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

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