Review of Samuel Moyn, Liberalism against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times (Yale UP, 2023)
Nic Johnson & Seokju Oh 10/29/2023
Strange as it may seem, if we bracket for a moment our preconceived ideas about what liberalism is and just focus on the set of people who called themselves liberals, there was very little “liberalism” in the U.S. before the First World War. Nor was the left-right spectrum, so common in Europe, more than a fringe way of navigating politics outside of an admittedly growing but unconnected archipelago of immigrant enclaves. Like “conservatism” and “socialism,” liberalism was born in the course of the French Revolution, and all three remained anchored to its memory throughout the nineteenth century as various ways of relating to its legacy. Had the Revolution been a mistake altogether, or had it just gone wrong somewhere along the way? Was the Revolution over, its historical mission accomplished, or would it return someday to complete its work? Could those creative energies that once animated the Revolution be channeled into more durable institutional forms, or was Louis XV’s “après moi, le déluge” all too prophetic? Having had their own revolutions, Americans understandably didn’t drape themselves in the guise of la Grande Révolution to articulate their aspirations and organize political disagreements. Federalist or anti-Federalist, Populist or Progressive, the U.S. idiom for politics reflected its own history.
Instead, early liberalism was continental, its genesis, specific. The adjective “liberal” – a commonplace meaning generous or broad minded, as in “a liberal helping of pudding” or a “liberal education” – was first turned into an ism by Swedish and Spanish opposition parties to Napoleonic rule, but liberalism’s most prominent paladins were French. The Paris of Benjamin Constant and Germaine de Staël became the center of a loose international network coordinating activism, and sometimes revolutions, against the ancien régimes of Spain, Italy, Russia, Greece. When Americans like Jefferson wrote about libéralisme, it was this exotic world of continental politics to which they were referring. Across the rest of the nineteenth century, revolutions punctuated political time – in 1830, 1848, and again in 1871 – each requiring individuals to choose anew their orientations towards the Revolution, the common template invoked, debated, imitated, or avoided by peasants, workers, professors and politicians. Historia magistra vitae est, indeed.
Liberalism thus refracted through people and events into a great variety of forms, articulated to a number of different ideologies. The July Monarchy, brought to power by the revolution of 1830, became the first self-consciously liberal government with staying power, with liberal ministers and policies; but liberals fractured between Guizot’s “conservative liberals,” proud to claim “we are the government of the bourgeoisie,” and their “ultraliberal” opponents looking to support the workers who put them in power, “socialists,” and revolutions abroad. After the pan-European revolutions of 1848 landed Louis Bonaparte in power, liberals were scrambling yet again; many blamed lack of secular education for the rise of caesarism, and looked to England and America as models of “liberal democracy,” where the schools were out of priestly hands. In Britain, which already had Parliament, limited government, constitutionalism, and religious tolerance, liberalism first meant free trade; then, a “New Liberalism” redoubled emphasis on education for “improving” common morals and developing citizens’ full civic potential, the assumption being that a liberal education could forestall revolutionary excesses, Bonapartism, and prepare the way for liberal democracy. In Germany, liberals split over how to come to terms with Bismarck – “national liberals,” “progressive liberals,” and “classical liberals” all positioning themselves differently on questions of national unification, free trade, and secular education.
It was only at the beginning of the twentieth century that liberalism took its place in the discursive pantheon of American ideologies. The initial impetus was to link Progressivism to Britain’s New Liberalism, but what truly accelerated the process was the First World War. Writing for journals like New Republic, Anglophiles from the northeastern seaboard depicted the war in Europe as a civilizational contest between liberal democracy and illiberal despotism, urging the US, now apparently the liberal democracy par excellence, to join the war. That Germany’s Historical School of economics – “socialists of the lectern” who endorsed Bismark’s “state socialism” as a way to ward off revolutionary socialism – was the intellectual progenitor of both American Progressivism and Britain’s New Liberalism didn’t prevent liberalism from becoming almost exclusively Anglo-American in self-conception. Once the transatlantic tie was forcefully made, especially after the U.S.’ eventual entrance, the liberal idiom swiftly gained currency within American political discourse. As the historian Helena Rosenblatt puts it, “Wilson called himself ‘progressive’ in 1916 and ‘liberal’ in 1917.”
After the war, with the prestige of European politics severely tarnished, liberals set about renovating their creed in light of the disaster. Classes in “western civilization” proliferated to teach students what it had all been for. The fascist and Bolshevik challenges to Anglo-American civilization, in turn, re-focused liberalism on the problem of revolution, providing an anchor for the twentieth century as the original French Revolution had done for the nineteenth.
As a part of that ideological exercise in reimagining the history and meaning of liberalism, its genealogy was substantially expanded and refurbished. No longer just the name of a movement or a particular set of parties, it became a set of abstract ideas with much deeper roots in Anglo-American history. As Duncan Bell ironically observed:
“Locke was not widely regarded as a liberal – let alone a paradigmatic one – until nearly a century after liberalism emerged as an explicit political doctrine. Several generations of self-identified liberals somehow failed to recognize him as one of their own.”
The short history of liberalism, of a movement and its parties, which began with the French Revolution was rebaptized and blown up into the long history of liberalism, mythologically reaching back to the Glorious Revolution (1688) if not the Magna Carta (1215) or the Norman Conquest (1066).
Closer to home, the nationalism unleashed by the wartime Wilson administration frightened many liberals into rethinking their views. Progressive liberals had focused rational reform efforts on “moral improvements”: Prohibition, Americanization campaigns targeting immigrant children, eugenics, and “good government” anti-corruption crusades. All these areas of life, Progressives had thought, could be improved by pedagogy applied in a Promethean spirit. But between the Palmer raids, race riots, and the return of the KKK, many American liberals in the 1920s came to the conclusion that mores were not as amenable to rational reconstruction as they had thought; religion, race, reproduction were recast as areas of irrationality and darkness. But the economy, unlike culture, was governed less by the passions than the interests – hence a more viable object of liberalization. In the following decade, Roosevelt’s unprecedented four-term run fatefully yoked that version of American liberalism to big government. It was then that “conservative” had to enter the American lexicon to describe free market ideology, at which point the U.S. political idiom had become thoroughly Europeanized.
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It is here that Samuel Moyn’s new book Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times picks up the thread. Across six chapters, Moyn argues that liberals renounced the most interesting parts of their heritage during and as a result of the Cold War. Each chapter is a capsule biography of a major writer which functions as a window onto larger thematic vistas: Judith Shklar and the Enlightenment; Isaiah Berlin and Romanticism; Karl Popper and the philosophy of History; Gertrude Himmelfarb and Jewish Christianity; Hannah Arendt and decolonization; Lionel Trilling and psychoanalysis.
At first this appears to be a straightforward way to organize a book. But it turns out to be an enormously complex narrative strategy full of tensions and ambiguities, because the paragons of Cold War liberalism (CWL) whose life stories Moyn relays so beautifully often turn out to be the exception to the general trend he wants to establish as definitive of the larger CWL project. This makes for a rich and complex story, but it also means the exact character and boundaries of CWL are hard to pin down. Layered on top of that is a deeply recursive and reflexive narrative structure: the main characters in Moyn’s intellectual history are themselves doing intellectual history.
Consider the first chapter. There Moyn makes the interesting observation that the concept of “The Enlightenment” as a periodization for western philosophy was only canonized in the postwar academy. As late as 1960, he finds Alfred Cobban apologizing for using “The Enlightenment” as an awkward term in English. And it’s true. Search Bertrand Russell’s landmark History of Western Philosophy (1945), and you won’t find “The Enlightenment” as an episode in his narrative (though the verb and adjective are dropped a few times). At the same moment, then, that “The Enlightenment” was being canonized as a supposedly unified “movement” that more or less spoke in one voice in favor of Rationality and moral Progress, CWLs were negatively polarizing themselves against it as a species of early-modern utopianism whose highest expressions were the Terror and the Gulag. They accepted without objection Stalinists’ claim that Marx and the USSR were the true heir of eighteenth century rationalism and free thinking. Attempts to plan society, CWLs argued, were just arrogance; only by accepting limits to rationality could hubris be prevented from degenerating into a desire to dominate and impose rationality on recalcitrant populations who did not want to be planned or morally improved. Behind this epic intellectual history of modernity lay an even yet more epic narrative in which the Enlightenment is but an episode of revival for the “ancient Stoic commitment to institutionalize universal reason as the touchstone for human affairs” which perennially contends with Christian fatalism. As a moment in the intellectual history of intellectual history, it is a fascinating argument. What makes it difficult is that, although Moyn’s chapter is populated by many of the famous CWLs, the story is largely told through the eyes of one of them, Judith Shklar, whose early work Moyn admires for her unhappiness with the CWL’s rejection of the Enlightenment. In other words, Moyn’s “Cold War liberalism” is defined in part by “a rejection of the Enlightenment,” and young Shklar is apparently the exception that proves the rule.
The difficult definition-by-exception strategy reappears in chapter two, which tells the story of CWL’s “rejection of Romanticism” through the biography of Isaiah Berlin, the one CWL who found romanticism appealing. The additional complexity of narrative reflexivity also reappears here in a discussion of whether or not the Romantic movement even existed. Moyn quotes Johns Hopkins professor Arthur Lovejoy, founder of the history of ideas in the United States: romanticism “is by different historians—sometimes by the same historians—supposed to have begotten the French Revolution and the Oxford Movement; the Return to Rome and the Return to the State of Nature; the philosophy of Hegel, the philosophy of Schopenhauer, and the philosophy of Nietzsche” who asks “which other three philosophies more nearly exhaust the rich possibilities of philosophic disagreement?” Like “the Enlightenment,” mercantilism, and for that matter “Cold War liberalism,” romanticism was not a label with which its participants would have readily identified. Non-actors’ categories are notoriously difficult historiographical instruments, but as an almost purely vibes-based category “romantic” was especially fraught. Despite being such a complex and multifaceted movement that it might not have been a movement at all, CWLs (Berlin excepted) blamed Romanticism too for the Terror and the Gulag.
As with rationality and self-creation, so with the geography of freedom. Quoting Voltaire’s dictum that one can rebel against the spirit of an age and yet still retain all of its defects, Moyn makes a case that Arendt, a self-professed non-liberal, was actually a fellow traveler of CWL. What both Arendt and CWLs shared was their abandonment of universalism that had hitherto characterized liberalism’s global ambitions. Earlier liberals often looked favorably on imperial civilizing missions, and even more favorably on settler colonialism. By contrast, CWLs were pessimistic about western elites’ ability to educate post-colonial populations in the obligations of liberal citizenship, and even more so about anti-colonial movements’ emancipatory potentials. As western empires slowly collapsed in the postwar period, Arendt and her fellow CWLs argued that only within the garrison states of the white west could freedom flourish. The perimeters of freedom should be jealousy guarded, lest the corruption of the outside creep in. Economic and development aid wouldn’t do much to spread freedom elsewhere. The one exception was for Israel, whose political project all of Moyn’s CWLs enthusiastically supported. Arendt’s biography serves a function similar to Shklar and Berlin’s, since she eventually parted ways with her fellow travelers and abandoned her earlier Zionism, thereby becoming the exception that proves the rule. The story thus told is sophisticated, but there’s something uncanny about Moyn’s description of CWL foreign policy: “Having been global imperialists, many liberals lost global interest. With the implication that global freedom was a lost cause, they resolved to safeguard the liberty of the West against the terror of the rest.” The basics of Cold War orthodoxy was, after all, limitless response to the unlimited, existential threat posed by unfreedom anywhere. That Moyn’s CWLs appear to have been restrainers in foreign policy would have surprised the radical students who launched CWL on its career as an epithet during the Vietnam War, when the dream of CWL politicians was to build “a TVA on the Mekong.”
Moyn’s CWLs aren’t always divided on everything. Karl Popper’s hatred for rigidly deterministic laws of history was blown up into a rejection of history as a theater for any kind of progress whatsoever. If men feel too much pride in their ability to predict the future they will also feel confident and justified in committing crimes to bring about that future and accelerate convergence towards it. In the place of historical progress, Gertrude Himmelfarb looked to Augustinian theology, with its emphasis on original sin and humility towards God, to provide an absolute moral compass in the flux of unpredictable events. On the superiority of reactionary Catholic views of eternity over liberal secular visions of historical time, CWLs were in agreement. To tame man’s evil nature, religion or something a lot like it was necessary, so they rallied around and invented a “Judeo-Christian tradition.” It is here that Moyn makes the most convincing case for CWLs as a break within the overall liberal worldview they inherited from the long nineteenth century. What could be more alien to a movement centered around rational self-creation and individual perfectibility, inspired by revolutionary progress, than an emphasis on original sin and the propagation of mythologies to contain social conflict? Lionel Trilling offered a sympathetic alternative when he replaced Judeo-Christian tradition with Freud, who he reads as rather Augustinian: psychic maturity means recognizing the limits of reason, accepting social obligations and assigned roles, and conforming to the demands of democratic culture.
In all these ways, CWL was an attempt to revise down liberal ideals, if not to outright replace core beliefs with their reactionary nineteenth-century critiques. In so doing, Moyn contends, they opened the floodgates to neoliberalism and neoconservatism. Hayek’s argument about the superior information processing capacities of markets compared to states and Strauss’ arguments about the “theologico-political predicament of modernity” are not so far off once the emancipatory potential of human rationality and history have been discarded. Whereas liberalism in the long nineteenth century was sympathetic to revolutionary ideals and skeptical of its excesses, CWL decked itself out in anti-revolutionary full plate. Abandoning the Enlightenment “led down a Cold War liberal slope into neoconservatism and neoliberalism alike.” To the extent that neo-’s liberalism and conservatism are the names for what ail our times, we have CWL to blame for leaving us defenseless against their arguments and for eroding our imaginative capacity to produce something else, a better liberalism worth defending.
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In the introduction and conclusion, Moyn frames his book as a contribution to the debate about the fate of liberalism that took off in 2016 with the election of Donald Trump and the publication of Patrick Deneen’s Christian conservative polemic Why Liberalism Failed. These events “provided the occasion for the enthronement of CWL one more time.” Readers not heavily engrossed in that debate will have to reconstruct it for themselves, since only its broadest outlines are laid out. Readers familiar with the short and long history of liberalism might wonder why Moyn chose 2016 to date the debate about liberalism to which he was contributing, since it has often faced such crises of confidence, from the first Napoleon to the third and beyond. More proximately, the post-2008 rise of millennial socialism and the foreign policy “pivot to Asia” during the second Obama administration might better frame the return of Cold War thinking.
In 2018, Moyn reviewed a very different book about liberalism. Mark Lilla had made the not-so-plausible case that woke students and academics ruined the New Deal coalition. This didn’t make much sense, Moyn pointed out, since the academic humanities hardly wield that kind of power. To the extent that they influence the world outside their ivory towers at all, it is by gradually shifting the tone and texture of conversations over the course of generations. But even that kind of influence, it might be added, is heavily mediated by external events and subsequent history. As Moyn said at the time:
Lilla’s overall story of the United States and the Democratic Party is still far too much about the superstructure (in the relevant terminology). It needs more attention to the base. More importantly, it is too much about the wrong reformers, focusing on the New Left in humanities departments and omitting the actual governmental and party policies that have mattered most.
The humanities, Moyn correctly argued, were simply not in the driver’s seat of national politics. Rather, insofar as academia has any bearing on such epochal changes in national – and indeed international – politics, it is professors in STEM and the social sciences to whom we should be paying the most attention. After all, they provide the shock troops for think tanks, high finance, corporations and consulting firms – not to mention the direct and unmediated influence of economists on policy when ensconced in autonomous executive bureaucracies like the Federal Reserve. Yet even here, such local influence only makes sense within the context of a total history which can explain why such bureaucracies even exist in the first place and how they have come to accumulate so much leverage over the rest of society. Again, Moyn hit the nail on the head: who is more to blame for the slide from postwar liberalism into neoliberalism, he asked, “Is it Homi Bhabha and Judith Butler—or Lawrence Summers?”
These same points are relevant to Moyn’s latest book – a book about how two political theorists, two philosophers, a historian, and a literature professor laid the groundwork not just for neoliberalism, but for neoconservatism too.
One could also quibble with Moyn’s definitions. Was Himmelfarb a Cold War liberal or a neoconservative from the start? Arendt, Moyn acknowledges, loudly and often declared she was not a liberal. Moyn makes a convincing case for them as fellow-travelers but these choices come at the expense of an examination of other more central CWLs, their diverse trajectories, and the political and economic events that shaped their history.
To take up Moyn’s challenge, what would a history of Cold War Liberalism look like that focused on the actual governmental and party policies that have mattered most? Take Arthur Schlesinger, who is absent from the book but arguably the CWL par excellence. As the Kennedys’ house historian (the closest we literary intellectuals ever really get to power) he campaigned for Civil Rights to be included in the Democratic Party platform. Or take Leon Keyserling, principal economic advisor on both the National Labor Relations Act and the Social Security Acts, who in the postwar period planned the military Keynesian dimension of Cold War Liberalism for Truman, only to be hounded by McCarthy, and reemerge in the 1960s as economic advisor to the Civil Rights Movement. The 88th Congress that passed the Civil Rights Act was the same Congress that, four short weeks later, passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. That wasn’t just a coincidence – as Mary Dudziak has argued, a major motivation behind liberals’ embrace of civil rights was the desire to project cultural power abroad, which they felt was hamstrung by the embarrassment of the Jim Crow South.
The point is not that Cold War Liberalism was therefore admirable or provides a liberalism worth defending. On the contrary: is there any lower motive for supporting human dignity than geopolitics? Rather, Moyn’s arguments about influence and causation lack grounding without reference to the struggle over and backlash to these policies. Just off stage are CWLs’ contemporary enemies, against whom their canonization & anti-canonization were weaponized, and most importantly the political moment to which they responded. Moyn’s account of the transition from postwar liberalism to the late twentieth century world operates entirely at the level of ideas, but without McCarthy, Civil Rights, Vietnam, and the pivotal decade of the 1970s, where does the rubber meet the road? Lionel Trilling inspired Irving Kristol, true; but he inspired Allen Ginsberg too. There were evidently many different paths out of postwar liberalism and/or through Cold War liberalism.
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The question of revolution defined the central axis of European (and increasingly global) political thought from 1800 to the 1970s. There were always other axes of differentiation, but the left-right spectrum was uniquely powerful in lending politics its coherence. Sometime in the late twentieth century, revolution exited the scene, and the well-structured discursive field it had generated for over a century and a half went with it.
Politically, although it took until the 1990s for Liberalism Militant to congratulate itself as Liberalism Triumphant, the USSR had already visibly lost steam as the engine of global revolutionary challenge to the American capitalist world-system by the 1970s; mired in poverty and civil war, the PRC wasn’t doing much better. Domestically, the disappearance of revolutionary horizons on the left hasn’t meant the disappearance of potential violent uprisings against the state. There are more guns (393.3m) than people (331.9m) in the U.S. – no doubt an understatement given the surge in gun purchases since the pandemic, not included in this figure – and they are unevenly distributed. Only one third of Americans own even a single gun; gun owners are disproportionately old white men, and overwhelmingly rural and conservative. Even that understates the skew: a 2016 Harvard and Northeastern study estimated that half the guns in America were owned by just 3% of the population. Kathleen Belew and others have documented that it was in the 1980s that the White Power movement, organized in a network of cells and compounds across the continent, declared revolutionary opposition to the Federal government. Whatever one makes of January 6th, the overall picture should be clear: in a prospective political and social breakdown precipitating the Federal government’s loss of its monopoly on legitimate violence, the balance of power, of sheer capacity for brute force, does not favor the left. Nor is the gap marginal.
Intellectually, there were a common set of assumptions guiding figures as diverse as Stalin and Jean Jaures, Arendt and Karl Popper in their interpretation of the French Revolution: a rising bourgeoisie, the abolition of feudalism, the sudden seizure of power by inexperienced “men of letters” all hopped up on a cocktail of rationalisme encyclopédique and Rouseauvian-sentimentalism, and the unfettering of industrial capitalism with revolutionary changes in social relations. That shared interpretive matrix prompted a basic existential decision, in the words of Herbert Butterfield: “Every man must have an attitude to the French Revolution – must make a decision about it somehow – as part of the stand that he generally takes in life.” But revisionists and their respondents began picking this view apart in the 1960s. What bourgeoisie existed were lawyers, happily ensconced in the absolutist state; “feudalism” by the late eighteenth century had meant little more than a salt tax, a tithe, and aristocrats’ monopoly on grain mills and privilege to hang weathervanes; representatives of the Third Estate, far from utopian murder-poets, were typically bureaucrats with long tenures in local politics, and few had heard of, let alone carefully read Rousseau. Within a few years, the old consensus view of the Revolution had collapsed. Post-revisionist scholarship now focuses on issues like colonization and its blowback on metropolitan Europe, interimperial warfare and the debt it generates, and aristocratic resistance to taxation or fiscal reform. In addition to just being better history, these themes are more relevant to our present which looks increasingly “early modern” in many respects.
In the absence of any progressive revolutionary forces in which to ground them, the very concepts of liberalism, socialism, and conservatism arguably become incoherent. From Napoleon through the July Monarchy to the pan-European revolutions of 1848 to the Paris Commune to the communist revolutions of the twentieth century, the revolutionary imagination which defined the liberal world 1800 to 1970 has vanished. The old words remain, without reference to the same concepts. There are precedents for such Wile-E-Coyote moments in the history of political language, when old idioms appear to have momentum because they haven’t looked down (for instance the early modern language of civic humanism, which not coincidentally has seen a revival in the last fifty years; or the Freudians Foucault mocked for writing about ‘repressive society’ like they still lived in the Victorian Era and not on the other side of the great Sexual Revolution of the 1960s).
All of this puts us, practically and conceptually, in a pre-Revolutionary situation much closer to the eighteenth century, whose Enlightenment spirit Moyn champions. CWL’s rejection of the Enlightenment, therefore, is even worse than a betrayal of liberalism’s own best values – it is a refusal to face our situation. For the same reason, whether CWLs “accept” or “reject” something they call “the Enlightenment” is less interesting than the way they characterize le siècle des Lumières. Arguably they don’t do so correctly. If they didn’t understand the Enlightenment when they rejected it, what would a return to those values mean?
The early Shklar, Moyn’s “muse,” characterized the Enlightenment as the combination of rational political optimism, anarchism, and intellectualism. Moyn has been one of the most insightful critics of naive, dogmatic depictions of the Enlightenment. But neither Shklar nor Moyn can see the Enlightenment for what it was with two centuries of liberalism and revolution obstructing their view. The Enlightenment was neither optimistic nor pessimistic; it was a complex social scientific discourse whose affect was often ambiguous or intensely ambivalent. The crown jewel of that social science was political economy, and that is what we should return to and begin anew.
Rousseau for example is often cast as a counter-Enlightenment cultural critic, but he wrote the article on “political economy” for Diderot’s Encyclopedia. Rousseau didn’t just think luxury was making men effeminate (though he did think that). He also thought that the production of luxury goods was only possible because they were being pushed as a part of the French monarchy’s post-Colbert mercantilist strategy for state-led economic development, which in turn was the fuel for the war machine in Louis’ crusade for Universal Empire. Rousseau was worried that the rural taxation needed to subsidize urban luxury manufacturing would impoverish the peasants to the point of depopulating the countryside, creating starving, jobless masses in the cities who would be susceptible to the caesarist demagogues stirring in the absolutists’ war machine. The unevenness of luxury-led economic development could be improved on, and the disaster of military government prevented, by an even more expansive system of state planning for balanced growth. Nor were these just abstract literary tropes – Rousseau outlined ideas for such a system when the Polish government asked him to write their constitution.
This is just one example of many we could muster from the eighteenth-century storehouse – Montisquieu’s ideas about the welfare state that he developed as president of the Bordeaux parlement; the conceptualization of money and private property Locke applied during his time at the English mint and as Carolina constitutionalist; the arguments about deindustrialization and offshoring that David Hume promoted after he had abandoned writing about human nature, or his apocalyptic visions of public debt – to demonstrate that political economy was at the heart of what we now can’t avoid calling the Enlightenment. The extent to which intellectual historians evacuate political economy from the picture is the extent to which they miss the forest, and the trees, and the terrain of struggle altogether.
Moyn’s call to think our way past Cold War liberalism is ennobling, but to rise to the occasion we can’t constrain our search for alternatives to the liberalism of the long nineteenth century. As another reviewer put it, Liberalism against Itself can sometimes “seem as if Moyn is asking his readers to bake a cake and supplying them only with a list of ingredients to avoid.” Expired ingredients won’t help either. Thankfully, not everything in the storehouse of modern political theory expires at the same rate. The problems of economic statecraft which were at the center of Enlightened philosophy have proven more durable than the problematic of revolution. As the discourse of our own time shifts down into that deeper, more enduring register we are likely to be confronted by the fact that, unlike the drama and poetry of the barricades, for political economy, an advice language for managers of competitive commercial states, the devil is in the details.
RGK 