument and collective action. For Anderson, this postwar liberal era, “bleak, chastened, and invested in complex aesthetic expression of its aims,” clarifies salient tendencies in political and philosophical liberalism that reach at least as far back as J. S. Mill and L. T. Hobhouse (20).
For readers of this journal, recovering a more complex understanding of liberalism’s political character may be most compelling for the way it enables Anderson to rediscover “the formal and conceptual complexity involved in literary engagements with liberal thinking” (2). Dividing her attention between nineteenth-century Britain and twentieth-century America, Anderson shows how novels from Dickens’s Bleak House to Ellison’s Invisible Man negotiate universalizing aspirations for rationalism, procedural argument, and abstract equality, and an ethos dwelling...