Ramesh, I just read Wolfe’s post. It’s . . . interesting. I’ve been meaning to read his book when I get a chance, even though the reviews from a lot of folks I respect have been so brutal. He says the one thing he knows is “that there is no such thing as a distinction between ‘classical’ and ‘modern’ liberalism.”

A few thoughts:

1. While Wolfe tries to sound authoritative, he’s really quite out there. Most liberals and most historians would disagree with the idea that classical liberalism and modern liberalism are the same thing. And it seems to me that the majority is obviously right.

2. It would be nice to know if Wolfe can point to serious testimony from the founders of what most people call “modern liberalism” who believed they were simply carrying the project of classical liberals to the next stage of history. Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Croly, Horace Kallen, John Dewey, Thurman Arnold, and most of the New Dealers certainly didn’t think that was the case. They mostly had contempt for the dogmas of the 18th and 19th century. Dewey considered it baldly obvious that liberalism “has meant in practice things so different as to be opposed to one another.” Why can Wolfe see this seamless continuity but the great brains of liberalism (prior to him) could not?

3.Classical liberalism believed in objective rules constraining and delineating the role of government. Modern liberalism, born at the beginning of the twentieth century, holds that there are no rules rooted outside the prevailing sentiments of liberals themselves. It’s all up to what liberals decide is necessary. Stuart Chase — who reportedly coined the phrase “the New Deal” — argued that it was vital that liberals be put in charge of an “economic dictatorship.” “Why,” he asked, “should the Russians have all the fun remaking the world?” Thurmond Arnold, one of the intellectual titans of the New Deal, defined liberalism as “deuces wild.” Dewey believed there was no such thing as natural rights and argued for things like “social control.” Wilson believed that the U.S. Constitution — a classically liberal document, I think it’s fair to say — needed to be scrapped for a new, living constitution. Call me crazy, but I find these to be contrary, not merely “evolutionary” perspectives.

4. I think — or rather fear — Wolfe has a point when he says “In one sense, I think what my critics call modern liberalism is instead the logical and sociological outcome of classical liberalism.” This strikes me as a vague version of an argument advanced by people such as Joseph Schumpeter, James Burnham, and others that the wealth of capitalism creates a parasitic class of managers who become invested not in the continued success of capitalism but in the continued prosperity and power of the managerial class. Eventually this class strangles the entrepreneurial spirit and it crashes in on itself — which the managers see as an opportunity for even more control. Wolfe obviously doesn’t think the modern liberal managerial class is anything like that sort of a problem — or a problem at all! — but that’s hardly comforting to me.

5. But if that’s even remotely his point, that the prosperity created from classical liberalism gives modern liberals the means to become more effective social planners, I hardly think that bolsters the contention that the classical and modern versions of liberalism are as closely related as Wolfe suggests (never mind the suggestion that there’s no distinction to be made between them). It’s one thing to say that Protestantism would be impossible without Catholicism. It is another to say that Protestantism is the same thing as Catholicism. If anything the distinctions between modern and classical liberalism are far, far, more stark.