Post-Communism, Socialism - General & Miscellaneous, Liberalism & Conservatism

Liberalism's Crooked Circle

Name: Liberalism's Crooked Circle
Author: Ira Katznelson
ISBN: 9780691034386

by Ira Katznelson

Write a review

Overview

In Ira Katznelson's view, Americans are squandering a tremendous ethical and political opportunity to redefine and reorient the liberal tradition. In an opening essay and two remarkable letters addressed to Adam Michnik, who is arguably East Europe's emblematic democratic intellectual, Katznelson seeks to recover this possibility. By examining issues that once occupied Michnik's fellow dissidents in the Warsaw group known as the Crooked Circle, Katznelson brings a fresh realism to old ideals and posits a liberalism that "stares hard" at cruelty, suffering, coercion, and tyrannical abuses of state power. Like the members of Michnik's club, he recognizes that the circumference of liberalism's circle never runs smooth and that tolerance requires extremely difficult judgments. Katznelson's first letter explores how the virtues of socialism, including its moral stand on social justice, can be related to liberalism while overcoming debilitating aspects of the socialist inheritance. The second asks whether liberalism can recognize, appreciate, and manage human difference. Situated in the lineage of efforts by Richard Hofstadter, C. Wright Mills, and Lionel Trilling to "thicken" liberalism, these letters also draw on personal experience in the radical politics of the 1960s and in the dissident culture of East and Central Europe in the years immediately preceding communism's demise.

Reviews

There are no reviews yet. Log in to write one.

Editorials

Library Journal

Katznelson (political science and history, Columbia Univ.; City Trenches, 1981) here addresses the contemporary crisis of left-wing politics by redefining and "revaluing" the liberal tradition. Rather than presenting a conventional social-scientific analysis, his intervention takes the form of two lengthy epistles to Polish-Jewish dissident Adam Michnik. Katznelson's prose style is as elegant as his political stance is sophisticated. This is a subtle, searching examination of liberalism's complicated relationship to concerns about class inequality and social difference. The book should appeal to readers interested in "the pressing task of discovering an ethical and political imagination sufficiently resourceful to grapple with current challenges and responsibilities." Unrepentant leftists, as well as advocates of an undiluted capitalism, will find much to disagree with in this short, pithy volume. But they should also find Katznelson's savoir faire intellectually bracing. Recommended for all academic libraries.-Kent Worcester, Social Science Research Council, New York

Political Science Quarterly

Thoughtful and eminently readable contribution to debates about the future of liberalism.... Katznelson's argument is provocative.

Foreign Affairs

[An] unusual and inventive work.

The Boston Review of Books

Liberalism's Crooked Circleis an intellectually rich engagement with two large issues in contemporary liberalism.... Historically grounded and sociologically realistic—it is a great success.

Political Science Quarterly - William E. Scheuerman

[A] thoughtful and eminently readable contribution to debates about the future of liberalism.... [Katznelson] argues for a synthesis of the most progressive elements of political liberalism with the strengths of the socialist critique of capitalism.