Alan Wolfe of Boston College is a prolific and generally well-regarded author. In the last five years he’s published four books on contemporary politics and public policy: The Transformation of American Religion, Does American Democracy Still Work?, Return to Greatness, and Is There a Culture War? His new book, The Future of Liberalism, timed to coincide with the arrival of the Obama administration, tries to provide an in-depth intellectual framework for Wolfe’s mildly unconventional liberal political predilections. “No one is more temperamentally conservative,” he says, “than a Manhattan leftist living in a rent-controlled apartment and holding tenure.” (This quip is witty enough, but it’s followed by such solemnities as “Liberalism matters only because people do.”)
Academics and journalists haven’t been able to defend liberalism effectively, Wolfe claims, so he’s had to raise his pen once again. Liberalism’s core principle, he argues, is that “as many people as possible should have as much say as is feasible over the direction their lives will take.” Who of any consequence in America would disagree? He goes on to insist that “the liberal proposition, tested by long experience, is that whatever dependency results from using public policy to address inequalities, the resulting gains in individual mobility, development of physical and mental capacity, and racial and gender equality far outweigh them.”
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