Louis Menand is a literary critic who was influenced greatly by Lionel Trilling. His piece on Trilling's life in the New Yorker a few weeks back had some great insights on the concept of what it means to be a liberal. Some of the highlights follow:
- And there are, as a matter of political theory, very different types of liberals. There is, in Isaiah Berlin’s famous distinction, the liberal who believes in negative liberty, “freedom from,” and the liberal who believes in positive liberty, “freedom for.” There is the classical liberalism of free markets and individual rights, and the left liberalism of state planning and class solidarity.
- A liberal is a person who believes that the right economic system, the right political reforms, the right undergraduate curriculum, and the right psychotherapy will do away with unfairness, snobbery, resentment, prejudice, neurosis, and tragedy. The argument of “The Liberal Imagination” is that literature teaches that life is not so simple—for unfairness, snobbery, resentment, prejudice, neurosis, and tragedy happen to be literature’s particular subject matter.
- For books, including the Great ones, are social products “all the way down.” They do not come from some place outside the system, and they do not represent an independent alternative to the way things are. They are among the things that are, even when they belong to what Trilling called “the adversary culture”—even when they reject conventional ways of thinking and behaving. The adversarial is part of the system; it helps to hold the other parts in place. Responsible liberal people feel better adjusted for having an appreciation of art and ideas that are contemptuous of the values of responsible liberal people. It helps the world seem round.
These selections, especially the last segment, frame succinctly the attraction self-proclaimed liberals have towards counter-culture. The question begs to be asked, to what extent and to what end do you embrace subversive ideas and the adversarial culture?
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