Arnold Kaufman's The Radical Liberal

...Thirty years before political theorists raved about "deliberative democracy," Kaufman put the ideal into practice first at the University of Michigan (whose all-night teach-in on March 24, 1965, inspired many to follow) and the national teach-in held in Washington, D.C., a few months later...

...When he set out to write The Radical Liberal, Kaufman tried to bridge the different worldviews that motivated his work—the New Left vision of participatory democracy represented by SDS and the world of welfare state and coalition politics found in organizations like ADA...

...During the 1940s, he worked with the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE), whose nonviolent direct action fueled the civil rights movement and the New Left...

...When he departed the University of Michigan in 1968 for the University of California, he became an American Federation of Teachers (AFT) activist who articulated some of the founding principles of today's academic labor movement— such as the link between academic freedom and a professor's secure employment...

...He bemoaned the capacity of elites to "buy off discontent through periphDISSENT / Summer 2000 • 95 RECONSIDERATIONS eral remedy of grievances...

...More specifically, he set out his own canon that included John Stuart Mill, Leonard Hobhouse, and John Dewey...

...For him, this sort of developmental and ethical individualism required a political community or a public of fellow citizens...

...He was no aloof academic but an engaged, activist intellectual...

...In the process he hooked up with Dissent, arguing with the distrustful Irving Howe that the magazine should welcome New Lefties...

...In Kaufman's own time, his philosophical framework of radical liberalism offered sharp insights into contemporary movements...

...In the whirlwind of 1968, Kaufman envisioned what we need today—traditional social democratic policies aimed at ensuring economic equality infused with community-based participatory democracy...

...Like C. Wright Mills, whose writings clearly inspired him, Kaufman was a supreme rationalist who believed not only in organizing for change but in justifying why this effort was necessary and legitimate...

...Kaufman loved not just activism but the life of the mind—the realm of ideas and philosophical debate...

...As he saw it, criticism of the welfare state could become "an arrogance, a piece of cultural snobbery that must be criticized and fought by general liberals...

...KEVIN MA1TSON is author of Creating a Democratic Public: The Struggle for Urban Participatory Democracy...

...And it is the missing piece of the American political spectrum (although Bill Bradley hit on it at times) that would seem to offer an alternative to libertarianism, neo-liberalism, and traditional welfare statism...

...The central tenet of Kaufman's liberalism was the right of "each person's equal opportunity to develop his potentialities as fully as possible...

...In fact, they hold a living legacy...

...Drawing from his activist experience, he synthesized participatory democracy and community organizing with the arguments Bayard Rustin made for political coalitions capable of transforming representative institutions...

...Refuting democratic realists, Kaufman argued that participatory democracy was a necessary component of any reconstructed liberalism...

...in political philosophy at Columbia University...

...After a stint in the navy, he acquired a Ph.D...

...On this point, Kaufman did not go too far beyond the classical formulation found in John Dewey's The Public and Its Problems— the best refutation of "democratic realism" ever penned—he simply updated it...

...In 1965, Kaufman hit on a big idea—the teach-in...

...It is evident throughout American history, in the work of populists at the turn of the century, regionalist visionaries within the New Deal, and the original plans of many Community Action Program leaders during the Great Society...

...As Kaufman saw it, liberals needed to rethink their assumptions by reenlivening the moral side of their intellectual tradition...

...For Kaufman recognized that social democracy was too statist, top-down, and bureaucratic in its political applications (and too alien to American ideals of self-governance...

...If put into practice, it might have counteracted the zaniness of the New Left and the eventual sclerosis of traditional liberalism...

...The teach-in captured the responsible and commonsense ethic behind so much vague talk about participatory democracy...

...A left that did this would also have to commit itself to two things at once: the building of a democratic public of engaged citizens from below and an activist state capable of solving problems like social inequities from above...

...He explained to a chronicler of SDS's history that Tom Hayden "got turned onto the idea of a democracy of participation and first started to think seriously about the theoretical dimensions of the topic when he took one of my political philosophy courses" (Hayden credited Kaufman in his autobiography, Reunion...

...He is at work on a book about New Left intellectuals, research for which went into this article...

...In the midst of hectoring and lampooning from the left, he managed to stay attuned to the moral dimension of modern liberalism...

...If we are serious about reviving the left, a good place to start would be to crack open a copy of The Radical Liberal...

...This was not such a bad vision for 1968...

...RECONSIDERATIONS national government...

...But Kaufman wanted more than an academic career...

...Nor does the idea that the left should focus on building the processes of citizen debate and deliberation...

...If we ever start to get there, though, we should remember Arnold Kaufman for leading the way...

...Conflict, too, was necessary, as was robust citizen participation in public life...

...But stability was not the end of political life, Kaufman argued...

...Therefore, Kaufman believed, liberals needed to hold in tension two distinct political traditions—one that stemmed from James Madison and another from Jean-Jacques Rousseau...

...In fact, the combination of participatory democracy with an activist state (and a liberal constitution protecting human freedoms) does not seem like such a bad idea today...

...The synthesis lives on today, even if not fully articulated...

...Though distinct, this form of political protest fit well with the new model of politics fashioned by the New Left, that of sit-ins, boycotts, and direct action...

...Thompson's New Left cohorts were "on the move again," to use C. Wright Mills's words), working as a freelance journalist and writing for Socialist Commentary regularly...

...This makes the book easy to discard as a relic of this country's tumultuous history during that crash and burn year...

...In regard to the peace movement, Kaufman pushed for finding policies that could counteract the totalitarian tendencies of Soviet communism while not devolving into militarism...

...He accused radicals of embracing direct action more for its therapeutic benefit than its effectiveness— what he called the "politics of self-indulgence...

...He liked to distinguish this principle from entrepreneurial individualism—a key difference in light of debates between communitarians and liberals today (Kaufman's was no egoist philosophy...

...They are too easily dismissed because of this...

...For Kaufman, the left needed to be content with reform, rather than an overhaul of the system...

...At the same time, he worried about pseudo-militancy (the brandishing of guns for guns' sake) and criticized the divisiveness of identity politics (the tendency, in his own words, to believe that "nothing matters but color and the 'identity problem...

...That we are not close to recognizing these things today is obvious...

...He was also an active member of Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), SANE, and numerous labor unions...

...Kaufman explained that teachins were "a means of vitalizing the process of discussion and debate without which democracy lacks significance...

...Kaufman essentially tried to merge federalism and antifederalism...

...But Kaufman hoped at the same time that students and faculty would not reject the modern university tout court but try to make good on its capacity to educate citizens by organizing teach-ins and reaching out to the wider public...

...He asserted, "The liberal tradition possesses moral and intellectual resources richer than those of any competing tradition...

...Though an anticommunist, he defended Angela Davis against her dismissal by the university and argued for academic freedom during the years when this principle had high stakes...

...In this spirit, he worked with the Poor People's Movement and formed the Coalition for an DISSENT / Summer 2000 • 93 RECONSIDERATIONS Open Convention, the New Democratic Coalition (a name tinged with contemporary irony), and the Conference for a Democratic Left...

...Back in the United States, he lectured on "participatory democracy" at the Port Huron Conference of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS...

...Of course, talk about disorder versus stability and coalition politics versus participatory democracy reflected the heady debates of Kaufman's own time...

...But read another way, The Radical Liberal offers critical lessons about our contemporary political predicament...

...Reading The Radical Liberal is like listening in on the internal dialogue (with both historical figures and contemporaries) of a politically engaged mind...

...For instance, he argued that "Black Power" could not be ignored, because it targeted the psychological damage of racism and created participatory communities among the disenfranchised...

...He tried his best to organize a radical pressure group within the Democratic Party...

...Though too young to be a part of Irving Howe's generational cohort, Kaufman described himself as a "New York immigrant Jew" and attended the alma mater of other famous New York intellectuals, the City College of New York...

...They were part of "an attempt to build a society which is free because its citizens are thoughtful and informed...

...In the following years (up to his tragic death in an airplane accident in 1971), Kaufman threw himself into a wide array of political activities...

...These were all liberals who had confronted socialists (note the absence of John Locke and Adam Smith from Kaufman's list...

...KAUFMAN WAS best known for his theory of "participatory democracy...

...He argued that the student radicals' critique of modern universities—what he called "shopping centers for careerists"—was essentially correct...

...94 n DISSENT / Summer 2000 But he saved his real venom for fellow liberals who had fallen prey to the "politics of pseudorealism...

...Or, for that matter, the idea that liberalism is a much more vibrant tradition than most other political philosophies (especially considering the legacy of Mill, Dewey, and Hobhouse...

...In so doing, Kaufman provided much of the intellectual scaffolding that would guide the New Left in its coming years...

...At the same time, Kaufman celebrated reform by arguing that "enough peripheral movements equal substantial social change...

...For instance, it could not provide people with health insurance or the resources necessary to correct previous social injustices...

...Kaufman argued that the radical critique of the welfare state's capacity to co-opt (a critique heard in New Left publications like Studies on the Left) had something to it...

...Yes, we needed a strong federal government capable of administering to a diverse population, and, yes, we needed a constitution that assured stability and protected the rights of minorities...

...He essentially foresaw the imminent collapse of the New Left...

...By the time he wrote The Radical Liberal, Kaufman had spent a lifetime in numerous New Left political activities...

...It would have to be respectful of liberalism's arguments in favor of representative institutions and individual rights...

...96 n DISSENT / Summer 2000...

...For a while in the early 1960s, he left for England (where E.P...

...The teach-in made good on C. Wright Mills's hope that intellectuals would play a special role in the New Left, since it engaged scholars in argument with the powers-that-be over foreign policy...

...As he explained in the early 1960s, "The main justifying function of participation is development of man's essential powers—inducing human dignity and respect, making men responsible by developing their powers of deliberate action...

...He was fearful that the leftist critique of the welfare state could ironically feed into a general push to dismantle it (and on this point, he was right...

...It would also have to square itself with the major accomplishment of modern liberalism—the welfare state...

...What was needed was a synthesis of these principles—a sort of progressive devolution or partnership between the federal and local levels that balanced participation with justice...

...At the same time, Kaufman never believed that communities left alone could solve all of their problems...

...USING THESE insights, Kaufman articulated his ideal for a future left...

...It would seem an ideal worth exploring today in light of the vacuum of progressive ideals...

...Some Greens in Europe approach it in their talk of community and welfare...

...Essentially, he offered an immanent critique of liberalism by pointing to the "enormous gap between the rhetoric and practice of most American liberals...

...Kaufman began the book by placing himself squarely within the liberal tradition...

...Clearly, this critique holds a lot of cachet today...

...But as the decade heated up, he understood why civil rights activists might question the idea of local community democracy— as the South stood intransigent in the face of political change—and why localities could not solve certain problems without the aid of the The belief that citizens were irrational and thus ill-equipped for political participation...

...As he explained in a reassessment of participatory democracy in 1968, the ideal was not enough in and of itself...

...Kaufman explained that "coalition politics without participatory democracy tends to be irresponsible, manipulative, and class dominated" and that "participatory democracy without coalition politics tends to be provincial, factional, and lacking in necessary political and material props, i.e., stability, welfare, and a framework of protected rights...

...One of America's most divisive presidential elections is just around the corner, and liberals are heating up for a face-off over Vietnam and urban riots...

...His vision was a creative and bold one that combined the best of the New and Old Left...

...He pointed out that student radicals often relied on the accomplishments and strengths of liberals, something forgotten during the hallucinatory excesses of the late 1960s...