Alan Wolfe - The Future of Liberalism (Vintage)

Alan Wolfe is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College. A contributing editor of The New Republic, The Wilson Quarterly, CommonWealth, and In Character, Professor Wolfe also frequently writes for Commonweal, The New York Times, Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Washington Post. He lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.

In the beginning, wrote John Locke in his Second Treatise on Government, all the world was America.

Locke, the late-seventeenth-century English philosopher as well known for his explanation of how our ideas are formed as for his insistence that government be based on the consent of the governed, viewed America, at least before the white man arrived, as a land in which, because no such thing as money was any where known, conflicts over that particular root of all evil would not be necessary. From that seemingly simple idea sprung a political philosophy thoroughly alien to the absolutist monarchies of Europe. Because everyone possesses the capacity to work, all have a right to the property created when their labor is mixed with the blessings offered by the land. It follows that societies are best organized by freedom (no one can legitimately take away what naturally belongs to you), as well as equality (nor can they take it away from anyone else). To say that in the beginning all the world was America is to claim that freedom and equality would become forces too powerful to resist. That, in turn, became the single most influential component of liberalism: the dominant, if not always appreciated, political philosophy of modern times. Three centuries after Locke wrote his masterpiece, liberalism offers the best guide not only to our own times, but to the future as well. It will be my task in this book to show why.

Liberalism is a way of thinking and acting so easily taken for granted that one can easily forget how it struggled to come into existence; solved many of the problems it was asked to address; spread its influence around the world, not through coercion, but because of its universal appeal; and remains to this day far more attractive than its leading alternatives. As important as liberalism has been to the development of modern citizens and the societies they inhabit, it suffers today from a crisis of confidence. To flourish, liberalism needs to be recovered, and the stakes in its recovery are much greater than which party wins a forthcoming election, proposes the latest social reform, or even launches the next war. Modern citizens all too often forget that the liberal way of life is a good way of life, indeed, under the political conditions in which they live, the best way of life. It is liberalism's underlying philosophy its understanding of human nature, its respect for both individualism and equality, its discovery of the social, its passion for justice, its preference for experience over theory, its intellectual openness, its commitment to fairnessthat offers us the surest path toward both individual freedom and a collective sense of purpose. We need liberalism if we are to respect the integrity of human beings, design institutions that serve their needs, and enable them to shape their destinies. John Locke pointed the way, and we remain indebted to him every time we insist that we be recognized for our own accomplishments or demand that nobody be treated as inherently more superior (or inferior) than anyone else.

There was a time when Americans appreciated the importance of the political philosophy that John Locke did so much to bring into being. Locke's little book on government is perfect as far as it goes, Thomas Jefferson wrote to Thomas Mann Randolph, his brand-new son-in-law, exactly one hundred years after the publication of The Second Treatise. Jefferson was hardly revealing state secrets; the whole literate world knew the extent to which he had relied on Locke when he wrote the Declaration of Independence. So closely connected were Lockean ideas with the development of the United States that one of the classics of modern political thought, the Harvard political scientist Louis Hartz's