DAVID CIEPLEY. Liberalism in the Shadow of Totalitarianism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 2006. Pp. x, 379. $49.95

Abstract

This is a bold and ambitious book. David Ciepley argues that U.S. encounters with communist and fascist dictatorships during the 1930s and 1940s revolutionized American governance, law, and intellectual life, transforming the very meaning of liberalism and of America itself. The rise to political salience of an antitotalitarian ideology that viewed all statism as a threat to individual freedom harkened a shift from a nineteenth and early twentieth-century liberal variant (dubbed “virtue progressivism”), which had reached its apogee in such New Deal initiatives as the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Agricultural Adjustment Act, to a revived strain of eighteenth-century “autonomous” liberalism that, in the postwar period, manifested as the embodiment of freedom a “neutralist” state that eschewed “substantive values” and conceived government as a disinterested arbiter among competing interest groups. This “libertarian” turn in politics toward “moral minimalism” and “hyperpluralism” paralleled a rightward shift in economic thought, social science theory, and especially jurisprudence, as the U.S. Supreme Court effectively “[recast] civil liberty and due process as protections against the imposition of values by government” (p. 25). Ironically, however, while the totalitarian encounter pushed American liberalism toward antistatism, “this has not meant the elimination of authority from American life” but rather the empowerment of those institutions—namely “courts and corporations”—that “do the best job of concealing its exercise” (p. 31). Ciepley's prescription for democracy's ebb (which admittedly has few prospects, given ongoing “culture wars” that reference antitotalitarian ideologies on the Right and Left) is to reignite a “sociology of virtue” to animate a “new progressive era” in American politics. Far-sighted twenty-first-century leaders might make good on the promise of a “developmental state” that had nearly reached fruition during the 1930s but was derailed by the rise of fascism and communism and an attendant, paralyzing fear of state power gone amok.