Abstract

In a recent article in the journal International Security, I offered an explanation for a puzzling aspect of democratic America's post-Cold War foreign policy: its increasingly expansive and interventionist cast.1 Building upon Louis Hartz's famous argument about how America's tradition could paradoxically produce domestic illiberalism, I sought to explain recent manifestations of America's international illiberalism, such as the drive for hegemony and the willingness to intervene in various countries to remake the world in its own liberal political (democracy) and economic (free markets) image, as also rooted in American liberalism.2 The idea that liberalism, imperialism, and other forms of international illiberalism are not only compatible, but perhaps inextricably linked, has gained currency among many scholars. As Uday Singh Mehta puts in his study of the intellectual underpinnings of the British Empire: it is liberal thinkers . . . who, notwithstandingindeed, on account oftheir reforming schemes, endorse the empire as a legitimate form of political and commercial governance; who justify and accept its undemocratic and nonrepresentative structure; who invoke as politically relevant categories such as history, ethnicity, civilizational hierarchies, and occasional race and blood ties; and who fashion arguments for the empires' at least temporary necessity and foreseeable prolongation.3 Mehta's book is part of a burgeoning literature exploring the many compatibilities between liberal thinkers such as Jeremy Bentham, James Mill, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Alexis de

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