Liberal Victory Research Articles

Social Tradition: Theoretical Problems and Practical Implementation

The article examines the historical, logico-conceptual and politico-pragmatic content of an ideological trend, such as “social traditionalism”. The idea of combining socialism with the core tradition of Orthodoxy can be traced back in our history to the last quarter of the nineteenth century. In Konstantin Leontiev’s statements, in particular. Later on, it appeared among the members of the “Christian Brotherhood of Struggle”: Valentin Sventsitsky, Vladimir Ern, and the Priest Pavel Florensky. Nikolai Berdyaev upgraded this idea to its logical fi nish, by describing the phenomenon of “Russian communism” as the metamorphosis of Russian religiosity: they created the Third Rome, but got the Third International instead. Alexander Shchipkov’s thesis, according to which the traditional ideological paradigm of modernity (“liberalism — conservatism — socialism”) is undergoing the reformatting stage and is being replaced by the “nationalism — socialism — traditionalism” paradigm, implies that “liberalism” is being driven out by “nationalism” as its alternative. However, in the fi eld of international relations, “nationalism” can be interpreted as a projection of liberal individualism justifying the right of a national state to freedom, that is, sovereignty. Against the background of evaluating the outcome of the Cold War, the USSR breakup can be understood as the victory of liberalism over socialism. Today, China embodies the idea of socialism, while the liberal West faces inner culture wars: liberalism is being attacked by supporters of multiculturalism and the “cancel culture”. In the course of evaluating the prospects of “social traditionalism” as a Russian state ideology, one should take into account that both the United Russia party and President Vladimir Putin defi ne their ideological position as “conservatism”. At the same time, the latest edition defi nes presidential conservatism as a political management technology. In this regard, the defi nition of traditionalism as a “set of methods” and “procedures for ethicization” proposed by Alexander Shchipkov can also be considered technological rather than ideological. But in this case, a contradiction emerges: social traditionalism claims to replace conservatism precisely as an ideology, striving to synthesize socialism and Christianity. Socialism becomes the result of an arbitrary choice procedure, while Christianity remains a tradition, but not in the sense of the basic defi nition of traditionalism.

On Fukuyama’s New Book ‘Liberalism and its Discontents’: What About The End of History?

Sovyetler Birliği’nin yıkılmasıyla birlikte gündeme gelen Francis Fukuyama ve Samuel P. Huntington’ın çalışmaları bir kırılma yaşayan dünya tarihinin bundan sonra nasıl seyredeceği konusunda yaklaşımlar sunuyordu. Bir taraftan Fukuyama Sovyetler Birliği’in çöküşüyle birlikte Amerikan Liberalizminin zaferini ilan ediyor, öbür taraftan Huntington ise yeni dönemde çatışmaların kültürel temelli devam edeceğini söylüyordu. Her ne kadar iki çalışma birbirine zıt gibi görünse de zaman içerisinde her ikisinin de Amerikan siyasetine zemin hazırladığı görülmüştür. Fukuyama yeni eseri ‘Liberalizm ve Hoşnutsuzlukları’nda ise ilk eserinde olduğu kadar emin konuşmuyor, Liberalizmin zaferi yerine onu kurtuluş için sarılmamız gereken bir çare olarak sunuyor ve onun karşısında aşırı sağı tehdit olarak tanıtıyor. Fukuyama ilk eserinde her ne kadar Liberalizmi mutlak muzaffer olarak tanıttıysa da mikro çatışmaların süreceğini de söyleyerek çelişkili ifadelerde bulunmuştur. Çatışmaların devam ettiği günümüzde ise bu çatışmalara karşı yeni kitabını bir reçete olarak sunmaktadır. Ancak mevcut sosyolojik şartlarda reçetesinin uygulanması mümkün görünmemektedir.

Doubled brothers: misfitted male bodies and minoritized Basque culture in Handia (2017)

ABSTRACT This article examines the critically acclaimed Basque-language period drama Handia (The Giant, 2017), directed by Aitor Arregi and Jon Garaño. Handia, which won 10 Goyas, is the most viewed Basque film in history. Based on the true story of Miguel Joaquín Eleizegui Arteaga (1818–1861), a man with acromegaly who traveled throughout Spain and Europe as a freak show attraction, Handia centers on the complicated relationship between brothers Joaquín (the titular “giant”) and Martín, who are raised in a farmhouse near the tiny Gipuzkoan village of Altzo. Handia documents the brothers’ struggle to come to terms with the liberal victory in the First Carlist War and the overturning of the Ancien Régime. Martín seeks to escape the agrarian lifestyle of his upbringing, while Joaquín longs to remain on the homestead. I interpret the brothers as doubles who narratively and visually separate and merge throughout the film. As Martín strives to blend into urban settings by adopting the trappings of the European bourgeois man, the reluctant Joaquín’s body grows increasingly large, peculiar and conspicuous. Through the lenses of disability and gender theory, I contend that Joaquín’s nonstandard body represents an othered, agrarian Basque culture facing extinction within a modernizing Europe, and that the resolution of the conflict between Martín and Joaquín models a minority culture’s survival by embracing change without erasing its essential difference. To do this, I will illustrate how the portrayal of fitting and misfitting bodies in Handia articulates an alternative way of being characterized by interdependency, vulnerability, non-heteronormativity and stubborn resistance to homogenizing external forces. I conclude that Handia exemplifies how the Basques may continually redefine themselves – through strategic misfitting – in a way that merges the dichotomies of change and tradition, universality and particularity and wanderlust and rootedness.

Review: Knowledge, Ideology, and Civilization: An Attempt at Understanding History (Arabic Edition), by Ali Jarbawi

Review: <i>Knowledge, Ideology, and Civilization: An Attempt at Understanding History (Arabic Edition)</i>, by Ali Jarbawi

School and Human Formation: an ever-postponed proposal

The public school was born as an institution responsible for the common formation of citizens, for inserting them in the same culture, thus forming a nation. However, the victory of liberalism ended up, very early, transforming this task into an instructional practice, relegating the body, the arts, the human sensitivity to an accessory place in the school path. However, nowadays, the institution's monopoly over public education is threatened by the revolution in information and communication technologies, responsible for an overwhelming cultural transformation. With all these challenges, how could we think about school today? Would it be possible, given the individualism and immediacy of our current society, to think of its task as the practice of human formation? To answer those questions, we aim to analyze the historical moment that made possible the birth os cognitivism, its impacts in the idea of public school and how it, along with the liberal project, ignored the body in the process of human formation, reducing it to the simple task of instruction. Morover, the work aims to make a critical exam of the employment of digital medias in education, since it represents not only new possibilities for the school to revive the human formation ideal, but also new challenges to the public school project.

School and Human Formation: an ever-postponed proposal

The public school was born as an institution responsible for the common formation of citizens, for inserting them in the same culture, thus forming a nation. However, the victory of liberalism ended up, very early, transforming this task into an instructional practice, relegating the body, the arts, the human sensitivity to an accessory place in the school path. However, nowadays, the institution's monopoly over public education is threatened by the revolution in information and communication technologies, responsible for an overwhelming cultural transformation. With all these challenges, how could we think about school today? Would it be possible, given the individualism and immediacy of our current society, to think of its task as the practice of human formation? To answer those questions, we aim to analyze the historical moment that made possible the birth os cognitivism, its impacts in the idea of public school and how it, along with the liberal project, ignored the body in the process of human formation, reducing it to the simple task of instruction. Morover, the work aims to make a critical exam of the employment of digital medias in education, since it represents not only new possibilities for the school to revive the human formation ideal, but also new challenges to the public school project.

A European Enlightenment in the Promised Land? The Jewish Kulturkampf at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

ABSTRACT This article discusses the European Kulturkampf in the nineteenth century from the points of view of the Russian Hebrew writer Judah Leib Gordon and the founding father of the Zionist movement Theodor Herzl. Gordon’s literary outlook emphasizes the tension between the traditional Jewish religious leadership and the maskilim as an instance of the sweeping all-European Kulturkampf phenomenon, in which the problem of the rabbis was the last issue that had not yet been solved. He believed that the return of the Jews to the Land of Israel, without the elimination of the rabbis’ authority, carried serious dangers. In his dystopian feuilleton published in 1885 depicting the future Jewish state, he argued that the victory of liberalism was a historical necessity in order to avoid a radical orthodox and nationalistic hegemony. Like Gordon before him, Herzl feared that losing the basic humanistic principles of the Enlightenment the Jews had acquired in Europe would be one of the outcomes of their settling in the Land of Israel. In his 1902 utopian novel Altneuland he declared: “Stand by the principles that have made us great: Liberalism, Tolerance, Love of Mankind. Only then will Zion be truly Zion.” Gordon and Herzl both expressed their concerns in their fictional works, probably wishing that these would serve only as warning signs.

Populism, Sovereigntism, and the Unlikely Re-Emergence of the Territorial Nation-State

In the last three decades, the rise of a populist challenge to the liberal political mainstream exposed how shallow the supposed victory of global liberalism was, even in its heartlands in Europe and North America. Exclusive nationalism and nativism, identity politics, critiques of globalisation and internationalism, and calls for democratic re-empowerment of the demos have converged politically on a new locus of inflated territorial, indeed ‘border’ sovereignty, aligning the call of ‘taking back control’ on behalf of a radically re-defined community (‘we’) with a defensive re-territorialisation of power along existing fault lines of nation-statism. In this paper, I argue that the very same call has become the new common political denominator for all populist platforms and parties across Europe. I argue that populists across the conventional left–right divide have deployed a rigidly territorialised concept of popular sovereignty in order to bestow intellectual coherence and communicative power to the otherwise disparate strands of their anti-utopian critiques of globalisation. In spite of significant ideological differences between so-called right- and left-wing populism, in the short-term the two populist projects have sought to stage their performances of sovereigntism on, behind or inside the borders of the existing nation-states.

Challenging the Terms of Liberalism: On The Politics of Virtue

Challenging the Terms of Liberalism:On The Politics of Virtue D. C. Schindler With their recent book The Politics of Virtue,1 John Milbank and Adrian Pabst take a decisive step in the ongoing critique of liberalism. Not only do they articulate in a compelling way why the current crises of liberal institutions (which only those blinded by ideology can still deny) were all but inevitable given the founding principles of liberalism, but they also show, in relentlessly concrete terms, what a “post-liberal” alternative might look like. This latter contribution is something quite new, and quite helpful. The fundamental significance of this contribution ought not to be overlooked, and reflecting on it gets us immediately to the heart of the matter. One of the primary reasons for the triumph of liberalism in the West—and indeed, at this point, arguably in the world simply—is that it changed the very terms of the debate, so to speak, and did so in such a way as to make its triumph inevitable. To put the matter somewhat oversimply, it deposed truth as the standard by which reality is measured and, in a certain sense, replaced it with nothing at all, insofar as having a standard of any genuinely transcendent sort inevitably brings one back inside a horizon set by truth (as Plato showed over and over again). Radically new approaches to theology, metaphysics, anthropology, and physics are entailed by this shift that may, on the surface, appear to be little more than a new [End Page 1353] approach to politics and economics. This shift is a disruption of the previous tradition that is more radically new, at least in a certain respect, than even God’s self-revelation in Christ, since the latter is the revelation of the God who created all things, including the nature presupposed and perfected by the gift of grace.2 Ultimately, liberalism is in this sense a breaking of the analogy of being, and if there is a metaphysical equivalent of the sin against the Holy Spirit, the destruction of the analogy of being would be it, insofar as it finally renders metaphysics itself impossible. Because the shifting of terms entails a new theology and metaphysics, a critique of liberalism must address it at this level. But because liberalism is most directly a political philosophy, the critique has to be carried through to the level of prudential judgments concerning concrete matters. There are few who can do both, and the present authors are among those few. According to the authors, liberalism is a kind of absolutizing of the individual: “Liberalism … exhibits in all its variants an individualist consistency” (45). And, as we see clearly in Hobbes, Spinoza, Harrington, and Locke, it is committed to a reductive rationalism in politics that coincides with its ontological individualism: “A reigning individualism is inseparable from this rationalism and from opposition to any Catholic conception of the role of the Church” (46). This ontological individualism relentlessly undermines any gathering up of genuine unities, genuinely cohesive wholes, whether this be understood at the level of social or political order, culture, economics, philosophy, or others. It is just this fragmentation that ensures the victory of liberalism: it no longer needs to give reasons for its superiority, for reason itself has been emptied of substance. The only thing left is effective force in its various manifestations, above all technology, majority opinion, the machinery of state, and the movement of history, which gets dubbed “inevitable.” Liberalism wins because it has always neutralized in advance any competitor. It is in relation to this point that the authors’ achievement stands out so brilliantly. By introducing a concrete alternative to liberalism, they not only provide a competitor, or at least outline in plausible terms what a competitor might look like, but even more fundamentally, in doing so, they reinstate, at least in principle, the classical terms of the debate, terms that are necessary for there even to be any [End Page 1354] kind of debate in the first place. In impressive detail, Milbank and Pabst show that the liberal institutions that we have come to take for granted—capitalism, democracy, and so forth—were far from eternally...

Global Power and the Geopolitical Dynamics of Capitalism

The dynamics of the economic and political transformations of the second half of the twentieth century, especially since the 1970s, deepened interdependence among countries, raised the productive restructuring movement, and intensified both international trade and finance. This new dynamics attracted the attention of many scholars of International Political Economy (IPE) and started a new academic debate. Generally, those authors characterized the international conjuncture either by the existence of an American hegemony or by the multipolar character of the present order. Nevertheless, almost none of them questioned the notions behind the so-called victory of liberalism and the apparent decreasing role of the national states. In this sense, this paper reviews those main IPE theories concerned about the 1970s' crisis and presents the theory of Global Power, drafted by José Luis Fiori. Thus, it aims at demonstrating the potential of this theory to renew the current IPE discussions from a critical perspective.

The Canadian general election of 2015: The Liberal victory marks a swing back to the center in Canadian politics

Introduction Canadians went to the polls on October 19th 2015 and placed the Liberal Party leader, Justin Trudeau, son of former Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau, at the head of their next government, thereby putting an end to nine years of Conservative Party rule. The left of center New Democratic Party, which had won the second most seats in 2011, had consistently placed first in the early polls that were all predicting a tight three-way race. As the Liberals gained momentum, the NDP st...

The Enlightenment Surfaces in Nineteenth-Century Mexico: Scientific Thinking Attempts to Deliver Order and Progress

On 16 September 1867, a Mexican man of science rose to make a far-reaching debut on his national stage by giving an independence day address in Guanajuato. He spoke in the context of a nation still reeling from a decade of warfare preceding independence in 1821, followed by decades of chaotic government, American invasion resulting in territorial dismemberment (1846^48), followed by civil war (1858-60), and, finally, the defeated French military intervention (1862-67). The orator, Gabino Barreda, a medical doctor and student of philosophy, affirmed that, despite all its travail, Mexico had been following a necessarily correct historical path, dictated by the laws governing the development of societies.Barreda based his historical analysis on the teachings of Auguste Comte. His speech marked the public entry of Comtean positivism into Mexican national life, where its emphasis on the use of science and reason was welcomed by many, along with the like-minded thinking of John Stuart Mill, Alexander Bain, Herbert Spencer and others. Shortly after his independence day speech, entitled a Civic Oration, Barreda appeared as a prominent figure in the Juarez entourage in the Restored Republic of 1867. President Benito Juarez, elected in 1861 following a Liberal victory in a civil war with Conservatives, had returned to power after defeating the Imperial government installed by the French after their armed intervention beginning in 1862. Barreda needed only seven weeks from his appointment as director to open the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria (ENP) in Mexico City for the purpose of offering Comte's positivist curriculum. The ENP formed a cadre of leaders, called cientificos, who with like-minded allies, would try to apply scientific thinking to the problematics of governance and society.This paper argues that the thinking of the cientificos was influenced, not only by Comtean and related positivistic thinking, but also by a longstanding eclectic effort by Mexican thinkers, shadowing European thinking, to extend the influence of science and reason in national life, a process dating from the post-independence period and even further back, into colonial times. Their eclecticism sometimes expressed itself in an interest in Protestantism, seen as an essential factor in the building of a modem state and economy. The emphasis of Comtean positivism and other forms of positivism on the use of science and reason to build nations and order societies also influenced much of the rest of Latin America. In Mexico, the key to the rise of positivism was Juarez, a yet insufficiently recognized advocate of applying science and reason to national life as a committed educator, in addition to his documented roles as politician and statesman. Juarez had an overlooked off-stage inner circle of positivists around him. Many Liberals and Catholics, while respecting the need for updated use of science and reason, objected to positivism's philosophical exclusivity and consequent rejection of Christianity and other values. Their opposition gave rise to a sophisticated debate, current with European thinking, over the philosophical implications of the use of science and reason.Some Conservatives, as well as some centralist Liberals like Juarez, sought to apply science and related knowledge to chart the course of Mexican society. Aspects of positivism's centralism and scientific thinking appealed to pragmatic, scienceoriented centralist Liberals, in a process in which these pragmatic Liberals eventually replaced traditional, federalist Liberalism in Mexican governance, beginning with the Restored Republic in 1867 and succeeding totally in thePorfiriato, in effect, the 35-year reign (1876-1911), of President Porfirio Diaz.1 What Barreda and some of his associates apparendy had in mind was the establishment of a complete Comtean society, including Comte's secular Religion of Humanity, which, historians have suggested, had most institutional impact in Brazil. …

October Term 1963: “The Second American Constitutional Convention”

October Term 1963: “The Second American Constitutional Convention” L.A. POWE, JR. Think of the Warren Court: Brown' and the outlawing of segregation, Miranda2 and the increased protections of those accused of crime, New York Times v. Sullivan,3 the near abolition of obscenity law, the end of legalized McCarthyism, banning prayer in schools, reapportionment ending the rural domination oflegislatures, the belated assault on capital punishment. With the exception of religion (which was seldom at issue during the era), the 1963 October Term witnessed major cases in each of these areas. There has never been another Term of the Court that pushed constitutional doctrine so far in so many areas, and there have never been two back-to-back volumes of the United States Reports that hold as many significant cases as 377 and 378 U.S. At one point near the end of the 1963 Term, The New York Times Supreme Court reporter Anthony Lewis passed Solicitor General Archibald Cox a note asking “How does it feel to be at the second American Constitutional Convention?”4 Lewis’s ques­ tion “captured the logical congruence of a Court filled with accomplished, confident, powerful men and Cooper v. Aaron's5 immodest conclusion that the Court’s pro­ nouncements were synonymous with the Constitution.”6 Fifty years ago, the Warren Court reached its apogee, and with the passage of a halfcentury it seems appropriate to revisit that once-in-a-lifetime Term. “The level of agreement of the justices was incredibly high for the 1963 Term,”7 but not in the cases that follow. All but two of these reflect liberal victories; the more conservative Justices—Tom Clark, John M. Harlan, Potter Stewart, Byron White—pre­ vailed only when they werejoined by William J. Brennan, who prevailed in every single case.8 After Brennan, the smallest number of dissents came from Chief Justice Warren, William O. Douglas, and Arthur J. Goldberg, who each dissented twice. In previous Terms, Hugo L. Black would have had a voting record similar to Douglas, but in the 1963 Term he was commencing his movement away from across-the-board liberalism; he dissented four times. White, who President 1963 TERM 195 The 1963 Term was a watershed year for the Supreme Court, which issued major rulings in nearly all areas of the law. Most decisions were liberal victories; the more conservative justices—Tom Clark, John M. Harlan, Potter Stewart, and Byron White—were in the majority only when joined by William J. Brennan, who prevailed in every single case. John F. Kennedy thought would be “the ideal New Frontier judge,”9 demonstrated his unease with judicial liberalism with seven dissents, tying him with Stewart. Harlan and Clark were the two constant dissenters, Harlan with eleven, Clark one less. Civil Rights Because of the brutality—high-pressure fire hoses, electronic cattle prods, K-9s—with which Birmingham police attacked AfricanAmerican protestors, especially children, in the spring of 1963, a majority of the country had joined with the Court in concluding that the number one issue facing the nation was civil rights—understood as the dismantling of segregation in the South. With a single exception, the civil rights cases were all too familiar. NAACP v. Alabama'0 was back for the fourth time—the third since the Court ruled the NAACP had a First Amendment right ofassociation that protected from forced disclosure the names of members of the organization. Griffin v. Prince Edward Coun­ ty' 1 had been one ofthe four companion cases to Brown and was back representing the last gasp of“Massive Resistance.” Prince Edward County had responded to the Court’s deci­ sions by closing its public schools. Finally, there were four sit-in cases like the ones the Court had been seeing from the previous two Terms. Previously, as the cases played out in the murky doctrinal world of state action, the Court had studiously escaped deciding the core constitutional issue of protests against segregation versus the rights of private property owners to exclude the protestors. 196 JOURNAL OF SUPREME COURT HISTORY Autherine Lucy became the first African-American student to be admitted to the University of Alabama in 1955. She is pictured here accompanied...

Gender and Poetry Writing in the Light of Mexico's Liberal Victory, 1867-ca. 1890

This article studies the relationship between gender and poetry writing as it was understood by Mexican poets and critics of the late nineteenth-century. From 1867 on they were witness to a renaissance in Mexican literary and intellectual life, which included a significant increase in writing and publishing by women. In this period, influential men of letters encouraged their peers to produce an explicitly masculine verse, one connected to formal politics and Mexican patriotism. However, both male and female poets also sought inspiration from a different Muse: that of female domesticity, and the seclusion, sentimentality and emotion they associated with it. This ideal of domesticity created constraints for Mexican women who wished to write, constraints which they both accepted and challenged in verse and in prose.

Know Thine Enemy

Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (New York: W.W. Norton, 2009), 356 pages, $26.95, hardcover, $16.95, paperback. Kim Phillips-Fein has provided us with a very fine account of how we got where we are—in a stranglehold of big business conservatism that has by no means been broken by the liberal electoral victory of 2008. She has not only absorbed a considerable amount of secondary literature, but has also combed through the archives, combining her impressive research and insights with a well-paced narrative populated with a variety of interesting personalities—all quite well-to-do, all white, almost all male, and yet a very diverse and interesting lot. This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website , where most recent articles are published in full. Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Between Legitimacy and Violence. A History of Colombia, 1875-2002 (review)

Between Legitimacy and Violence. A History of Colombia, 1875-2002. By Marcos Palacios. Translated by Richard StoUer. (Durham and London: Duke University Press. 2006. Pp. xvi, 300. $79.95 clothbound; $22.95 paperback.) This is a very weU written and informative book. The author addresses the long-term faUure of the Colombian national state to modernize, to eliminate persistent internal violence, and to develop institutions and forms of representation that accurately reflect social change and channel it in salutary directions. This is not for lack of trying: Palacios reviews successive efforts, major and manor, running from mid-nineteenth-century Radical Liberals to the Rafael Nunez' Regeneration, the Conservative Republic, the Liberal Revolucion en Marcha, the HispanophUa of Laureano Gomez, the National Front and the 1990 Constituent Assembly. AU are punctuated by continuing violence, and weakened by the enduring, if graduaUy attenuated, power of regionalism. A primary theme throughout the book is the impact of the country's fragmented geography, the long-term underdevelopment of its agrarian economy, and the resultant severity and extension of poverty. The discussion of geogra- phy is exceUent, but given its importance, one is surprised to find no maps of any kind in the book. A related theme is the persistent weakness of the national state and the inadequacy of pubUc institutions of aU kinds, including systems of banking and taxation. The author also examines the long-term presence of the Liberal and Conservative parties, through which competitive and relatively comparable elite groups have sustained their rule by managing patrimonial loyalties and loosely linked regional machines. The counterpart of this eUte pattern has been the weakness of trade unions, peasant associations, and much of what passes elsewhere for society. The continuing power and institutional presence of the Catholic Church is a notable element in this equation. FinaUy, of course, this is a national history punctuated by repeated moments (often lengthy moments) of intense violence. Since 1875, the count includes four civU wars (1876-77, 1885-86, 1895, and 1899-1902), one undeclared civU war (the Violencia of the 1940's and 1950's), along with persistent pockets of violence associated with struggles over land, with poUtics and vendettas, and with trade in a variety of valuable goods (most notably emeralds and drugs). Other trends that have helped make Colombia the way it is today include accelerated development of mass transport (from river fleets to raUroads, roads, and airplanes), the growth of Uteracy and the spread of mass communications, and the notable pattern of multi-polar urban development with four major cities ( Bogota, Cali, MedeUin, and BarranquUla), each with a distinct identity. The first three chapters detaU the decline of radical Uberal rule, the impact of late nineteenth-century civU wars, the rise of Nunez and the Regeneration, and main lines of political history through to the great depression and the Liberal victory of 1930. …

A House Divided: Race, Class, and the Dilemma of American Liberalism

Carol A. Horton. Race and the Making of American Liberalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. ix + 300 pp. Notes and index. $39.95. The last forty years have been troubled times for American liberalism. Today, liberalism is so much on the defensive that most progressive candidates for office shy away from using the term "liberal" to describe themselves, assuming that for many Americans, "liberal" has become a dirty word. In spite of the conservative-dominated Republican Party's growing problems, liberals have found it difficult to mount a successful campaign to reestablish the dominance they once enjoyed in American politics and are now seriously divided over the best means of attempting to challenge conservatives' hold on power. Some argue that the Democratic Party must strengthen its appeal to the center by disassociating itself from the kinds of governmental activism and cultural experimentation that became associated with liberalism in the 1960s. Others contend that if liberals are ever to offer a compelling and winning alternative to Republican conservatism, they will have to return to their progressive roots and develop a comprehensive reform agenda that addresses the fundamental socio-economic problems that are creating an increasing divide between privileged and ordinary Americans. Carol A. Horton attempts to place the current plight of American liberalism in historical context by focusing on the crucial role of racial concerns in shaping liberalism's development since the Civil War. At the heart of her argument is the claim that liberalism has long been plagued by "the difficulty of creating and sustaining political movements that possess both the desire and the capacity to tackle the intertwined problems of racial and class inequality" (p. 225). This difficulty has had a long history, but it was powerfully brought to the fore by the civil rights movement of the 1960s, which not only created a white backlash that helped set the stage for a conservative resurgence, but which also created rifts among American liberals that have not yet been fully healed. Although Horton focuses on the crisis of what she calls "left-of-center liberalism," she argues that even in today's era of so-called "conservative" [End Page 372] dominance, the liberal tradition, as described fifty years ago by consensus historian Louis Hartz, continues to provide the basic ideological framework in which most Americans think about politics and society.1 Thus, Americans have consistently prioritized "the value of individual rights and liberties, limited and representative government, private property and free markets, constitutionalism and the rule of law" (p. 5). She notes, however, that liberalism over the last 150 years has taken on many forms, and that in the development of competing versions of liberalism, contrasting approaches to dealing with the nation's race problem have been central. Part of the appeal of today's "conservatives" is that, in fact, they use the language of liberalism to attack such policies as affirmative action. Neo-conservatives thus accept the legitimacy of the 1960s civil rights laws that ended de jure segregation and protected the right of African Americans to vote, but oppose affirmative action as a form of "reverse discrimination" that is inconsistent with their conception of an equal-opportunity, "color-blind" society. Horton's study of the development of American liberalism examines two separate periods in American history. She devotes four chapters to the years from 1865 to 1896 that witnessed the First Reconstruction and the rise and fall of "producer republicanism" as represented by the Knights of Labor and the Populist movement, and another four chapters to the years from 1945 to 1980 that saw the liberal victories of the 1960s, the subsequent collapse of the New Deal order, and the ultimate triumph of Reagan's "right-of-center liberalism" (p. 223). Horton's discussion of what she calls "anti-caste liberalism" in the period immediately after the Civil War does not depart significantly from what are now standard treatments of Reconstruction...

Anatomy of a liberal victory: making sense of the vote in the 2000 Canadian election

Acknowledgements Introduction * The Parties and their Messages * The Media: Getting Out the Messages * Why Was Turnout So Low? * The Vote: Stability and Change * A Multi-Stage Model of Vote Choice * The Social Bases of Party Support * Values and Beliefs * Partisan Loyalties * The Economy * The Issues * Liberal Performance * The Leaders * Strategic Voting Conclusion Appendix A: Multinomial Estimations of Vote Choice Outside Quebec Appendix B: Multinomial Estimations of Vote Choice in Quebec Appendix C: The Estimated Impact of Variables on the Propensity to Vote for the Parties Outside Quebec Appendix D: The Estimated Impact of Variables on the Propensity to Vote for the Parties in Quebec Appendix E: Description of Variables References

The Impact of Issues and the Economy in the 1997 Canadian Federal Election

This article examines the impact of issues and the economy in the 1997 Canadian election among voters outside Quebec. The authors show that both factors affected individual vote choice and provide estimates of how much difference the issues and the economy made in the election. It appears that the issues were decisive for 9 per cent of the voters and the economy for 4 per cent. Issues mattered more than the economy for individual vote choice. The net impact of both the issues and the economy on vote support for the different parties was practically nil. The findings indicate that the Liberal victory cannot be imputed to the economy or the issues.

Reflections on Socialism

Today no one needs proof that socialism, both as an intellectual conception and as a social movement, is undergoing a deep crisis. Such an observation has become commonplace. As for the future, given the wholesale collapse of the communist system, the claim of American political scientist Francis Fukuyama seemed quite plausible: namely, that socialism had no future, and that the period of the final and definitive victory of liberalism had arrived; it had defeated all other currents of social thought [1]. It soon became clear, however, that things were not so simple. In the West the social-democratic parties, which had begun to see their influence decline, have again begun to score points; and in the East, after a brief euphoria of postcommunist liberalism, interest in socialism is also being renewed.