History, method and ethos: a response to the symposium on Liberalism in Dark Times

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 See Seymour B. Sarason, The Creation of Settings and the Future Societies (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1972). This citation reflects a patrimony from one of my first, dearest teachers; see Cary Cherniss, ‘Seymour Sarason and the Creation of Settings’, Journal of Community Psychology 40, no. 2 (2012): 209–14.2 Liberalism in Dark Times, 205 (italics added).3 Cf. Michael Walzer, The Struggle for a Decent Politics: On ‘Liberal’ as an Adjective (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023).4 See Greg Berman and Aubrey Fox, Gradual: The Case for Incremental Reform in a Radical Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023).5 Cf. Aurelian Craiutu, Why Not Moderation? Letters to Young Radicals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023).6 Jefferson’s statement that ‘rather than it [the French Revolution] should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated. Were there but an Adam and an Eve left in every country, and left free, it would be better than as it now is’ seems distant from tempered liberalism. Jefferson to William Short, 3 January 1793, accessed at https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-25-02-0016.7 For the articulation of a ‘democratic ethos’ drawing on the Lincoln and Douglass approach to abolitionism see Rogers M. Smith, This is Not Who We Are! Populism and Peoplehood (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020).8 See Liberalism in Dark Times, 76, 80, 89–97, 101, 146, 152, 199, 204, 213, 219. Steinmetz’s example of the chain of devastation initiated by one-click purchases recalls Niebuhr’s reminder to his readers that their cars were produced by the misery of Ford’s factories; and Camus’s picture of the ‘civilized’ man who calmly reads reports of his country’s judicial killing of a terrified human being. Niebuhr, Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic (New York: Meridian, 1964), 99–100; Camus, ‘Reflections on the Guillotine’, in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage, 1995), 173–234.9 W.H. Auden, ‘September 1, 1939,’ accessed online at https://poets.org/poem/september-1-1939.