Kesler Charles R. - Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness: ten years of the Claremont Review of books

Introduction

A Decade of CRB

Charles R. Kesler

Ten years ago the Claremont Institute decided to publish a book review. What could we have been thinking? It isnt unheard of for a think tank to publish a magazine, of course, though it is rare for a think tank to publish a good one. For the Claremont Review of Books to prosper it would have to be very good, and it would have to meet a need that the conservative intellectual movement, despite its fecundity, had not satisfied.

In the inaugural issue, I posed the threshold question: why a book review? Because, I wrote,

it is a format that conservatives have not exploited, and we think that conservatives need, persistently and farsightedly, to wage the battle of ideas at the level of ideas rather than merely at the level of particular policies, important as they are. The galaxy of conservative journals and think tanks will continue to shine brightly... illuminating ideas as well as issues. But every month important conservative books and arguments languish, liberal tomes escape censure, and intelligent works of biography, history, politics, and literature remain unexamined.

The CRB set out to change that for the better, and we have succeeded remarkably, despite remaining a David compared to the Goliaths of the Left. Take our most conspicuous competitor (please!): the New York Review of Books has scores of staffers, publishes 20 times a year, and is read by tens of thousands of academics and liberal activists, always assuming one can distinguish between an academic and a liberal activist. The Claremont Review of Books operates with a handful of staff (we have never had more than four full-time employees), publishes quarterly, and is read by mere thousands of peoplebut what people. Our readers love their country not despite but because of its founding principles. They believe in the liberty of the individual not merely on account of its material benefits, though these are undeniable, but because human liberty reflects the divine image stamped on every human soul. They cherish the civilization of which America is such a distinguished part, the civilization which Americans are once again called upon to defend against new forms of barbarism and tyranny, at home and abroad.

Despite his size and shiny helmet, and his coat of mail and the greaves of brass upon his legs, Goliath had a weakness, which David exploited. He smote the Philistine in the forehead. The Biblical account adds the Tarantinoesque detail that the stone sunk into the giant, and Goliath fell upon his face to the earth. When we at the CRB take up our little sling, we too aim our stones at liberalisms headits most vulnerable point. Modern liberalism has never lacked academic credentials or intellectual pretensions, of course. Two generations ago, men as cultivated as Lionel Trilling and Louis Hartz could take it for granted that conservatism in America was either liberalism in disguise or a European affectation, at once aristocratic and ridiculous. Over here, conservatism was thought inarticulatebookless, John Kenneth Galbraith once sniffedbecause it was presumed to have nothing valuable to say about, or to, America. With his usual acuity, Galbraiths pronouncement came in the midst of the centurys greatest outpouring of conservative booksby such different thinkers and writers as Milton Friedman, Leo Strauss, Whittaker Chambers, and William F. Buckley, Jr. And the flow of important books and essays has continuedas a glance at the present volume will confirm.

So whos bookless now? Six years ago the publisher of the New Republic confessed, It is liberalism that is now bookless and dying. Who is a truly influential liberal mind in our culture? Whose ideas challenge and whose ideals inspire?... Theres no one, really. Perhaps Marty Peretz missed Barack Obamas autobiography, which inspired a lot of readers, or at least purchasers, once he entered the presidential lists. But in truth, it wasnt the book but Obama in the flesh, more precisely at the podium, that caused such devotees as Chris Matthews to go all tingly. In any event, the underlying problem is worse than Peretz realizes. As an intellectual movement, liberalism peaked a hundred years ago, shortly after it first emerged on the American scene bearing the calling card of Progressivism. The line of descent is straightforward. For example, today Paul Krugman recycles the arguments of Galbraith, who was recycling Simon Patten, who was recycling his friend Richard Elywho was one of Woodrow Wilsons mentors at Johns Hopkins. Ely got his from his teachers in graduate school in Germany. Liberals believe in recycling, I know, but this is downright unimaginative. And, to switch metaphors, after so many generations of intermarriage, its no wonder their ideas are getting a bit thin. Backhandedly, liberals have come around to admitting both their paternity and their problem. From Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to President Obama, leading liberals now prefer to be called small-p progressives, hoping that everything old really is new again.

In some respects, to be sure, liberalism has changed over the years. Mostly, these shifts have been adaptations of its original concepts to new conditions: figuring out how to overcome the moral truths and constitutional limitations of the American political tradition, in favor of a new freedom, a new deal, a fair deal, a new frontier, a great society, etc. In that fatal et cetera one confronts the weariness, the growing exhaustion of the liberal idea. How many times can one loudly demand change of a fundamentally transformative sort? Bill Clinton wanted to call his formula for revolution the new covenant, but as a notorious covenant-breaker had to retire the idea. Obama trotted out the new foundation but gave up when the jokes about ladies undergarments got too thick. The ennui is not merely rhetorical, however. It is philosophical.

The original liberals believed in progress as a scientific inevitability, and they had the sciences to prove it. The new social sciences that sprang up with the American research universities in the late 19th century paved the way for Progressivism, teaching the critical views of capitalism and the Constitution that would become liberal staples, and inculcating the reform spirit that would gin up a government program for every social problem. From the beginning, the academy served as the unofficial fourth department of the state, along with the judicial, executive, and legislative branches, as Frederic Howe (another Ely student) described the scene in Wisconsin, that laboratory of social democracy. The new economics, ethics, political science, sociology, and psychology all predicted, indeed guaranteed, the better world to come, very soon to come. For todays liberals, however, progress is more of a hope than a certainty. In fact, that may be too optimistic. The leftist professors are moving, sometimes reluctantly, from Hegel to Heidegger, from John Dewey to Richard Rorty, from a faith in progress to the cult of relativism that calls itself postmodernism. Progress is becoming progress, in scare quotes; for who can say what it is , much less that it is inevitable or beneficial? President Clinton was on to something when he said it all depended on what the meaning of is, is!