Yosef Malka
Not Thinking Like a Liberal by Raymond Geuss, Harvard University Press, 224 pp., $29.95
Raymond Geuss is now a 75-year-old political theorist and emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Cambridge. When he arrived at Columbia University at age sixteen, in 1963, he felt that he was emerging from “almost complete isolation.” Up to that point, he had barely read a newspaper or listened to the radio. The teachers at his Hungarian Catholic boarding school, in a Philadelphia suburb, were less concerned with John F. Kennedy than with keeping alive the high culture of Habsburg Europe, which had ended in 1918 with the start of the First World War.
His teachers were Piarist priests who took vows to provide special care to young people. They had fled Hungary after the failed uprisings of 1956, and they warned him as he entered Columbia that, despite all appearances, America and its global hegemony would not last forever. Like Virgil’s Rome, post-war America was an empire expanding its ranks that would likely offer him, the poor son of a steel worker and a secretary, a valuable education at little cost. But it would only be a matter of time—30 years, they projected—before decline would inevitably set in.
A Catholic boarding school run by Hungarian priests is not a traditional place to begin a narrative about liberalism. But Geuss’s time at this school taught him that all views begin somewhere, and his memoir explores the effect of this odd education on his intellectual trajectory. Geuss has spent his career attacking core tenets of liberal theory: its conception of the rational and transparent self, the notion that deliberation will lead to political consensus, and the prominence of “ideal theory,” which prioritizes ethics over political reality in the study of politics. Not Thinking Like a Liberal (Harvard University Press, 2022), traces his lifelong skepticism of liberalism to conversations he had as a boy with his religious teachers.
Geuss argues in the book that Anglo-American hegemony has made it too easy to take liberalism for granted. Because of the power of liberal nations and the fact that liberalism is dedicated, in principle, to pluralism and open-mindedness—“the marketplace of ideas”—it has come to see itself as an “anti-ideology.” In so doing, it has become blinded to its contingent history and to its embattled present. Geuss thinks he can define and diagnose liberalism’s problems because his education oriented him away from it and taught him the importance of seeing ideologies from the outside. The idiosyncratic Catholicism of his school—inflected by Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Camus, and first-hand experience of fleeing the total breakdown of Europe—did not allow him to view the world as a liberal.
Geuss has critiqued in previous work the “counter-movement” of the 1970s that overturned social welfare and privatized public services—what many deem “neoliberalism.” In this book, however, Geuss lumps all versions of liberalism together, claiming that “a certain kind of liberalism is the very air that one breathes in most English-speaking countries.” This liberalism, he suggests, stretches from Locke to Rawls and is responsible for everything from the financial crisis of 2008 to Brexit to climate catastrophe. In fact, it is not clear that this is a unified tradition, or that it is fair to identify the excesses of neoliberalism with post-war liberal thinkers. In the current moment of crisis, why should we be inclined to caricature liberalism and agree with him that there is “no insight to be found” in its long history? Aren’t there some versions of liberalism worth saving?
Geuss welcomes liberalism’s demise, but readers need not join him. “Not thinking like a liberal” simply means seeing liberalism from the outside as an embattled and historically entangled “total ideology.” In that respect, Geuss’s book might serve as a wake-up call to readers, cautioning them against deploying stale invocations of “free speech,” “the open society,” and “the rules based international order” in order to stem the present crisis. Liberals must be willing to think critically about what they have to offer the world in order to defend their tradition.
“I do not mourn the passing of liberalism,” Geuss claims as he surveys its decline. He is hardly an “internal critic,” but he is also not a reactionary “post-liberal” with simple remedies like working the land and going to church. Liberalism, Geuss says, is buckling under the weight of internal contradictions. In their quest to dominate the globe, Britain and the United States created a “construct that combined universalist pretensions with hard-headed self-interest.” According to Geuss, liberals put forward doctrines of universal, natural rights, but excluded minorities. Universalist pretensions were a useful mask for a project of expansion, commercial exploitation, and deregulation that facilitated imperialism abroad and inequality at home, while restricting freedom to the few. Liberalism, to Geuss, is an iceberg: universal principles high and visible, with a mass of self-interest and domination lurking underneath. A global financial crisis, slew of climate emergencies, and wave of authoritarianism have exposed the iceberg: they are symptoms of liberalism, Geuss argues—reasons why the ship is now sinking.
If not the iceberg liberalism, what does Geuss believe in? At one point he refers to the book as a lamentation of the “massive cultural loss” of Brexit, an event that Geuss says, “I think I shall probably never get over.” He suggests that Brexit was the logical conclusion of a system that prizes deliberation without acknowledging the ways that material interests and entrenched differences affect the public sphere. And he clearly prizes the way his boarding school nurtured skepticism about the regime from within its borders. Truth often thrives in the cracks of a dominant culture, Guess suggests. By clashing with entrenched ways of thinking, minorities often gain a prescient ability to understand societies. This is ironic, because for all of the hypocrisy behind liberal tolerance, tens of millions—including the Hungarian priests that raised him—fled to the United States for it. Acknowledging this need not lead to glorifying liberalism as it exists, but to the realization that within the “constellation of ideas” that Geuss speaks of, there may be a few good ones.
Geuss’s book is almost evenly divided between his time in the boarding school and his time at university, but the lessons he internalizes in both spheres are almost exactly the same. While he did not become a “good Catholic,” Geuss found many parallels between his teachers’ criticisms of Protestantism and their critiques of liberalism.
The priests at his Catholic school, Geuss reports, taught Luther’s letter on translation and letter against the peasants at the same time. Luther put forth the seemingly liberal, tolerant philosophy of sola scriptura—that believers can understand scripture without a priest. But, Geuss’s teachers claimed, his vernacular translation of the Bible was meant to support his own narrow reading. When the preacher Thomas Müntzer and his band of peasants disagreed with it, sola scriptura flew out the window: Luther called on the princes to slaughter them. This reminded Geuss of an anecdote his Irish literature teacher would often repeat: after Oliver Cromwell conquered Ireland, he proclaimed that he would permit “liberty of conscience,” so long as the Irish were not allowed to attend Mass. Though Cromwell is hardly a liberal icon, Geuss believes that this kind of hypocrisy is endemic in liberalism: “tolerance” and “neutrality” are usually a means of hiding principles from scrutiny.
His religious teachers and a discovery of Theodor Adorno’s work formed Geuss’s suspicion of the “panacea” of deliberation often put forth in liberal democracies. Adorno, a shell-shocked Jewish emigré who helped found the Frankfurt School of critical theory and fled the Nazis, taught Geuss that truth is often deeply obscure and that we should not claim otherwise. Geuss frequently returns to the Adorno quote that “the piece of grit in your eye is the best magnifying glass.” Adorno’s point is that subscribing to total ideologies which would otherwise seem to cloud our visions of the world is often the only way to get some purchase on it. Without presuppositions, we are completely adrift. It is natural and, in fact, ideal to change course at different times in life, but we need to enter the journey with some equipment—some baggage. Once we realize that the grit is in fact grit, and understand where our worldviews come from, we can start to experiment with ideas and see politics clearly.
Much of Geuss’s theoretical work since entering Columbia has centered on “total ideology” and the possibilities of deliberation, and the memoir traces his skepticism of “baroque” ideals of consensus and clarity that end up privileging the status quo and stifling difference. Liberals often think that discussion and clarity are necessary to reach truth and order, but notions of “clarity” usually reflect the dominant ways of thinking. “Clarity” is rarely a pure, philosophical standard, and claims that something is not “clear” often serve to repress those who think differently. To have a truly “open society,” one would have to be comfortable with the obscure nature of many truths.
Readers of Geuss’s memoir still face a tension: as many of his critics have pointed out, Geuss’s work seems to veer towards a pugnacious vision of politics where reason and persuasion are fantasies that only serve to uphold a regime built on violence. On the other hand, there is something deeply pluralistic and empathetic in his effort to expose the ways in which calls for unity and deliberation often bulldoze legitimate forms of difference and suppress those who diverge from accepted norms.
Totalizing worldviews are, in an odd way, liberating: but only once we see them for what they are. Growing up with a set of guiding principles, myths, and narratives is often necessary to become oriented in the world. After grasping where these categories come from and seeing them from the outside, we are free to continue making use of them or to seek new orientations.
Rather than offering a systematic critique or alternative to the dominant system, Geuss simply wants readers to realize that liberalism is as totalizing as Catholicism or Communism, even if it pretends not to be. It has myths, stock responses, and transcendent truths that take root as deeply as any other ideology—its principles are not “neutral.”
Guess’s book prompts this moment of disenchantment for liberals who grew up during the “end of history” and do not know how to respond to a new era of crisis. However, many who see through liberalism’s pretensions may still find that they believe in its transcendent claims and wish to save them. While Geuss is unwilling to do this, we may choose to abandon the false universalism that has blinded us to the possibility of change and encouraged collective political immaturity. We may be forced to take liberalism seriously again.