Putting Liberalism in its Place.

Vol. 15 No.6 (June 2005), pp.523-526

PUTTING LIBERALISM IN ITS PLACE, by Paul W. Kahn. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. 336pp. Cloth. $29.95 / £18.95. ISBN: 0-691-12024-2.

Reviewed by James Magee, Department of Political Science and International Relations, University of Delaware. Email: jjmagee@udel.edu .

At the end of the 19th century Sir Henry Maine summarized the history of British law in a pithy expression: “from status to contract.” Feudalism had gradually been supplanted by a more liberal, capitalist system in which legal rights of “contract” offered a means to escape from a fixed status and climb to a richer life through the open market. Contract has also been the concept spun by political theorists for hundreds of years to explain the emergence of the liberal state and its obligations—from Thomas Hobbes on down. “We the people” made a deal with a powerful “state” to protect us from the anarchy and brutality of the “state of nature;” in turn, we surrendered some of our freedom inherited from the state of nature and agreed to obey decisions of the state. The terms of the contract have changed with the values promoted by the theorist. For Hobbes, the objective was order; John Locke advocated property rights; John Rawls sought justice. In this latest of his several books, Paul W. Kahn, of Yale University Law School, fundamentally rejects the social contract foundation of liberalism. The state does not exist merely to guarantee rights or justice. He reconstructs and redesigns liberalism with a mélange of fascinating analyses of intellectual thought and pure myth and renders an explanatory principle more eloquent and moving than Maine’s succinct, impersonal conclusion about law: “Attachment to the political community is a matter not of contract but of love” (p.12).

The book’s title suggests hostility to liberalism, but Kahn completely accepts the core ideals of individual dignity and equality, ethnic and religious diversity, representative but limited government, a regime of rights, the rule of law, an independent judiciary, and well-regulated but generally free and open markets. “These liberal values do not, however,” he says, “explain the conditions that bind a community into one sustained historical project. They do not explain why citizens will put survival of a particular political community ahead of their own survival” (p.10). Later in the book he is even more critical: “liberalism is a political theory without any understanding of politics” (p.182). The massive body of liberal theory that has been produced from Hobbes to the present is not per se wrong, but fundamentally incomplete.

Weaving in and out of legends, folklore, literature, history, plays, law, and political discourse, Kahn analyzes Supreme Court decisions, the biblical myths of Adam and Eve, Abraham and Sarah, the plays of Sophocles, Jesus on the cross, Shakespeare, and medieval, modern, and contemporary thinkers like Hannah Arendt and John Rawls. Any reader of this book will quickly concur when the author says: “I am aware that my argument is not easy to follow” [*524] (p.21). At the risk of misstating his elaborate and complex argument, here is an encapsulation of the central message of his theory:

Jesus on the cross reflected sacrifice, love, redemption, revelation, and grace. Before Christ these always existed in the human condition, both in actual experience and in the aspirations of writers, thinkers, playwrights, religious leaders and others who were searching for ultimate meanings about human life and death. Though somewhat sporadically, Kahn devotes quite a bit of his analysis to pre-Christian ideas, but the book’s theoretical coherence seems to take root and build with the image of Christ on the cross. From that symbol emerged the Christian church; the body of Christ became the body of the church destined to be universal and the central organizing mechanism for human life on earth (at least in the western world, where liberalism was born). Sacrifice everywhere augmented the church’s stature and growth; a star-studded cast of martyrs demonstrated affinities with Christ and his teachings and produced a litany of saints.

Kingdoms arose, and the king’s body became the sovereign “mystical corpus of the state” (p.89). From the religious wars secular states emerged. The world appeared after the Peace Westphalia as a space of nation-states, and the church slowly receded as the forger of human communities knitted together by allegiance to Jesus and the meaning of his crucifixion and resurrection. Kahn writes: “The domain of sacrifice shifted from that of religious resistance to that of political patriotism. . . . Western nation-states became grand institutional structures for the sacrifices of their citizens to the idea of the necessity of the state’s continued existence.” The “state” became the secular successor to the church. Ultimately, through revolution—the “will” of “the people”—liberalism appeared and monarchies declined, and “we the people” became the transcendent sovereign, and the written expression of our will became enshrined as revelation in governing instruments such as the Constitution of the United States: “The constitution preserves that sacred appearance of the popular sovereign and organizes political life around it” (p.161). Reason does not underpin the liberal state, because the sacred is always beyond reason. Instead, the politics of modern nation-states, like the Christian world from which they materialized, is filled with “symbols and miraculous appearances” (p.164).

The secular state and its liberal descendant developed, not through “reason” or “contract,” but through revolution expressing the sovereign will of the people, and the liberal state entered history bearing the experience and traditions of Christianity. Love and sacrifice are the touchstones of a meaningful life: “These are the critical elements of political experience, yet they fail to appear when we begin with the Hobbesian state of nature or the Rawlsian veil of ignorance” (p.64).

Kahn canvasses a staggering portfolio of issues. There is a chapter (called “The Erotic Body”) on love, romance, sexuality, and pornography. Unlike Catherine MacKinnon who condemns pornography as the manifestation and perpetuation of power of men over women, Kahn sees it a “fantasy of freedom” that temporarily liberates us from powerlessness and the burden of [*525] our ordinary lives (p.207). The first order of politics is to domesticate the erotic, “the turning of love toward the labor of social and familial reproduction” to maintain the “intergeneration project that is the polity.” Pornography is closely associated with political revolution and is viewed by the state as an act of “political rebellion” (p.226). Liberal theorists confine love and sexuality to the private domain, outside the realm of the state, which “pushes love to a contractual model of relationships. Liberalism is a political philosophy of a loveless world” (p.141). For Kahn, love is the base of the nation “which is a political organization of human sexuality” (p.181). Love and sexuality produce families and children, the future of the state, some of whom will be sacrificed for the state’s continued existence. “The modern nation-state demanded of families that they give up their children for the sake of the state. For the most part, families have done so” (p.202). Sacrifice and love are the heart of both politics and family: “To imagine a family in which sacrifice was not ordinary is to image a dysfunctional family; the same is true of the state. Liberalism, however, is speechless in the face of sacrifice” (p.224).

This intriguing book is filled with challenging ideas and supplies some missing ingredients of the intellectual groundwork of liberalism. Like most grand scholarship of this kind, however, it provokes more questions than it adequately answers. For example, while the great tradition of Christianity can help to explain liberalism, liberalism also selectively screened that tradition, for not all of the church’s belongings were inherited or accepted by the successor state system. The imperialist church brought the crusades, and through ghettos, expulsion, and death it punished heretics, Jews, and other non-believers. Science was retarded by a church that silenced and jailed Galileo. Kahn does not address that side of Christianity nor does he explain how liberalism eventually sifted the good from the bad within the modern liberal nation-state. Excluding these ugly traditions has more to do with reason and the Enlightenment than with love and sacrifice.

Kahn is astounded to see that liberal theorists have ignored sacrifice even in the face of the mass slaughter and sacrifice that characterized the twentieth century’s global wars: “one would never know that the modern nation-state has been the site of endless passion and sacrifice for ultimate meanings” (p.93). To Kahn this is evidence of the centrality of sacrifice, but perhaps these horrors were no more than the Hobbesian state of nature on a global scale that has since been less brutal and more harmonious. Moreover, sacrifice may describe the motives of suicide bombers and radical Islamic fundamentalists, but neither Kahn nor any liberal will claim that liberalism underlines the purpose of either of these groups.

Finally, immeasurable sacrifice is given by those sent to fight war in Afghanistan and Iraq, but most Americans have been asked to sacrifice very little (even their taxes have been reduced as the country braced for a seemingly endless war against terrorism and ostensibly in the name of liberalism itself). Volunteers for military service are harder to find, and suggestions of a military draft amount to [*526] political suicide. Aside from occasional reports about Iraq, TV news in America—the source for most Americans—is consumed with sensational sideshows that often border on the vulgar and irrelevant. “If citizens refuse to see themselves as the material bearers of the popular sovereign, then the nation-state can quickly become a mere abstraction. Formally, it may continue, but political life ceases for its population. . . . The material reality of the state is not its geographic reach, but the bodies of its citizens” (p.274). If Kahn is right about sacrifice, we should expect more from citizens and their political leaders.

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