Like a lot of people I’ve been ruminating about liberalism lately, almost as if the word “liberalism” itself stood for some recently-rediscovered exotic animal. I’m an avid Yasha Mounk listener, which I suppose if nothing else marks me as a true nerd, and I subscribe to numerous Substacks from people with liberal sensibilities (“small l” as they say, although all of these people are Democrats too). Here I’ll point as one example to the excellent work of my close friend Joel Newman, a fellow Pomona College graduate.
Speaking of college, when I look back on my long ago Pomona days, it’s interesting to me how liberalism back then felt like a set of ideas and values that floated vaguely through the smoggy Southern California air; something that was ‘just there” without ever being an urgent pedagogical focus. In a way this made perfect sense. What better way to teach liberal values to young people than to have us bathe in them? Nobody likes to get hit over the head with a text from John Stuart Mill, and the impulse to do such a thing would be decidedly illiberal in the first place. Still, speaking just for myself, I’ve noticed in recent years how my liberal education left me unprepared to cope with illiberal trends already latent in American society. Liberalism at the time seemed not merely a bit vague but also a bit tired; certainly less sexy than the already ascendant market fundamentalism on the right (a sort of caricature of liberalism), or the already clearly identifiable late 1980s ramp-up of identity politics on the left (then called “political correctness”).
I’ve been ruminating too lately about concepts kindred to but not quite the same as liberalism; concepts like universalism, and enlightenment. Maybe it’s an effect of the rain in Scotland, which I just visited. The place, after all, was long ago home to Adam Smith, not to mention other figures of the Scottish Enlightenment.
I have no great new and independent insight, you may be relieved to hear, about liberalism, enlightenment, or universalism. But shortly before going to Scotland, I picked up a slim volume on a whim at one of my favorite bookstores, Point Reyes Books, from someone who just may have such an insight. The book, called Radical Universalism, is by Israeli-born academic Omri Boehm, currently chair of Philosophy at the New School. I ended up reading big chunks of the book on the train between Edinburgh and Inverness, and while I am definitely unqualified to critique Boehm’s book as a work of philosophy, I still want to devote the rest of this short essay to a more general interpretation of his book and to a case for why, to me, Radical Universalism points to the key to enlivening not only universalism, but also liberalism. What is this key? In short, Boehm argues that we need to refocus on the radical vision implied in the Declaration of Independence.
Now, the Declaration is actually just one of three texts around which Boehm weaves his narrative. The others are “What is Enlightenment?” by Immanuel Kant and the biblical story of the Binding of Isaac. But of the three, the Declaration is the one that as American I find the most familiar, interesting, and urgent. Very early in his book, Boehm makes a case, which I instantly recognized, that commitment to the US Declaration and commitment to the US Constitution were not the same historically, and perhaps are not the same today. In his words, “The distinction between moderate and radical universalism maps well onto the familiar split in pre-Civil War America between the North’s unionists and abolitionists.” The unionist’s “founding text,” Boehm states, was the Constitution, and the abolitionists’ founding text was the Declaration. Why? Prior to the Thirteenth Amendment, the constitution “still protected slave owners’ right to their property—not the inalienable rights of the humans who were that property.”
This argument felt so familiar as I read it in part because it called back to mind a book I read when my children were small; Louis Menand’s Pulitzer Prize winning The Metaphysical Club, which deals with the philosophical tradition of pragmatism as told through the biographies of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., William James, Charles Pierce, and John Dewey. My memories of this remarkable book are all mashed together with memories of carrying an infant around in a sling. But one strong message I took away through my sleep deprived brain fog was to notice the degree to which pragmatism as an intellectual tradition represented a cultural (and personal) reaction to the extreme violence of the Civil War experience.
I remember thinking while readingThe Metaphysical Club that this reaction seemed understandable, especially given that I’d never spent time on a bloody battlefield and fervently wished for my young sons to avoid such an experience as well. So far so good. But in the back my mind I also remember wondering, wasn’t the Civil War necessary given the South’s refusal to recognize the inalienable rights of slaves? Justice is not always pragmatic.
What struck me powerfully in Boehm’s recent book is that he seems to have a similar thought. Commenting on Martin Luther King’s famous statement, borrowed from St. Augustine, than “an unjust law is no law at all,” Boehm states that if, “If this proposition is taken seriously, it contradicts the idea that liberal procedures bestow legitimate authority.”
It’s certainly clear that Boehm is no fan of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., or especially John Dewey, in whose work he sees deep moral commitment being stripped away from enlightenment liberalism. This surprised me a bit, because I’d always respected Dewey. But the quote below, which contrasts Dewey’s pragmatist ideals with those of African American thinkers like Martin Luther King and W.E.B DuBois, made me revise my thinking.
Whereas King’s metaphysical position proceeds from the Declaration of Independence and is continuous with Du Bois’s abolition democracy, Dewey gave us unionist democracy. For Du Bois, abolition democracy denotes the ambition to construct a democratic tradition that continues the same moral commitment that led to the war. For Dewey, the idea was to eliminate the metaphysical idea of man that called for the war and replace it with the common sense, or experience, that would have prevented it in the first place.” (Boehm, p. 102-103)
Here then, Dewey becomes a central figure in providing intellectual justification to a form of liberalism that feels dry and procedure-based; not a liberalism focused on ultimate “metaphysical” commitments to universal human worth and dignity. Here then too, perhaps, are the intellectual roots of what made liberalism seem rather vague back in my liberal arts college days, something floating in the California air, like I said earlier, as opposed to something immediate and urgent, something worth fighting for.
If anyone was a true fighter in American history, it might be John Brown. I’m sure it is no mistake that Boehm leads his book with the words “On October 16, 1859, John Brown, a white abolitionist from Connecticut, led a raid on the United States Armory in Harpers Ferry Virginia, took its guards hostage, and successfully seized the facility.” Later, in the only the passage in Boehm’s very intellectual little book that affected me emotionally, Boehm repeats the lines of the old Civil War marching song “John Brown’s Body.” He does this to bring home the point that Union soldiers knew full well that they were fighting for universal principles; knew full well that they were risking their lives so that Brown’s “soul” could go “marching on.”
The story Boehm tells about John Brown is, then, a very direct pointer toward the meaning of the “radical universalism” that Boehm is talking about. Along these lines, it’s pretty fascinating how “John Brown’s Body,” as transmuted into the familiar Battle Hymm of the Republic by Julia Ward Howe, still has such strong cultural currency. The song is even the topic of the cover story for the current issue of the Atlantic Magazine, perhaps a hopeful sign that the “radical” transmutation of liberalism that Boehm has called for may already be underway.