A friend asks me if I can nominate a list of five liberal classics parallel to the five conservative classics covered below. It’s a much harder task since postwar liberalism has been more diffuse and specialized. But in terms of bedrock Cold War liberalism — without branching off into the New Left and various identity movements — a basic canon might include:

A Theory of Justice, by John Rawls

The Vital Center, by Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

The Liberal Imagination, by Lionel Trilling

The Liberal Tradition in America, by Louis Hartz

The New Industrial State, by John Kenneth Galbraith

Although I’m on the record as being skeptical of the National Association of Scholars’ project of counting up how often “liberal” and “conservative” works are assigned in college curricula, I would be curious to see whether these works are widely read in class. Rawls definitely is. But I know I never encountered any of the others on a syllabus in my undergraduate years. Academic historians today consider Hartz quaint. I didn’t take enough English courses to know what Trilling’s status might be, but I suspect his Freudianism is seem as terribly outmoded. Schlesinger’s book, like those of many leading conservatives, is nonacademic and probably not assigned. Galbraith, too, is almost certainly not technical enough (or in the right ways) for contemporary economists. This tentative “liberal” list is marginally more scholarly than the conservative list, so it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison, but I doubt that any of the books on either list, save Rawls, are common in classrooms today. Perhaps in addition to efforts to get “conservative” classics into college courses, we need an effort to get old center-Left consensus classics onto syallbi as well.

(While my initial objections to the NAS project centered on the question of whether many explicitly conservative texts are even suitable to an academic milieu, the comments thread on the NAS page points to the flipside of the problem: should serious scholarly works really be press-ganged into classification as “liberal” or “conservative”? Even lesser, contemporary authors are hard to peg. NAS wants unambiguous examples, but the commenters seem to be having some difficulty coming up with any. The first suggestion is Francis Fukuyama. But is Fukuyama a conservative or a realistic liberal or a quasi-classical liberal? Nonacademic works, such as those included in my liberal and conservative lists, are more easily categorized than academic works are. But one shouldn’t find too many of those, of either Left or Right, in classrooms today, not because of political biases but because of the nature of what modern universities do — and don’t do.)

Filed under: Books, academia