Thread by @SohrabAhmari

Sigh. Another half-baked, underdeveloped critique of the "postliberals," including yours truly.

Why do people give themselves permission to weigh in on things without having done the reading? Or even thought things through?

1/x

hedgehogreview.com/web-features/t…

The big tell is the absence, for the most part, of any quotations from any of the postliberals. He chides us for failing to attend to various 19th- and 20th-century critics (Lasch, Marx, Matthew Arnold, Tocqueville). Excuse me, but do the f--ing read.

I've constantly drawn on Arnold (never mind having *been* a Marxist --- do the reading, argh!). Deneen is deeply, deeply engaged with Lasch and Marx and Tocqueville. Hazony's ideas owe a huge debt to Burke.

And then besides doing the reading (actually reading the people you set out to chin-stroke about), you should really think through what your thesis is and whether it's worth putting to paper.

Insofar as this guy has a thesis, it's that postliberals give too much credit to liberalism. He agrees that liberalism's "political imaginary"--the state of nature, the atomized individual, etc.--is just that: a fiction. So far, so good.

But then he thinks he's pulled off a very clever move by showing that that imaginary has never been fully realized in history. Actually existing liberals tolerated slavery, scientific racism, etc. I.e., the history of liberalism defies liberalism's claims about itself. Aha! Aha!

By failing to attend to this and reading their Lasch and their Marx, the postliberals recapitulate liberalism's triumphant claims about itself. *chin-stroke, chin-stroke*

Except, the people he criticizes *have* dealt with this. We all realize ideology unfolds in history, and it's never as smooth as the ideologues hope (liberal ideologues in this case). And yes, we *have* accounted for why liberalism and eugenics, etc. could go hand-in-hand.

He concludes (I'm lending his mushy musings more coherence than they possess): The postliberal critique takes the liberal imaginary too seriously: The postliberals say that the individual really has been atomized/liberated, just like the 18th-century liberals promised/imagined.

This, he thinks, is the coup de grâce. "How the twenty-first century substantiated precisely the social reality conjured up by eighteenth-century natural philosophy remains an obscured part of the story." Oof!

First of all, note how much work *precisely* is doing in that sentence. Has the liberal subject been liberated/atomized *precisely* as a Locke imagined? Who knows? But he's a lot more atomized than the preliberal subject was, that's for sure.

The bigger point is this: Liberalism's state-of-nature mythology might be--indeed, *is*--mythology. But it doesn't follow that such a mythology couldn't be used to legitimate a system that really does liberate/atomize the individual (from family, church, community, etc.).

Please, do the reading. Don't just come at the postliberals (I increasingly hate the label) with vague notions of what they stand for and have argued. Don't embarrass yourself. Don't be Andrew Lynn.