Vol. 17 No. 3 · 9 February 1995
pages 26-27 | 3583 words
By the Roots
Jeremy Waldron
- The Anatomy of Anti-Liberalism by Stephen Holmes
Harvard, 330 pp, £23.95, November 1993, ISBN 0 674 03180 6
‘The day will come, and perhaps it is not far off, when John Locke will be universally placed among those writers who have perpetrated the most evil among men.’ If Locke has a competitor in this, it is David Hume, ‘the most culpable of these fatal writers who will not cease to damn the [18th] century in the eyes of posterity, the one who has used the most talent with the most composure to produce the most evil.’ Europe is in chaos because intellectuals like these have forgotten their place: ‘They detest without exception every distinction they themselves do not enjoy; they find fault in every authority; if they are allowed, they will attack everything, even God, because he is master. They should be hung like housebreakers.’
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Letters
Vol. 17 No. 5 · 9 March 1995
From Michael Walker
Jeremy Waldron made several telling points in his review of The Anatomy of Anti-Liberalism (LRB, 9 February), but the one which made the deepest impression on me was his criticism of anti-liberals who inveigh against liberalism in theory but recoil from acknowledging the practical consequences of their own invective. Such a criticism has often been made of left-wing thinkers. Waldron is entirely right to underline that it is a failing of many thinkers on the right as well. Having written for and read many publications of the so-called European New Right, as well as being the editor of a publication which has been so categorised, I would say it is the single greatest philosophical weakness of that movement.
Part of the problem stems from the use of the word ‘liberal’, which in America especially is used, mostly but not only by right-wingers, to refer to persons who might be better described as socialist, communist, anarchist, promoters of free love etc. It is time someone (Jeremy Waldron perhaps) wrote a book clarifying the parameters of classical liberal notions as distinct from those of modern progressives. A liberal/anti-liberal position, no longer distorted by conservative-minded people calling ‘liberal’ everything they find politically distasteful, could then offer an interesting alternative to the left/right scheme as a way of interpreting conflicting political theories. But that, I suppose, is another story.
Michael Walker
Editor, <em>Scorpion</em>
