>On Mar 9, 2009, at 4:21 PM, SA wrote:
>
>>Speaking of braindead right-wingers, Jonah Goldberg once actually
>>said something that was pretty plausible on this score. He said
>>conservatives all have a common corpus of Great Classic Works of
>>conservative political philosophy, like the ones you mention above,
>>whereas liberals or "progressives" have nothing like that. Who is
>>the great thinker of American liberalism? I mean that contemporary
>>liberals actually recognize and cite as a maître à penser of their
>>own?
>
>Arthur Schlesinger? Paul Krugman? A little further left, Naomi Klein?
>
>But as Irving Kristol once put it: "American conservatism lacks for
>political imagination. It's so influenced by business culture and by
>business modes of thinking that it lacks any political imagination,
>which has always been, I have to say, a property of the left....If you
>read Marx, you'd learn what a political imagination could do."
>
>Doug
yeah.
the thing is we are _all_ liberals -- in the enlightenment liberal sense, yes? Lockes, Hobbes, J.S. Mills, Kant, Hume, Smith, etc. When I took a foundations of social theory course, the instructor made us read Isaiah Berlin's The Crooked Timber of Humanity and then De Maistre in order to understand what conservatives were in the 18th c. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_de_Maistre)
Everything that follows is, really, reformist attempt to correct for enlightenment liberalism in one direction or the other --without ever going to Marx or De Maistre. As such, by their very character, it seems to me that libs and cons are going to be captive to business interests in generally and, as such, there can only be piecemeal, reactionary writing about small fixes here, and maybe a moderate enhancement there. ha. in the lingo of my job: tactical bug fixes and tactical enhancements. little niggling fixes to make what is considered essentially OK work just a leetle bit better -- or sometimes, to intervene with a major fix because something went haywire -- but such a fix is just restoring thing to "normal".
As for reformist liberalism of the 20th c, I'd count JK Galbraith as a major figure -- as, at least, someone who was at one time quoted widely and who you can mention and the generally college educated will have heard them name. Not kids these days, of course, but back in the 80s/90s.
Also, in the 90s, I'd guess it was Robert Reich who pumped out a number of books which demonstrated something of a narrative or vision.
speaking of, I went perusing bookshelves and spied Charles Lindblom's Politics and Markets, which I'd been tempted to drag off the shelf in response to SAs tant-elemics about central planning v. markets. Which I'd wanted to get because I found it rather annoying that central planning languauge, which Lindblom avoided (as did C.B. MacPherson in _The Real World Of Democracy), does such a cute job of ignoring _politics_ at work in planned economies -- politics for good or ill. As MacPherson argues, what's being talked about is non-liberal democracies -- and not necessarily non-democratic states. Which is also why Lindblom refuses to call it Politics and Markets -- to emphasize the politics that take place in both systems and to refuse to cater to the rightist language.
(hmmm. reading the marginalia in this old book, I was apparently very perplexed, frustrated and perturbed with Macpherson's discussion of the vanguard state. :)
shag
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