The Anatomy of Antiliberalism.

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.