Fear Not, Liberalism: Liberal Psychology as Intellectual History

I commend Kahan for this ambitious and erudite new intellectual history of liberalism. Freedom from Fear tells a story of liberalism’s development that de-centers concepts such as natural rights, consent, equality, constitutionalism, or even the proverbial social contract with which liberalism is commonly identified. Locke is out; Adam Smith and Montesquieu are in. Instead of fixating on seventeenth-century England or the so-called “Enlightenment,” the “short 19th century” (9–22, 77–120) becomes decisive. Contrary to reductionist criticisms of liberalism as atomistic, secular, or deracinated, Kahan emphasizes that liberalism has traditionally been bolstered by three distinct “pillars” of political freedom, free markets, and morality. These pillars have been marshaled at successive stages of liberalism’s development in response to a number of liberal “fears,” ranging from the threats posed to liberty by the arbitrary power of church and state, by social and political revolutions, poverty, nationalism, totalitarianism, populism, and so forth. Extrapolating from Judith Shklar’s seminal understanding of liberalism in terms of minimizing cruelty, Kahan expands her concern with fear to a wide range of periods and thinkers, offering fresh interpretations of canonical figures such as J. S. Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville while showcasing lesser-known thinkers such as A. V. Dicey, Léon Bourgeois, L. T. Hobhouse, the Ordoliberals, and many others. Kahan’s readings of individual thinkers are consistently illuminating and worthy of discussion in their own right, but my remarks focus on the book’s larger conceptual framework.