Putting Liberalism in its Place, by Paul W. Kahn - Hamline University ...

WEITHMAN.DOC 8/17/2005 8:51:49 AM 

Putting Liberalism in its Place. By Paul W. Kahn. Princeton University 

Press 2004. Pp. 321 & viii. $29.95. ISBN: o-691-12024-2. 

Paul Kahn begins this ambitious book by reminding his readers of 

important but uncomfortable facts about political life that he thinks 

liberals ignore: that citizens are “potential instruments of state violence” 

(20) who may be called upon to coerce or kill others on the state’s 

behalf, and that they may also be called upon to die for the state. Thus 

he reminds us that modern states claim the right to impose heavy 

obligations on their citizens and to demand huge sacrifices from them. 

If citizens are to discharge those obligations and to make those 

sacrifices, Kahn implies, they must believe the hardships entailed are 

worth enduring and the sacrifices are worth making. They will believe 

that, Kahn seems to think, only if the sacrifices are justified by the 

“ultimate value” (18) of the life those sacrifices are needed to preserve. 

And so that life—political life in a liberal democratic state—must, Kahn 

asserts, be a source of “ultimate value.” (18) 

Some thinkers accept roughly this line of reasoning but, because 

they deny that there is much of value to be found in the political life of 

the modern state, deny that such states are worth dying for. Alasdair 

MacIntyre once famously remarked that being asked to die for the 

modern state is like being asked to die for the telephone company. 1 But 

Kahn does find American political experience to be a source of 

meaning; in particular, he thinks Americans find meaning in the exercise 

of popular sovereignty. Part of what he hopes to do in this book is “plot 

the shape of the world of meaning” that he “find[s] all around” him. (19) 

Kahn argues that the moral psychology of liberalism is inadequate 

to account for that world of meaning because it has a conception of the 

will too impoverished to do justice to the rich experience of popular 

sovereignty. And so Kahn wants to put liberalism in its place by 

“juxtaposing to it other normative strands of our culture.” (15) This 

juxtaposition not only makes it possible to recover a more adequate 

conception of the self. It also “allows us better to comprehend the place 

of liberalism in our self-understanding.” (15) The result of Kahn’s effort 

is a rich and ambitious exercise in cultural study, political theory and 

1. After MacIntyre: Critical Perspectives on the Work of Alasdair MacIntyre 303 (John 

Horton & Susan Mendus eds., U. Notre Dame Press 1994). 

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102 JOURNAL OF LAW & RELIGION [Vol. XX 

moral psychology. 

Perhaps because it is so ambitious and its reliance on cultural study 

so heavy, Putting Liberalism in its Place will be a maddening read for 

those whose preferences run to rigorous definition and to clarity of 

expression. The book is full of phrases like “[i]f context is always 

pregnant with coercion,” (127) sentences like “[e]very creed derives its 

symbolic energy not from its specific content, but from the identification 

of the individual with the underlying social reality,” (23) and portentous 

assertions like: “Meaning exists in between mind and body, reason and 

desire. The structure of meaning is captured in the great Western 

metaphor of the ‘idea become flesh.’” (142) 

Such constructions certainly sound important, for they link big 

ideas—ideas such as “symbol” and “creed,” “meaning” and “metaphor.” 

The problem with them is that it is impossible to figure out what any of 

them actually means. What, for example, is the “symbolic energy” that 

creeds are said to have? What exactly is a “social reality” and what does 

such a reality “underl[ie]”? What is it for a context to be “pregnant”? 

What is “the structure of meaning” and how is it expressed by what 

Kahn takes to be a metaphor—but what Christians take to be a fact— 

namely, the Incarnation? Authors should be allowed the occasional 

vague but picturesque turn of phrase, for the intermittent exercise of 

poetic license can add touches of lyricism to works that are otherwise 

arid and restrained. But the prose of this book is neither arid nor 

restrained; it is lush and indulgent. Virtually every page presents the 

reader with at least one formidable exegetical challenge. Many of those 

challenges will prove defeating. 

Kahn’s method also makes some of the central arguments of the 

book very difficult to assess. He begins his critique of liberalism with 

what he calls a mapping of the “conceptual architecture” (31) of 

liberalism in chapter 1 and a “genealogy of American liberalism” (31) in 

chapter 2. It would have been very helpful to have been presented with 

sustained discussions of just what conceptual architecture and genealogy 

are, and of just what evidence counts in favor of one mapping or one 

genealogy rather than another. Putting Liberalism in its Place needs 

such methodological discussions because it is far from obvious that the 

subjects Kahn discusses in his crucial opening chapters are subjects to 

which the methods of architectural mapping and genealogy are 

appropriately applied. 

Architectural mapping and genealogy seem to entail the 

identification of a subject matter for treatment, and the imputation to that 

subject matter of a unity the principles of which it is the business of


101] BOOK REVIEW 103 

mapping and genealogy to uncover. But the drive pithily to distill some 

one thing that is allegedly central to a heterogeneous category is a drive 

to which Kahn sometimes gives too free a rein. Thus readers are told in 

a single sentence what “[c]ritical theory’s most basic argument” is (123) 

and what “the lesson of twentieth-century genocide” is. (200, emphasis 

added) 

Critical theory and genocide do not occupy much of Kahn’s 

attention. His precipitous reductions of them to tag-lines might be 

dismissed as innocent were they not symptomatic of two serious 

problems with his methods: the problem of overly hasty and selective 

assimilation of disparate phenomena into large categories and the 

problem of false essentialism with respect to the phenomena that have 

been assimilated. Things called “American liberalism” and “the 

American political experience” occupy a great deal of Kahn’s attention. 

It is in Kahn’s treatment of them that these two problems exact more 

serious costs. 

The fact that politics is and must be a source of ultimate meaning 

for citizens, Kahn argues, is what liberalism is inadequate to. 

Americans, Kahn thinks, find that meaning in a particular set of political 

experiences. He writes: 

The distinctly American political consciousness is born in the 

experience of revolution as an act of popular sovereignty. This 

can never be seen as corrupt; it is an inexhaustible source of 

meaning for the citizen and the state. (109) 

American political consciousness is the consciousness of politics 

that people who live or have lived in the United States have or had. It 

would not be surprising if Americans’ consciousness of politics, and the 

meaning they find in politics, varied with race, gender, ethnicity, wealth, 

social location and condition of servitude. Perhaps there is nothing 

illegitimate about gathering the diverse political experiences of all these 

Americans into a single category. But it is far from obvious that there is 

something common or essential to those experiences that can then be 

identified as “the distinctly American political consciousness” and that 

is connected with revolution or popular sovereignty. Certainly Kahn 

provides no evidence for thinking that there is. And so he provides no 

evidence that American politics provides some one source of ultimate 

meaning for which liberalism is unable to account. 

Liberalism itself is a large extended family of political views. 

Members exhibit family resemblances. It is tempting to exaggerate the 

unity of the family and then to look to genealogy or architecture for 

something that explains it. But assimilating members of the family into



one character with a single genealogy yields a picture of liberalism that 

caricatures every family member but that does not resemble any of them 

all that closely. To be sure, there are places where Kahn shows some 

sensitivity to the diversity of liberal views. (179ff.) But more often he 

talks of liberalism as it were a single theory, and he offers quick and 

unqualified characterizations of it that are simply distortions. He says, 

for example, that “liberalism purports to have monopolized the language 

of reason,” as if liberals denied, say, that Aristotelians talk about the 

importance of practical reason in politics. He also claims that 

“liberalism requires, as a matter of political psychology, that individuals 

be able to take the same attitude toward their own conception of the 

good as that they take toward that of others.” (116) Kahn does not say 

which liberals have thought this nor does he cite any textual support for 

his assertion. His implication that liberals think someone who devoutly 

believes propositions central to Judaism must also be able devoutly to 

believe the propositions central to Catholicism, Islam and atheism is 

either clearly false or trivially true, depending upon what is meant by 

“able.” 

Kahn’s attempt to group various thinkers and bodies of thought 

under the broad liberal banner is also highly selective. His genealogy of 

American liberalism makes no references to such eminent liberal 

historians as Joyce Appleby, Louis Hartz, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and 

Alan Brinkley. He criticizes American liberalism for endorsing a moral 

psychology with too thin a conception of the will, but he does not 

mention the liberalism of Reinhold Niebuhr. The liberalism that Kahn 

wants to “put in its place” is thus not American liberalism as such. It is 

American liberal political theory of the last three decades—particularly, 

to judge by the number of footnotes in which he is cited, the liberalism 

of John Rawls. 

But liberal political theory, and Rawls’s theory of justice in 

particular, make odd targets for Kahn’s critique. Kahn variously 

criticizes liberals for their failure to “explain the normative conditions of 

the political,” (227) for failing “to explore the other values—that is, the 

nonliberal values—for which they leave room.” (19) for being 

“incomplete even as an account of the operation of a liberal polity,” 

(144) for never producing “an adequate explanation of the family” (218) 

and for being unable to “understand the pornographic rebellion against 

politics.” (219) But explaining such conditions, exploring such values 

and accounting for the operation of actual liberal polities are not tasks 

that Rawls, at least, has undertaken. Rawls famously defends principles 

of justice for the basic structure of a well-ordered liberal democracy


101] BOOK REVIEW 105 

under conditions of pluralism. His defense of those principles does not 

purport to explore all of the non-liberal values citizens might pursue. 

Nor does it purport to be a social theory accounting either for the 

operations of liberal polities as we know them or for the “normative 

conditions of the political.” It certainly does not purport to explain “the 

pornographic rebellion against politics.” Indeed, it is not clear that 

Rawls’s theory is meant to “explain” or “account” for anything beyond 

our sense of justice. 

Any collection of human practices as sprawling and complex as the 

set that we group under the label “politics” raises an enormous number 

of questions. Some of those questions are normative; some are 

conceptual. Questions of both these kinds arguably fall within the 

domain of political philosophy. But philosophy will leave many 

requests for explanations of interesting political phenomena unsatisfied. 

This may be a source of some frustration for those who, like Kahn, are 

sympathetic to liberal values. The power and scope of liberal political 

theory as it has developed in recent years is truly impressive. Those 

who most deeply admire it might like to see it embrace even more than it 

does. Its ability to do so may depend upon philosophers making better 

use than they now do of work in sociology, social psychology and 

anthropology. It is a shortcoming of academic training in political 

philosophy that students of it are not taught to appreciate and use 

findings in these fields. But some of the explanations we want provided 

may have to be furnished by scholars of politics who work in other 

disciplines. Whether something called “liberalism” can provide those 

explanations depends upon whether liberal scholars can provide them. 

Kahn’s limitation of American liberalism to American liberal political 

theory in its present state is therefore especially vexing. He will not be 

able to sustain the case that liberalism as such lacks explanatory power 

until he has examined a much wider range of liberal scholarship than he 

considers in this book. 

American political history and the diversity of American political 

consciousnesses have no doubt been shaped, not just by liberalism, but 

by many other forms of political thought as well. The question 

confronting liberals who work in normative theory is how much of that 

history they wish to commend. This brings us back, at last, to one of the 

points with which Kahn begins and about which he is surely right. 

Virtually all large modern states have called upon some of their 

citizens to die for them. The fact that they have raises two very different 

questions. One is the question of whether the various liberal political 

theories that enjoy some currency can ever be drawn on to provide



citizens with good reasons to die—or, for that matter, to kill—for their 

country. The other is the question of whether those theories can be 

drawn on to provide citizens with good reasons to do what states which 

purport to be liberal democracies have asserted they should do: fight, kill 

and die either in whatever wars their governments may declare or in the 

wars those governments have actually declared. Kahn does not 

distinguish these two questions. But his emphasis on the meaning 

American citizens actually find in politics suggests that Kahn is 

interested in the second (cf. 263 n. 65 and accompanying text). He 

seems to criticize liberalism because he thinks the answer to that 

question is “no.” 

Perhaps liberal theory would be liable to criticism if the answer to 

the first question were negative, though that would have to be shown. 

But even if Kahn is right that the answer to the second question is ”no,” 

he needs to say much more clearly than he does why this answer 

provides grounds for criticizing liberal theory. Some liberal 

democracies, such as the United States, have called upon their citizens to 

kill and die for them in imperialist or expansionist adventures, in 

response to provocations which were patently contrived, and on the 

basis of evidence which was later discovered to be false or to have been 

misleadingly presented. Many of the citizens who have tragically gone 

to their deaths in these cases no doubt risked their lives while selflessly 

believing they were obligated to do so. It may be that liberal theory 

cannot provide a basis for the obligations alleged in these cases. If not, 

then it is imperative to ask much more searchingly than Kahn does (282) 

whether the fault really lies with liberal theory. Perhaps it lies instead 

with those government officials who proclaimed the glory of the cause, 

pretended that the declaration of war was an exercise of popular 

sovereignty and asserted obligations to displace, maim, kill and die 

where there may never have been any such obligations at all. 

Paul Weithman † 

† Professor and Chair, Department of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, 

Indiana 46556.

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