Liberalism in Dark Times: The Liberal Ethos in the Twentieth Century
by Joshua L. Cherniss
Princeton University Press, 2021

It never quite stops being jarring, but even so: the “dark times” alluded to in the title of Joshua Cherniss’s new book Liberalism in Dark Times isn’t the Middle Ages or the depths of the East German Cold War - it’s now, it’s the present world since 2016, a benighted world surrendering on all fronts to irrationality, intolerance, innuendo, and, to the point of the book, illiberality. It doesn’t always seem that way explicitly; the focus in these pages is on four key liberal thinkers of the previous century, Reinhold Niebuhr, Albert Camus, Raymond Aron, and Isaiah Berlin. But any reader coming to this book fresh from the openly mendacious savagery of the 21st century news cycle will see the present, not the past, and maybe despair a little. 

Cherniss, associate professor of government at Georgetown University, offers a multi-faceted discussion and defense of “tempered liberalism,” which “seeks to reduce, as much as possible, the fear, the frustrating sense of immobility or entrapment, the cramping of character and narrowing of horizons through deprivation or coercion, and the arbitrariness and arrogance of authority, within a society.” 

His examination of his key figures is exceptionally strong and nuanced, and it spills over into invigorating assessments of all kinds of parallel figures (particularly the relationship between György Lukács and Max Weber). But Cherniss is at his strongest when grappling with ideas, not thinkers, and there’s a real sense that, as he puts it, “the clash between liberals and radically anti-liberal political movements in the twentieth century was ethical as well as ideological and institutional.” He’s acutely aware that ethical clashes can produce dark excesses on all sides and warns accordingly:

Readiness to sacrifice individuals in the pursuit of moral causes often takes less dramatic and bloody forms, which many of us could find in ourselves, if we looked. Anyone who feels the force of revulsion against the injustice, cruelty, and oppression of this world should be alert to this temptation; so should those who believe they have discovered the truth about how to improve human life (whether this truth is secular or religious, and identified with the political right or left).

But as rich as the author’s historical analyses are, the doleful present keeps breaking through. “Many political evils, of course, stem from garden variety villainy – ambition, venality, the appetite for domination or longing for submission,” Cherniss writes, for instance, “But righteous ruthlessness is particularly troubling, insofar as it can transform apparent virtues into terrible vices.” Anyone reading that in 2021 will automatically fill in half a dozen specific names. Cherniss notes that what he delicately refers to as “recent events” have confirmed how fragile American constitutionalism is, particularly when a virulent anti-liberal bias has infiltrated what he, again delicately, refers to as “the upper echelons of power.” 

The upper echelons of power, yes indeed. Liberalism in Dark Times does a bracingly sharp job of fleshing out the contentious etiology of tempered liberalism as a dogged resistance to barbarism, know-nothingism, xenophobic jingoism - and also that garden-variety villainy. It’s a richly involving anatomy of liberalism, and we can only hope its not also an epitaph.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.