Trilling: The Liberal Imagination and its Discontents

Louis Menand wrote an (occassionally) insightful essay on the novelist and critic Lionel Trilling for this week's New Yorker. It was Trilling's book, The Liberal Imagination, that put him on the map, says Menand, as it was one of the works, along with Arthur Schlesinger's The Vital Center, George Orwell's 1984, and Richard Crossman's The God That Failed, that "helped make the case for liberal anti-communism." This was of course a weighty debate in the years after World War II, as the Soviet machine made its presence felt and its intentions toward the West clear. There were a great many on the American Left in those days who were so worried about the totalitarian threat from right-wing fascism that they were blind to the totalitarian threat from left-wing Stalinism. It was Trilling and other liberals who had the intellectual courage to stand opposed to the naivete of many of their ideological comrades, and expose Soviet communism for what it truly was. Menand cites this excerpt from Trilling's letters, for example:

I expect a quantum of injustice in any imperium, expect contradictions as the price of order—what brings me to the puking-point is the fine feelings. And what brings me to the fighting-point is the increasingly sure sense that Stalinist power aims at the annihilation of anything that does not contribute to power. There has never been a power-ideology that so wished to destroy every human quality that did not add to itself.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Trilling that comes out of Menand's essay is that not only was he critical of leftist supporters of the Soviet system, but that he had the integrity to question the very nature of modern liberalism itself. He saw literature, with its exposition of the great complexities of the human condition, as a kind of rebuttal to the liberal's faith in the possibility of finding a political system that could fulfill every imaginable progressive dream.

In Trilling’s view, the faith that liberals share, whether they are Soviet apologists, Hayekian free marketers, or subscribers to Partisan Review, is that human betterment is possible, that there is a straight road to health and happiness. A liberal is a person who believes that the right economic system, the right political reforms, the right undergraduate curriculum, and the right psychotherapy will do away with unfairness, snobbery, resentment, prejudice, neurosis, and tragedy. The argument of “The Liberal Imagination” is that literature teaches that life is not so simple—for unfairness, snobbery, resentment, prejudice, neurosis, and tragedy happen to be literature’s particular subject matter. In Trilling’s celebrated statement: “To the carrying out of the job of criticizing the liberal imagination, literature has a unique
relevance . . . because literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.” This is why literary criticism has something to say about politics.

Later in the essay, a similar point is made about the facile liberal hope for unrelenting human progress:

When Freud published “Civilization and Its Discontents,” in 1930, Trilling wrote a review dismissing the book as absurd. But the magazine he wrote it for, The New Freeman, folded, and the review never appeared. That was when Trilling was still a Marxist. After 1950, he became infatuated with “Civilization and Its Discontents,” and especially with Freud’s notion of a “death drive.” The death drive is one of the most fantastic creatures in the Freudian menagerie, and Trilling took the concept exactly as Freud intended it: as naming an innate, biological resistance that people have to being made better. The death drive was designed to discredit the claim, made by renegade Freudians like Wilhelm Reich and, later on, Herbert Marcuse, that the right kind of political and economic change would do away with “discontent,” with neurosis. Freud’s argument, Trilling wrote in his last major work, “Sincerity and Authenticity,” “may be thought to stand like a lion in the path of all hopes of achieving happiness through the radical revision of social life.”

Finally, Menand emphasizes Trilling's skepticism over the student revolts of the 1960s era, this not so much a case of liberal naivete over the tragic nature of the universe, but about the errors of political commitment motivated purely by a desire for a cause, rather than by the merits. The subject of Trilling's essay On the Teaching of Modern Literature, Menand tells us, was a complaint about the eagerness of his students at Columbia "to engage in the process that we might call the socialization of the anti-social, or the acculturation of the anti-cultural, or the legitimization of the subversive." And a few paragraphs later: "The students didn't really care about the issues; they simply wanted 'the gratifications of being political.'"

It requires vigilance, to be sure, to steer clear of such psychological minefields on the path to philosophical discovery.