> Beyond this central conviction of the necessity to persuade the the
> unconvinced and uncommitted to a true world view, Liberal
> Intellectuals
> vary greatly, and probably one cannot find further defining traits.
> Shag's hisotoricist account is interesting and probably accurate but
> ahistorical in finding the core or meaning of liberalism in the past.
> The sources of liberalism must be first located in the present.
>
> Carrol
totally agree. the one book i'd mentioned, Brian Fay's _Social Theory and Political Practice_, provides a concise historical treatment with reference to the Saint Simonioans and Comte who are typically studied in sociology as giving birth to the enlightenment liberal world view in terms of its political practice: advancing technological and social progress, the perfectibility of society through he application of science, a class of experts to lead and guide such movement. What is utterly crucial to this world view is that society becomes a thing that can be managed and social engineered. Andrew Seligman explores the rise of this concept with the Scottish Enlightenment and the birth of "civil society" -- the cleavage between market, state, civil society, a rupture that emerged with capitalism. there's more but I don't have the book with me to prompt memory.
Another thing that he explores are two kinds of liberals - and here I'm going to, again, highlight why Liberalism cannot articulate a vision of the good society. it isn't a lack of will and it isn't a lack of ideas. refusal to articulate the worldview AS ideology IS at the heart of enlightenment liberalism. conservatives escape this straightjacket, but only by getting one arm free, for reasons I'll elaborate later.
1. the technocratic liberal (my phrase) who puts her faith in the power of science and technology to fix social problems. this kind of liberal loves hard data, numbers, surveys, general trends because then society is like a project which and you have goals that can be measured so you can track output and progress. Fay never writes any of this quite this way. It's my spin.
2. the interpretive liberal (my phrase) who puts their faith in communication. The best illustration of this is in Bellah et al's _Habits of the Heart_ where they explore "therapeutic individualism" as it is articulated in interviews with people talking about everything from activism to marriage. Therapeutic individualism is the view that since there is no way to resolve disputes by reference to some objective truth - god, etc. - then all we have is communication and all we have then are rules as to how communication must proceed to negotiate conflict. What becomes crucial in keeping a marriage together in their study is commitment not to anything larger than the marriage, but to the process of communication itself.
you can see where i'm going with this, yes? With the interpretive liberal, there is no god to mediate political conflict. thus, there can be no ideals to both with, nothing with which to actually convince - because nothing grounds the truth of those ideals. As a consequence, all the interpretive liberal can do is fetishize the process of communication between conflicting parties in the polity.
thus, the concern with informed citizenship. If you just follow the rules or process, where the individual must be informed (which, btw, is a common sense articulation of the ideal of rational autonomy - so nyeh nyeh to SA, such ideals are manifested in everyday speech), then people will elect the best people to office. there is nothing to adjudicate what the best is, what political leadership is -- for we cannot agree to any ideals. but what we can have is a 'free market' in the polity in which politics is like the market: composed of atomized individuals with their preferences toted along in a knapsack. they whip out those preferences and vote. interpretive liberals think that, if those preferences are truly informed, then people will naturally love liberals ideas.
this is all buttressed by the way our political system is supposed to work in the ideal. enlightenment liberalism conceded that no god and its truth can adjudicate what is good and true in political life. therefore, you have only process and method left. in the justice system, it is the adversarial process. no judge decides the fate of the defendant alone. instead, two attorneys duke it out - and then we throw a little "people's democracy" into the mix.
this utter faith in the inevitability of progress leading to the instantiation of liberal ideals is this is what conservatives correctly suss out in their claims about elitism.
Jefferson quote that I always think illustrates liberal enlightenment.
"The generation which commences a revolution can rarely complete it. Habituated from their infancy to passive submission of body and mind to their kings and priests...their experience, their ignorance and bigotry make them instruments in the hands of the Bonapartes and Iturbides, to defeat their own rights and purposes. This is the present situation in Europe and Spanish America. But it is not desperate. The light which has been shed on mankind by the art of printing has eminently changed the condition of the world..It continues to spread... To attain all this, however, rivers of blood must yet flow and years of desolation pass over. Yet the object is worth rivers of blood and years of desolation, for what inheritance so valuable can man leave to his posterity?"