Having said A, one must say B. Ezra Klein poses this question and receives many responses. I’ll nominate William Appleman Williams’s The Tragedy of American Foreign Policy, Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, Richard Rorty on cruelty, Michael Walzer’s Spheres of Justice, and Harold Cruse’s Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. Martin Luther King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail deserves consideration although it does not exactly fit the category. Rachel Carson wrote an important book but not really a good book. Carol Gilligan is an interesting dark horse selection.
Jane Jacobs, by the way, might win either prize if you are allowed to count her as either a conservative or a liberal. But which is she? John Dewey and Walter Lippmann are two other figures who could be nominated for either prize.
If you think this list beats the conservative one, you are right. Note, however, that the conservative list excluded economics (and libertarians), which is where most of the contributions have come on the Right over the last fifty years. Plus the all-important Chicago School focused on ideas and articles, not books. So the comparison is not as lopsided as these posts, taken alone, might indicate.
Just a few weeks ago, Bryan Caplan and I decided that Rawls’s Theory of Justice wins the prize for "least Hansonian book ever." For all the evident philosophic care, in the final analysis Rawls was just making stuff up.
What are your nominations?
Addendum: Thinking back, Wilson’s On Human Nature might be a good pick for the conservative prize, even though I do not believe Wilson is himself a conservative.
I would suggest Richard Hofstadter’s “Age of Reform” is still pretty important in understanding the liberal worldview.
I’d be interested to read the reasoning behind your view on Rawls.
Letter from Birmingham Jail is absolutely not “liberal political thought.” It gets my vote for a different category, one that may include a strange mix of works including Paine, Thoreau, and Huxley….
The conservatives I know denounce Dewey as a liberal. I kinda like him.
Veblen’s “Theory of the Leisure Class” misses by a year (1899), but it’s held up well for me.
Amartya Sen’s work will stand the test of time.
E.E. Schattschneider was on the left, but his work is the best defense of democracy we have.
Henry George is neglected these days, but is arguably more relevant than ever — the left would do well to rediscover him.
Good point on Rawls: even Derek Parfit would acknowledge your claim. I remember asking Parfit why Rawls believed someone wouldn’t choose a utilitarian principle of highest expected utility behind the veil of ignorance–as opposed to the difference principle Rawls puts forward. If you don’t know who you’re going to be, I asked, then isn’t it reasonable to assume you have an equal chance of being any one once the veil is lifted?
Well, Rawls says you can’t assume any probability. Why not? Because it leads to utilitarianism.
You have to remember, Parfit said, that the veil is just something Rawls made up. He can change its conditions if he doesn’t like the output. Of course, he continued, it means his argument against utilitarianism is worthless.
I’m not sure I see Walzer’s place on this list. Spheres of Justice is in many ways deeply conservative: his respect for precedent and social tradition, and his “Wogs begin at Calais” attitude (as Brian Barry puts it), among others. Given his opposition to individualism, it makes sense to define him as against the type of conservatism to which you subscribe, but perhaps not necessarily to brand him a liberal.
Polanyi’s notion of commodification is useful, but his conclusion that the market must be stopped does not follow. Markets are about freedom of trade and commodification occurs when people decide they want to trade. Stopping markets is stopping people and where’s the liberalism in that? Scenic poverty, anyone?
I think that James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State is brilliant. Is he a liberal or conservative? Which definitions are you using? He is pro-people, I gather. If we assume that conservatives defend the status quo against change and that liberals want change (Burke vs Paine?) then Wilson is neither — he says that many centrally-imposed changes are stupid but also that the State wants to block citizens’ ability to make change (freedom). I make him a liberal, so there.
Why no respect for Rawls? Does that mean all philosophy is just “making stuff up”? (Specifically, if Rawls was doing so, Nozick certainly was, too.)
Also, in response to Rue’s post, if we were going to put odds on the outcomes, wouldn’t it be more realistic (given the income distribution in the U.S. — or, for that matter, the world — today) to assume that most people would not be big winners and that there would be more people in poverty than more people fabulously wealthy, therefore making it more likely that individuals behind the veil would choose to ensure a minimum level of income, etc. for the worse off?
Plus, Rawls’s theory is a theory of moral and political justice. A utilitarianism that allows some people to suffer for the benefit of others would conflict with his definition of what is moral.
I think Schlessinger’s “Age of Jackson” is the most influential.
As a conservative, I would have to say the following have held up quite well:
Revolt of the Elites and Culture of Narcissism, Chistopher Lasch
Friendly Fascism, Bertram Gross
The Promise of American Life, Herbert Croly
The Power Elite, C Wright Mills
The Affluent Society, JK Galbraith
City of Quartz, Mike Davis
Blue Collar Aristocrats, EE Lemasters
The Age of Jackson, Arthur Schlesinger
Individualism Old and New, John Dewey
I’m not saying I agree with all of their points, just that they are still worth reading. There are certainly others; I have just scratched the surface here.
Speaking for myself only, I never found Rawls to be particularly persuasive. He makes too many presumptions about the reader and his/her socioeconomic background (i.e. college education, white collar, affluent, guilty about this affluence, etc. I can elaborate on this…).
Jose Ortega y Gasset’s The Revolt of the Masses is not an American liberal work, but the Wikipedia article on the book describes Krugman to a T in the last sentence quoted below:
In this work, Ortega traces the genesis of the “mass-man” and analyzes his constitution en route to describing the rise to power and action of the masses in society. Ortega is throughout quite critical of both the masses and the mass-men of which they are made up, contrasting “noble life and common life” and excoriating the barbarism and primitivism he sees in the mass-man. He does not, however, refer to specific social classes, as has been so commonly misunderstood in the english-speaking world. Ortega states that the mass-man could be from any social background, but his specific target is the bourgeois educated man, the señorito satisfecho (satisfied little prince), the specialist who believes he has it all and extends the command he has of his subject to others, contemptuous of his ignorance in all of them.
J-
Sorry, I made a mistake of omission. It should read highest average expected utility. Given Rawls’s set up, the rational choice behind the veil is to maximize for the highest expected average utility. Whereas the difference principle, by contrast, calls for maximizing the position of the worst off. To see how these two positions differ from each other, consider these two options:
In outcome A, 98 percent of the population has an extremely high level of well-being, say a score of 100. On the other hand, the other 2 percent are very low, say, a level of 15.
In outcome B, 98 percent of the population lives life at 25 and the remaining 2 percent at 20.
If we follow the difference principle, we should chose outcome B, because it maximizes the position of the worst off. But is this really the morally right outcome? If we didn’t know who we were going to be in either outcome, and we had an equal chance of being anyone once the veil was lifted, then really we should seek to maximize our average expected utility, as we would by choosing outcome A. You just take seriously any theory of justice that would, as Rawls’s does, outcome B.
Ortega y Gasset maybe a liberal in Spain but he was a reactionary . An elitist, an antiamerican, an anticapitalist and a ludite. “He hardly would be published today” Cowen, Tyler ,My favorites things Spain.
Rawls is quoted in many political science work by Buchannan and Tullock.They respect his work for sure.
John Ely Hart said taht every Justice must read “heory Of Justice”
Ortega y Gasset was more or less a classical liberal, and was not a reactionary.
He opposed the de Rivera dictatorship and King Alphonso. He also found both sides of the Spanish Civil War inhospitable.
The author of the words quoted above is for taxation, the welfare state, etc., yet claims to be a libertarian.
I know it doesn’t quite make it into the 20th century, but if you want something that still stands up well, I think Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) is remarkable.
As for Rawls, I think you’re missing the big picture. Any undergraduate can see the problems with the original position. That’s not the part that’s supposed to have held up. The whole trick, in reading Rawls, is to try to figure out why it’s hands down the most important work of liberal political philosophy since Mill, despite having so many obvious problems, and despite the fact that he appears to say so little. The same way, when you read Kant, the trick is to figure out why the categorical imperative is so important, even though it obviously doesn’t work. It’s also important, with Rawls, not to get too hung up on the original position — i.e. the first 80 pages of ToJ. His understanding of what it means to have a “political” conception of liberalism, or what it means to think “politically” about the theory of justice, is a far more challenging idea.
I’m not the biggest Rawls fan, but you can’t understand anything that’s happened in political theory in the past 30 years without seeing that (with the exception of work in democratic theory) it’s all a response, in one way or another, to some dimension of Rawls’s work. His influence is so massive, so ubiquitous, that perhaps some people just don’t notice it. (Keep in mind, for instance, that Nozick’s ASU was, first and foremost, a response to Rawls. Rawls also did more to kill academic Marxism than perhaps anyone else, by presenting a version of egalitarianism that did most of the work that Marxists had been trying to get out of the labour theory of value, or the theory of exploitation, or whatever…)
Them’s fighting words on Rawls. A few points, some of which occur above.
1) Rawls has held up best in metaethics, where in large degree he saved the whole field. Keep in mind that before Rawls, the philosophical community largely believed that all moral statements were just saying ‘hurrah’ for things we like. Normative ethics was dying under the assault of philosophy of language and logical empiricism. Rawls changed all that and gave us a bunch of cool concepts like reflective equilibrium and reasonable pluralism and political justice.
2) Rawls suffers here like the conservatives. Think of Rawls’s impact on welfare economics. In general, I’d say Rawls understands economics better than any of the other liberals on the list. Perhaps Tyler feels like the other liberals hold up better precisely because they largely avoided economics and focused more on rights.
3) Rawls’s theory holds up better than you might think. In particular, if you think Nozick is a relevant example to cite, you haven’t heard enough deep criticism of Nozick (even the libertarians don’t like his position any more). Utilitarian criticism is relevant, but does not defeat Rawls’s position, because Rawls is off hanging out with Kant. Like Kant, no amount of Utilitarian criticism will defeat his relevance. Communitarian criticism does better, I feel. But that’s why Rawls’s later work moved in a communitarian direction.
At any rate, you might be right that Rawls does not ‘hold up’ if you exclude a) influence on other people, b) things which are not precisely ‘liberal normative ethics’, and c) if you are looking for a seminal work rather than a seminal body of work (the best argument). I would argue that somewhere along the line here we’re becoming a little silly. Of course Walzer is tougher to refute, he’s way less ambitious! A Theory of Justice is a bold statement of purpose, and I guarantee it will still be read a few hundred years from now even if there are a few problems you can drive a truck through.
I will second the nomination of Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique, which had a big influence on my own views. I would add Our Bodies, Ourselves. In addition to feminism, one of liberalism’s (in the sense being used in this discussion) biggest effects in the 1900s was on sexuality.
I will also cast a vote for the Affluent Society. Libertarians and classical liberals are sometimes fonder than they should be of large corporate entities and the bad policy wrought by the combination of big business and big government cannot entirely be blamed on the latter.
This and its conservative companion are two of the most useful discussions on MR in a while.
Jeff
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