The presidential election was never going to resolve the bitter ideological divides that have become a familiar part of our political culture. The project of peaceful coexistence with fellow citizens who see the world differently—perhaps the most significant goal of liberalism itself—seems to grow ever more challenging. And recent proclamations by political thinkers that liberalism harbors significant philosophical incoherencies, that it has taken some disastrous turns in recent years, or that it has outright failed are perhaps enough to make that project feel like a fool’s errand.
This unsettling situation is one reason political philosopher Alexandre Lefebvre’s recent book, Liberalism as a Way of Life, is such a breath of fresh air. Lefebvre does not ignore the myriad challenges liberalism currently faces. Instead, he acknowledges those threats and directs us to what he calls liberalism’s “spiritual heft and latent resources” for fostering both principled forms of agreement and meaningful ways of living our individual lives. And somewhat surprisingly (though accurately), he locates this “heft” in the work of John Rawls, whom many have interpreted as advancing an overly rational, and thus rather spiritually thin, conception of politics. Lefebvre helpfully recovers the weighty moral and existential dimensions embedded in Rawlsian concepts such as public reason (appealing to reasons that others have reason to accept) and reflective equilibrium (synthesizing our various convictions with one another), and he demonstrates how living out these principles is akin to undertaking a series of “spiritual exercises” through which we cultivate the attitudes of sincerity and grace, calmness and delight that sustain the liberal way of life.
At their core, Lefebvre’s spiritual exercises and Rawls’s guiding concepts all concern the imagination, which, it is worth noting, is an idea with a distinctly literary provenance. In his 1950 book, The Liberal Imagination, literary critic Lionel Trilling noted the natural affinity between liberalism’s “first essential imagination of variousness and possibility, which implies the awareness of complexity and difficulty,” and literature—particularly the novel—which “is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.” Recently, the writer Adam Gopnik asserted that, when it comes to the “temperament and tone” of liberalism “poets and novelists and painters…can be better guides to its truths than political philosophers and pundits,” though, interestingly, Gopnik focuses more on European writers such as Anthony Trollope and George Eliot. Trollope and Eliot are wonderful authors, of course, but there are also many American writers whose works were shaped by political turmoil and who posited that a liberal way of life demands a distinctly literary sensibility.
In fact, American literature generally developed in response to the political divisiveness and moral strife that seemed to be an inherent part of the democratic culture that took root in the nation’s formative early decades. Yet this aspect of our national literature has long been overlooked, not only by writers like Gopnik, but in the broader fields of literary studies and political philosophy. For decades, literary scholars have been extremely critical of liberalism (Trilling’s claims notwithstanding) and have sought to uncover literature’s radical political dimensions. Political philosophers, meanwhile, rarely consider American literature and, when they do, they predictably turn to one or two familiar figures such as Ralph Waldo Emerson or Henry David Thoreau.
Rawls himself argued in Political Liberalism (1993) that his own liberal theory “is not a novel doctrine.” Many of its core ideas—toleration, public reason, reflective equilibrium—have long histories. And those histories appear not only in the works of political philosophers such as John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Hume, and Montesquieu, but also in the pages of American literary texts that routinely invoked and engaged these liberal thinkers in narratives of democratic life. Both public reason and reflective equilibrium, in particular, shape how we navigate our own deeply held beliefs and try to reconcile them with the way other people see the world. They are, in other words, profoundly imaginative endeavors, and what can easily be lost, even in Rawls’s own writing, is just how difficult these undertakings are. But they are precisely the endeavors that American literary writers were preoccupied with from the very dawn of our national literature.
Not unlike our current moment, the early decades of the American experiment were profoundly unsettled and divisive as rivalrous factions battled over the meaning and purpose of democracy. As a result, many of the most significant early works of American literature, from the popular gothic novels of the 1790s to the adventure novels of the 1830s and the vast literary flourishing in the 1850s known as the “American Renaissance,” concerned ideas integral to the democratic experiment. Given the persistence of chattel slavery—the main driver of the era’s moral and political strife—perhaps none was more significant than the idea of liberty. And while US writers were interested in what liberty meant and entailed, they were even more preoccupied with how we come to form our understandings of and attachment to such ideas—and what happens when we encounter others who think and feel differently.
We see this, for instance, in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) when, on the evening before several of its main characters are about to make their final push north into Canada to escape from slavery, Stowe’s narrator interjects, “Liberty!—electric word!” and asks the reader, “Is not the sense of liberty a higher and a finer one than any of the five?” For Stowe, an abstract concept like liberty can feel “electric” so that we no longer even think of it as an idea but as a heightened and refined part of how we “sense” the world. Similarly, in his famous autobiography, abolitionist and escaped slave Frederick Douglass wrote that “the silver trump of freedom had roused my soul to eternal wakefulness.” For these and other writers, ideas are not just abstract concepts to which we assent. Instead, they permeate the very ways in which we understand the deepest part of ourselves and thus shape how we apprehend the world around us.
Yet both Stowe and Douglass also recognized that individuals often “sense” the world and its governing ideas in divergent ways. Stowe’s novels are filled with scene after scene of characters debating and arguing about ideas like liberty. Douglass likewise would later write that “every time the abolitionist speaks in honor of human liberty, he touches a chord in the heart of the anti-abolitionist, which responds in harmonious vibrations,” especially when that individual is thinking only of himself. Then, Douglass writes, “he sees truth with absolute clearness and distinctness. He only blunders when asked to lose sight of himself. In his own cause he can beat a Boston lawyer, but he is dumb when asked to plead the cause of others.” Neither Stowe nor Douglass uses the terms “public reason,” “reflective equilibrium” or “veil of ignorance.” (The last is another Rawlsian notion of which Douglass’s description of the anti-abolitionist’s imaginative failures seems to be an early instance: namely that if we were ignorant of our own social position, we would prefer that society be governed by principles of justice and impartiality). But it is precisely those dynamics of liberal life—dynamics that make us traverse the imaginative terrain that resides between our thoughts and our feelings and between our worldviews and those of others—that they both have in mind, particularly since their works invoke liberal thinkers such as Alexis de Tocqueville and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Yet their literary explorations go much further in capturing the difficulty of cultivating these habits of mind and feeling, especially when faced with others who see the world differently.
We find a similar emphasis in the adventure novels of James Fenimore Cooper. Cooper is perhaps best known today as the author of The Last of the Mohicans (1826), which was made into a 1992 film starring Daniel Day-Lewis. The novel was part of a longer series that included a subsequent installment, The Pathfinder (1840), which literary critic Robert Spiller once called “a fundamental document in American democratic theory.” It begins with an immediate appeal to the Romantic imagination and its responsiveness to the natural world. “The sublimity connected with vastness,” the narrator opens, “is familiar to every eye. The most abstruse, the most far-reaching, perhaps the most chastened of the poet’s thoughts, crowd on the imagination as he gazes into the depths of the illimitable void.” The “illimitable” wonders of vast natural spaces, that is, inspire “far-reaching” ideas, which it is the poet’s task to ponder and sort through.
Yet, just as in Stowe’s novels and Douglass’s autobiographical writings, the characters in The Pathfinder and the series’ next installment, The Deerslayer (1841), constantly argue with one another about these ideas, including liberty and equality as well as the nature of race and the practices of toleration. Cooper thus purposely begins with, and consistently returns to, the nature of “the poet’s thoughts” to emphasize the relationship between a literary sensibility that can sort through and creatively synthesize the “far-reaching” ideas that “crowd on the imagination” in the natural world and the creative demands we are faced with when navigating the conflicting ideas we will inevitably encounter among those with whom we share a political world.
Cooper, Stowe, and Douglass are just a few examples of how our American literary tradition developed as an imaginative exploration of the habits of mind and feeling that are not only requisite for sorting through our own deeply held convictions (reflective equilibrium, to use Rawls’s terminology) but also for understanding and reasoning with other individuals who often think and feel differently (public reason, the veil of ignorance). We might also add to their number other literary figures such as Charles Brockden Brown, Robert Montgomery Bird, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, W.E.B. Du Bois, and, of course, Emerson and Thoreau (among many others).
“Democracy requires us all to pick up our game,” writes Lefebvre in Liberalism as a Way of Life. It’s a sentiment that echoes another famous American literary figure: Walt Whitman. Writing in the aftermath of the Civil War, he called for “imaginative works of the very first class” because he believed that, “[a]bove all previous lands, a great original literature is surely to become the justification and reliance, (in some respects the sole reliance,) of American democracy.” For Whitman, reading was to be “an exercise, a gymnast’s struggle” helping us train for the imaginative demands of democratic life itself. This may sound like an overly idealistic sense of what engaging with literature can accomplish, but we can certainly recognize how the disappearance of American literature’s liberal origins from both our scholarly and our public discussions has deprived us of vital resources for addressing our present challenges.
If we have learned anything from the past decade of political life, it’s that democracy requires its citizens to exhibit a host of largely unspoken habits, capacities, and behaviors when interacting with one another, especially those with whom we disagree. A renewed attention to the American literary tradition may therefore be one of the most important imaginative and spiritual exercises for restoring our liberal way of life.
This essay was adapted from Scott M. Reznick’s recent book, Political Liberalism and the Rise of American Romanticism.