In reading and thinking about Adam Gopnik’s A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism (2019), I am reminded of a line from Richard Rorty’s review of a very different kind of book, Hans Blumenberg’s The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (1983). Rest assured I don’t have a photographic memory of every review-essay published in the 1980s by The London Review of Books; I just happen to have read this one a couple of times, mainly because it’s Rorty and he’s never dull. Besides, if you can get through a thunderously difficult (and Germanic) tome such as The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, washing it down with a bit of Rorty doesn’t hurt. Anyway, the line in question was Rorty’s belief that Blumenberg’s treatise (which I’ll avoid a summary of for mental health reasons) championed those ‘whose highest hopes are still those of Mill’.
Rorty for one was adamant that however large or small a group there was that regarded Mill as their hero, this group needed a shelf of books that guided their appreciation for him, in the same way whole library collections have been written out of people’s love for Karl Marx. However I don’t think many today who fall into this group would look at The Legitimacy of the Modern Age and see a fellow traveller; it’s a book whose central character is the 15th century theologian Nicholas of Cusa, and that looks upon Petrarch’s ascent up Mont Ventoux in 1336 as an epoch-making event in the lead-up to modernity. Mill though has never lacked acolytes; they usually call themselves liberals, or progressives, or moderates, or social democrats. Not all of them look to Mill as their guiding star, but his name on its own conjures up a theoretical edifice, a personal temperament, and a political and economic program distinct enough for the learned on all points of the political spectrum to recognise.
Because I work at a university, I see posters everywhere alerting students to the latest event organised around the writings of Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg and sometimes Franz Fanon. For as long as there will be the three-year undergraduate course in the humanities and social sciences, there will be discussion groups organised around these figures. What I’m probably never likely to see is a poster telling us that there will be a lively discussion on, say, Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse (who is that you say?). Now I know this is a cheap shot because you can’t expect undergraduates to know of a minor figure like Hobhouse. But more famous figures who represent broadly the same social democratic or social liberal position as Hobhouse – figures like John Dewey, for instance – probably also wouldn’t get their university discussion group and accompanying poster. I doubt even Mill himself would get a discussion group on a university campus. Cliques, groups, crowds, bands, followings, especially if they’re comprised of the young, are drawn to some types of thinkers rather than others. Despite the formidable dryness of a figure like Marx, he does satisfy the young in a way Mill doesn’t.
Enter Adam Gopnik, veteran essayist for the New Yorker, with A Thousand Small Sanities, a book that uses Mill and other liberal personalities to articulate and defend that ideology which almost certainly has no place on campus: liberalism. The figure of Gopnik himself may be an apt illustration of the reason why Mill is neither a saint nor a sinner on university campuses. Gopnik is in his early sixties, and you can't help but associate his name with his employer the New Yorker: slick, self-assured, up-to-date, intellectual-but-not-academic, centre-left. In other words, the kind of individual who through age and literary association seeks to locate the Sensible in politics and culture. Gopnik himself seems to know how unfashionable Mill is to the young, as A Thousand Small Sanities is addressed to his daughter Olivia. At the beginning of the book he’s taking a stroll with Olivia in the morning after the 2016 election, attempting to console a distraught teenager after a vending machine with hands got himself elected. He attempts to lay out why in the long run liberal institutions, and the liberal project, will endure. It’s a stuttering effort, and he’s only half successful. By the time Gopnik is writing this book to flesh out his vision, Olivia is at college and is predictably enmeshed within campus sensibilities. The liberalism represented by her father and his publication is insufficient, perhaps a nemesis, to the type of radical imperatives promulgated in her new world of undergraduate intellectual life.
And so A Thousand Small Sanities addresses itself to those unconvinced of liberalism. David Frum in the New York Times has noticed that even though he tries to convince the left and right of the essential rightness of liberalism, it is mainly to the left that Gopnik feels the need to put his case more forcefully. This is because as we all know, ever since publication of The Communist Manifesto, and maybe even going back to the division of the Girondins and the Jacobins, the left and the centre-left have been at each other’s throats probably more so than they have against the right. Is there a better nomination for what constitutes the opening salvo in this battle than Marx and Engels calling out the various ‘economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class, do-gooders, members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance cranks, hole-and-corner reformers of every imaginable kind’ who in the aggregate merited the scornful title of liberal? Gopnik’s book is an entry into this long-running dispute, this one from a reformer attempting to cool the volcanic magma of the revolutionary.
On Gopnik’s side in this battle are Mill and his best friend, teacher, secret lover then wife, Harriet Taylor, George Eliot and her husband George Henry Lewes, Bayard Rustin, Frederick Douglas, and of course Montaigne. The substance of Gopnik’s book is less the ideas of liberalism in any programmatic sense and more in the temperament of his chosen gallery of great liberal figures. This strategy of looking at liberal people, and drawing lessons from how they treated those close to them, is a strategy that in a sense replicates the sensibility of the New Yorker, or at least those expansive character profiles that it’s published over the years on everyone from Hannah Arendt to Scarlet Johansson. For David A. Bell, who reviewed A Thousand Small Sanities for Nation magazine, this decision to focus on the liberal temperament is problematic. Even ‘admirable’ temperaments like the one exhibited by the liberal greats is no substitute for political analysis. Once liberalism gets cut off from concreteness – Lloyd George’s Liberal Party in the early 1900s, Roosevelt’s New Deal, Atlee’s Labour Party, Johnson’s Great Society – and becomes a series of free-floating character traits, then it becomes a merely private, innocuous affair.
Books like A Thousand Small Sanities are criticised as much for what they leave out than for what they include. Often what doesn’t get included is whatever the reviewer of the book happens to be well versed in and believes should’ve. In the case of David Sessions, who reviewed the book for the New Republic, the terrain not satisfactorily covered by Gopnik is, well, a lot. No Marxist writers are confronted, for example, and Sessions also couldn’t find any reference to contemporary left-wing publications or thinkers. Sessions finds in general that Gopnik doesn’t confront the reality of power relations in history and contemporaneously, a criticism I’ve seen elsewhere hurled at liberal theorists – see New Left Review’s take on David Runciman’s The Confidence Trap (2013). But Sessions points to a legitimate subject that goes begging in Gopnik’s analysis, that of climate change. Where, Sessions asks, does the commitment to incremental reform, which is the hallmark of liberalism’s attitude to institutional change, get us when confronting climate change? Gopnik’s line on climate change is thin: he simply argues against the idea that there is something specific to capitalism that is the sole determining factor in the worsening climate; instead it can be attributed to the broader phenomenon of the need for growth. Nothing that I can remember on the merits of carbon taxation or what new general outlook is needed to appropriately respond to our planetary crisis features in the book.
But if Gopnik is thin here, Sessions is equally thin in his criticism. Consider this paragraph from Sessions:
Without dismissing the seriousness of Sessions’ charge, I must remark that whenever someone suggests a big project such as ‘confronting the powerful interests behind the deadly carbon economy', one wonders if they truly conceive just how much power you would need to accumulate in order to mount that kind of challenge. This is the ultimate irony of policy proposals that intend to sweep away existing states of affairs: they require the preferred coalition of well-intentioned political actors to acquire not just a majority at election time, but practically take hold of the entire apparatus of decision-making levers to legislate such a change. The reason why this is ironic is that intellectually the left has always been pretty gun-shy about grasping the reins of power, for fear that doing so will corrupt those who take it. Conservatives have never had a problem with power, mainly because they’ve wielded it for longer. And they know better than the left that you need power in order to get things done. I’d feel more confident in the likelihood of climate change action if the likes of Sessions can at least intellectually face the institutional mechanics of how change would and could occur, instead of exhorting a vague, unidentified mass of people to simply show up and ‘confront’ powerful interests.
With that said I don’t intend to shrug off any and all criticisms of Gopnik-style liberalism. Criticisms from Nation and New Republic (together again) are warranted because Gopnik’s brand of liberalism is one that must necessarily leave many questions unanswered and various subjects unexplored. The appeal of liberalism has often been found in its incompleteness. The likes of Isaiah Berlin have held this very incompleteness to be the essential strength of liberalism against totalising doctrines. Which is why it would seem paradoxical to grant Gopnik-style liberalism a complete embrace; if anything, it deserves partial embrace because it can only offer a partial picture. It’s hard to see how liberalism can get anything done on its own. Alan Wolfe wrote something in his The Future of Liberalism (2009) that strikes one, depending on your current persuasion, as either very wise or insufferably arch, that only in a world where liberalism exists can one say that liberalism is impossible. It’s the centrist’s bland variation on Camus’ line that in order to say that life is absurd one must be alive. Take liberalism away and get back to me on how that goes. But it’s not a self-propelling locomotive, nor a self-enclosed universe of meaning. It probably ends up having more in common with classical conservatism than socialism: it’s all about holding back, keeping in check, cooling heads, maintaining standards. It itself doesn’t move.
Were these the hopes of Mill? To merely caution radicals to be slightly less excitable? I don’t think anyone who is familiar with Mill’s writings can be satisfied with this. You only have to read those sections in Principles of Political Economy where his radicalism is plain to see:
The aforementioned Hobhouse, in his Liberalism (1911) wrote that Mill in ‘his single person...spans the interval between the old and the new Liberalism’. The new liberalism was often called exactly that, but also went by the name of social liberalism, with Hobhouse as its chief propagandist. Mill still lives in two worlds: the Benthamite liberalism of his youth with its strict individualism and laissez-faire approach to economics, and the social liberalism, which advocated a more activist state in the economy alongside progressive social insurance and unemployment policies, of the older Mill. It took Hobhouse and others to draw from the older Mill inspiration in forming the outlook of the new liberalism of the early 20th century. And Hobhouse’s writings are themselves seen as influential in the development of the British welfare state and social democracy in the broader sense.
Rorty for one was adamant that however large or small a group there was that regarded Mill as their hero, this group needed a shelf of books that guided their appreciation for him, in the same way whole library collections have been written out of people’s love for Karl Marx. However I don’t think many today who fall into this group would look at The Legitimacy of the Modern Age and see a fellow traveller; it’s a book whose central character is the 15th century theologian Nicholas of Cusa, and that looks upon Petrarch’s ascent up Mont Ventoux in 1336 as an epoch-making event in the lead-up to modernity. Mill though has never lacked acolytes; they usually call themselves liberals, or progressives, or moderates, or social democrats. Not all of them look to Mill as their guiding star, but his name on its own conjures up a theoretical edifice, a personal temperament, and a political and economic program distinct enough for the learned on all points of the political spectrum to recognise.
Because I work at a university, I see posters everywhere alerting students to the latest event organised around the writings of Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg and sometimes Franz Fanon. For as long as there will be the three-year undergraduate course in the humanities and social sciences, there will be discussion groups organised around these figures. What I’m probably never likely to see is a poster telling us that there will be a lively discussion on, say, Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse (who is that you say?). Now I know this is a cheap shot because you can’t expect undergraduates to know of a minor figure like Hobhouse. But more famous figures who represent broadly the same social democratic or social liberal position as Hobhouse – figures like John Dewey, for instance – probably also wouldn’t get their university discussion group and accompanying poster. I doubt even Mill himself would get a discussion group on a university campus. Cliques, groups, crowds, bands, followings, especially if they’re comprised of the young, are drawn to some types of thinkers rather than others. Despite the formidable dryness of a figure like Marx, he does satisfy the young in a way Mill doesn’t.
Enter Adam Gopnik, veteran essayist for the New Yorker, with A Thousand Small Sanities, a book that uses Mill and other liberal personalities to articulate and defend that ideology which almost certainly has no place on campus: liberalism. The figure of Gopnik himself may be an apt illustration of the reason why Mill is neither a saint nor a sinner on university campuses. Gopnik is in his early sixties, and you can't help but associate his name with his employer the New Yorker: slick, self-assured, up-to-date, intellectual-but-not-academic, centre-left. In other words, the kind of individual who through age and literary association seeks to locate the Sensible in politics and culture. Gopnik himself seems to know how unfashionable Mill is to the young, as A Thousand Small Sanities is addressed to his daughter Olivia. At the beginning of the book he’s taking a stroll with Olivia in the morning after the 2016 election, attempting to console a distraught teenager after a vending machine with hands got himself elected. He attempts to lay out why in the long run liberal institutions, and the liberal project, will endure. It’s a stuttering effort, and he’s only half successful. By the time Gopnik is writing this book to flesh out his vision, Olivia is at college and is predictably enmeshed within campus sensibilities. The liberalism represented by her father and his publication is insufficient, perhaps a nemesis, to the type of radical imperatives promulgated in her new world of undergraduate intellectual life.
And so A Thousand Small Sanities addresses itself to those unconvinced of liberalism. David Frum in the New York Times has noticed that even though he tries to convince the left and right of the essential rightness of liberalism, it is mainly to the left that Gopnik feels the need to put his case more forcefully. This is because as we all know, ever since publication of The Communist Manifesto, and maybe even going back to the division of the Girondins and the Jacobins, the left and the centre-left have been at each other’s throats probably more so than they have against the right. Is there a better nomination for what constitutes the opening salvo in this battle than Marx and Engels calling out the various ‘economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class, do-gooders, members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance cranks, hole-and-corner reformers of every imaginable kind’ who in the aggregate merited the scornful title of liberal? Gopnik’s book is an entry into this long-running dispute, this one from a reformer attempting to cool the volcanic magma of the revolutionary.
On Gopnik’s side in this battle are Mill and his best friend, teacher, secret lover then wife, Harriet Taylor, George Eliot and her husband George Henry Lewes, Bayard Rustin, Frederick Douglas, and of course Montaigne. The substance of Gopnik’s book is less the ideas of liberalism in any programmatic sense and more in the temperament of his chosen gallery of great liberal figures. This strategy of looking at liberal people, and drawing lessons from how they treated those close to them, is a strategy that in a sense replicates the sensibility of the New Yorker, or at least those expansive character profiles that it’s published over the years on everyone from Hannah Arendt to Scarlet Johansson. For David A. Bell, who reviewed A Thousand Small Sanities for Nation magazine, this decision to focus on the liberal temperament is problematic. Even ‘admirable’ temperaments like the one exhibited by the liberal greats is no substitute for political analysis. Once liberalism gets cut off from concreteness – Lloyd George’s Liberal Party in the early 1900s, Roosevelt’s New Deal, Atlee’s Labour Party, Johnson’s Great Society – and becomes a series of free-floating character traits, then it becomes a merely private, innocuous affair.
Books like A Thousand Small Sanities are criticised as much for what they leave out than for what they include. Often what doesn’t get included is whatever the reviewer of the book happens to be well versed in and believes should’ve. In the case of David Sessions, who reviewed the book for the New Republic, the terrain not satisfactorily covered by Gopnik is, well, a lot. No Marxist writers are confronted, for example, and Sessions also couldn’t find any reference to contemporary left-wing publications or thinkers. Sessions finds in general that Gopnik doesn’t confront the reality of power relations in history and contemporaneously, a criticism I’ve seen elsewhere hurled at liberal theorists – see New Left Review’s take on David Runciman’s The Confidence Trap (2013). But Sessions points to a legitimate subject that goes begging in Gopnik’s analysis, that of climate change. Where, Sessions asks, does the commitment to incremental reform, which is the hallmark of liberalism’s attitude to institutional change, get us when confronting climate change? Gopnik’s line on climate change is thin: he simply argues against the idea that there is something specific to capitalism that is the sole determining factor in the worsening climate; instead it can be attributed to the broader phenomenon of the need for growth. Nothing that I can remember on the merits of carbon taxation or what new general outlook is needed to appropriately respond to our planetary crisis features in the book.
But if Gopnik is thin here, Sessions is equally thin in his criticism. Consider this paragraph from Sessions:
The climate crisis, more than anything,
has highlighted the inadequacy of the liberal orthodoxy’s
self-congratulatory moderation and celebration of glacial
incrementalism. It poses, in stark terms, the need for dramatic
action and the inescapability of confronting the powerful interests
behind the deadly carbon economy. The rapid degradation of the planet
has made radicalism rational and incrementalism a kind of
civilizational death drive. In this context, Gopnik’s blissful
ignorance reads not as comical but as deeply sinister.
With that said I don’t intend to shrug off any and all criticisms of Gopnik-style liberalism. Criticisms from Nation and New Republic (together again) are warranted because Gopnik’s brand of liberalism is one that must necessarily leave many questions unanswered and various subjects unexplored. The appeal of liberalism has often been found in its incompleteness. The likes of Isaiah Berlin have held this very incompleteness to be the essential strength of liberalism against totalising doctrines. Which is why it would seem paradoxical to grant Gopnik-style liberalism a complete embrace; if anything, it deserves partial embrace because it can only offer a partial picture. It’s hard to see how liberalism can get anything done on its own. Alan Wolfe wrote something in his The Future of Liberalism (2009) that strikes one, depending on your current persuasion, as either very wise or insufferably arch, that only in a world where liberalism exists can one say that liberalism is impossible. It’s the centrist’s bland variation on Camus’ line that in order to say that life is absurd one must be alive. Take liberalism away and get back to me on how that goes. But it’s not a self-propelling locomotive, nor a self-enclosed universe of meaning. It probably ends up having more in common with classical conservatism than socialism: it’s all about holding back, keeping in check, cooling heads, maintaining standards. It itself doesn’t move.
Were these the hopes of Mill? To merely caution radicals to be slightly less excitable? I don’t think anyone who is familiar with Mill’s writings can be satisfied with this. You only have to read those sections in Principles of Political Economy where his radicalism is plain to see:
I am not charmed with the ideal of life
held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is
that of struggling to get on; that the trampling, crushing, elbowing,
and treading on each other’s heels, which form the existing type of
social life, are the most desirable lot of human kind, or anything
but the disagreeable symptoms of one of the phases of industrial
progress...the best state for human nature is that in which, while no
one is poor, no one desires to be richer, nor has any reason to fear
being thrust back, by the efforts of others to push themselves
forward.
The aforementioned Hobhouse, in his Liberalism (1911) wrote that Mill in ‘his single person...spans the interval between the old and the new Liberalism’. The new liberalism was often called exactly that, but also went by the name of social liberalism, with Hobhouse as its chief propagandist. Mill still lives in two worlds: the Benthamite liberalism of his youth with its strict individualism and laissez-faire approach to economics, and the social liberalism, which advocated a more activist state in the economy alongside progressive social insurance and unemployment policies, of the older Mill. It took Hobhouse and others to draw from the older Mill inspiration in forming the outlook of the new liberalism of the early 20th century. And Hobhouse’s writings are themselves seen as influential in the development of the British welfare state and social democracy in the broader sense.
Here we hit upon the undeniable relationship between liberalism and social democracy. But what is the nature of this relationship exactly? If there’s influence at work, which way does the influence go? In his Making Capitalism Fit for Society (2013), Colin Crouch wrote of social democracy as the highest form of liberalism. In Death of the Liberal Class (2010), Chris Hedges saw liberalism as effectively stillborn without socialist alternatives mounting pressure around the corner. Gopnik writes that ‘social democrats are not democrats who went socialist, but, historically, socialists who went liberal’ and later that social democracy ‘is a form of adapted liberalism’. Like a lot of what he writes in his book, there is something true enough here, but probably too glib to be convincing. While its a complicated topic, I lean in the opposite direction by repeating what I said above, that liberalism on its own is fine, it just doesn’t do much. After all, it existed well before anything resembling democracy or social justice entered the scene, a fact which makes the phrase ‘aristocratic liberalism’ a plausible one. Its chief propagandists in the times before elections were just as privileged and elitist as the monarchists they opposed (Mill was hardly an unqualified admirer of democracy). It didn’t, and couldn’t, push itself towards democracy; it has to be pushed. I agree with Paul Starr in Freedom’s Power (2007) where he writes: ‘The rising power of radical and socialist movements forced liberals to revisit their founding principles, reinterpret their conflicting commitments, and adapt to a new political environment. Liberalism invited democracy. Then democracy changed liberalism’.
So while I don’t think the students at Olivia’s college will start putting up posters of her father around campus and inviting others to discuss his book, A Thousand Small Sanities can nonetheless take its place as a key text for those who consider themselves closer to Mill than to Marx. But even this group may end up seconding Howard Schneider’s position in his review of the book for The Humanist: ‘I respect A Thousand Small Sanities; I do not love it’. Gopnik admits at the beginning of his book that liberalism can be hard to love; it resembles the rhinoceros in the London Zoo that Mill and Harriet Taylor would meet in front of. The rhinoceros is ‘ungainly and ugly and short-legged and imperfect and squat’. But unlike the unicorn of many a utopian’s dreams, the rhinoceros has the advantage of actually existing. You don’t have to love it, but you got to at least respect that. Marx can keep the posters.
So while I don’t think the students at Olivia’s college will start putting up posters of her father around campus and inviting others to discuss his book, A Thousand Small Sanities can nonetheless take its place as a key text for those who consider themselves closer to Mill than to Marx. But even this group may end up seconding Howard Schneider’s position in his review of the book for The Humanist: ‘I respect A Thousand Small Sanities; I do not love it’. Gopnik admits at the beginning of his book that liberalism can be hard to love; it resembles the rhinoceros in the London Zoo that Mill and Harriet Taylor would meet in front of. The rhinoceros is ‘ungainly and ugly and short-legged and imperfect and squat’. But unlike the unicorn of many a utopian’s dreams, the rhinoceros has the advantage of actually existing. You don’t have to love it, but you got to at least respect that. Marx can keep the posters.
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