A "New" Liberalism

...Reason will, for instance, instruct man that if he wishes to preserve his life he must seek peace and consider other men his equals...

...Minogue, a young political theorist teaching at the London School of Economics, is representative of those newer liberals who have read Oakeshott and who understand Hobbes, who have been wounded by the experience of 20th-century brutality but who get along without Original Sin...

...They take for granted the often forgotten truth that conflict may and must be restrained by politics but will not cease...

...Why not establish sadomasochistic cooperatives, in which those whose greatest happiness lies in inflicting pain meet up with those whose greatest happiness consists in enduring it...

...The Liberal Mind offers an adequate analysis of this vulnerable center, which Western opinion neglects, but no indication of how liberalism might repair it...

...They respond to the ring of Hobbes' dictum that "Covenants, without the Sword, are but Words, and of no strength to secure a man at all...

...Such disruptive possibilities could be plausibly defended in utilitarian terms,' though of course they are not...

...Ever waiting to usurp the office is brute authority...

...especially if rescued, as Minogue would have it, from its illusions and equivocations and revived by a more vivid awareness of the capacities of reason and the forces of passion which characterize human reality...

...Even that which we assume easily (e.g., that evidence counts in the search for truth) has no standing until the determination of men to establish its rightful place is enforced by their politics...

...If Minogue had reflected further on the ultimate justifications of ethics and politics (his attempt to found moral criteria on "the moral character" is as evasive as the views he criticizes, for why choose to be this kind of person rather than that...

...Alternatively, it may be that man is by nature a risk-taking animal, able to stake his strength grandly, miserably, foolishly or well on the chance of defying the chaos with his measure of harmony...

...Reviewed by VIRGINIA HELD Author, "The Bewildered Age" After November, American liberals may be able to muster out of their current front-line engagements with primitivism and resume more productive hassles between the political factions analyzed by The Liberal Mind...

...They acknowledge, as Minogue puts it, "the crunch of truncheon on skull which always lies just in the background of political life...

...Minogue in addition exposes what his colleague Bernard Crick, in his far more brilliantly resounding In Defence of Politics, eludes: the weakness at the core of the utilitarian-liberal tradition where it offers no ground for moral obligation...

...He must choose courage...

...In a community of cheats, why should anyone ever take a chance on a more reasonable arrangement when he might lose...

...Minogue speaks, for instance, of the "moral emptiness" of Benthamism: "The individual, faced with some sort of moral choice, must [in the liberal-utilitarian view] simply decide what he and others want...

...The welfarist,' writes Minogue, "energetically creating sequences of political changes designed to improve the society we live in [may be] distressed at a world in which literacy simply means being able to read advertising slogans...

...Liberalism thus propounds the useful rules discovered by reason which will enable man to escape suffering and achieve happiness...

...The newer liberals revolt rather against the slipshod sentimentality and evasive thinking of those of their confrères, more recently ascendant, who suppose all suffering can be alleviated by proliferating governmental programs, and who refuse to acknowledge that one man's improvement can be another man's loss of freedom, or intellectual and esthetic goods, or wherewithal...

...In the calculations of morality and politics, if not in the ultimate justification of their bases, the liberal tradition may have no peer...

...But this view cannot refute one who willingly abandons his felicity to the misuse of power...

...In the meantime, a work such as Minogue's nourishes our anticipation...

...But the New Liberalism awaits its major spokesmen...

...he might have returned with greater confidence than he displays to considering the content of political morality...

...Even more serious is the question of the moral obligation of the powerful toward the weak...

...They argue that politics also has the function of assuring that interests are restrained, and their interaction bounded...

...At the same time they find parochial the notion, now fashionable on many campuses, that the function of politics is the adjustment of conflicts of interest between delicately grasping, well-mannered groups...

...Why not cooperation between those afflicted with blood lust and those about to commit suicide...

...Reason, at the heart of the liberal tradition, is seen as man's indispensable tool...

...Nor does it encourage or obligate the individual whose own interest would indeed be risked by adherence to a rule of reason...

...But at the moment they may suffer a shiver of doubt about Kenneth Minogue's statement that, where modern Western opinion is concerned, "liberalism provides a moral and political consensus which unites virtually all of us, excepting only a few palpable eccentrics on the Right and Communists on the Left...

...If he can succeed, why should not the strong man enslave his neighbors, or the clever one subdue the impressionable by manipulation...

...Yet all manner of fascinating possibilities arise...

...For them, outdated liberalism is not the laissezfaire economics and shackled government of previous centuries (a version of liberalism thought to be no longer at issue until American conservatives, quoting its exponents but shirking its demands of rationality, threw down their pseudoclaims to be its heirs...

...Minogue gives no evidence, for example, of having explored the ultimate grounding of morality offered by the Kantian tradition, in which man is thought bound to posit his freedom to legislate moral rules to himself...

...Yet he is often the last to realize what he is doing to weaken social institutions that might better combat this philistinism.' Nor do the newer liberals sustain that other, incompatible yet concomitant hope of recent liberal orthodoxy ("internal incoherence" is "one of the marks of ideology," Minogue contends): the brief in an eventually dwindling governmental power made possible by universal, harmonious espousal of programs for a happy society...

...If it can do so safely, why should not the great state gobble up the small...

...but the utility of competing courses of action does not determine our choice, for the simple reason that it depends on our choice...

...Stripped of fantasies encouraged by Hume, that the benevolent sympathies of men for each other would save us from such unpleasant possibilities, the liberal-utilitarian tradition maintains that consideration by the powerful for the weak is expedient: Sides may change...

...Retracing the development of the liberal surge, Minogue examines its welling in Hobbes and Locke, its source in the view that man is impelled by his passions but capable of using his head...

...The newer liberals think they know that disorder is elemental and that whatever harmony men may wrest from it must be continually recreated and imposed upon the disorder by political institutions...

...In a murderous society, he who stakes his own happiness on a less murderous course must do more than follow liberalutilitarian advice to use his reason to implement his desires...