The Growth of the Liberal Soul.

• Author: CHOI, DANIEL
• Position: Review

The Growth of the Liberal Soul By David Walsh Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997. Pp. 386. $39.95 cloth.

"There is first of all the difficulty of being heard at all," David Walsh writes in the introduction to his new book on the liberal political tradition, The Growth of the Liberal Soul. Indeed, Walsh does not enjoy much name recognition in academic political theory, and copies of his book are hard to find. He does not improve his predicament by warning that his distinctive approach to liberal political thought has few if any practitioners today and saying that the "only demonstration" of his thesis consists in patiently "undertaking the journey" traced by the whole book. But as one who was lucky enough to come across Walsh's book and accompany him on the journey, I wish to testify that his contribution to liberal thought should be widely read and taken seriously.

According to Walsh, liberal politics is in deep crisis. Liberalism has more or less managed to hold centrifugal forces--namely, those of religion, class, and race--within itself since John Locke's time. But Walsh says that the present crisis is new: "The corrective centripetal forces have all but disappeared" (p. 15). The latitudinarian Judeo-Christian consensus that long served as the moral core of liberal society is now pushed to the margins in service of the dogma of diversity. The prospect of equal opportunity and endless economic growth, which has quelled class divisions for three centuries, now entails great sacrifices of certainty and security. Where once Martin Luther King, Jr., stirred Americans "to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands," God is no longer so publicly available to help bring the races together. Hence the rancor and hollowness of public life have increased.

In the academy, liberal thinkers have lately been unable "to find an intellectually compelling justification ... sufficient to stop the endemic unraveling tendencies of liberalism" (p. 23). There is no theoretical consensus on the meaning and justification of the liberal order, especially one commensurate to liberalism's former self-assurance in its struggles against feudal aristocracy, absolutism, and totalitarianism. The "deontological," "nonfoundationalist," and "post-metaphysical" tack many liberals in the academy have taken recently, eschewing any basis for liberalism in human nature...