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

WEITHMAN.DOC 8/17/2005 8:51:49 AM
104 JOURNAL OF LAW & RELIGION [Vol. XX
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