OTR Politcs - December, 2003

Terror and Liberalism
By Paul Berman
Norton, 2003

Paul Berman is attempting to do something quite tricky. There isn’t much space for it and he knows that. His unspoken condition, that of a minority within a minority, pervades much of the book Terror and Liberalism, though it is rarely articulated outright. In the first chapter, speaking about Gulf War I, he says, “In the entire country, maybe fifteen or twenty persons seemed to uphold positions like mine, pro-war and Left-wing—and most of those fifteen or twenty appeared to be the readers, writers, and editors of Dissent magazine, whose circulation was miniscule.”

That’s the mood of the whole book, that’s the thin strip of space upon which Berman is trying to work out something new in the self-understanding of the Left. The Left, outside of the fifteen or twenty people Berman has referred to, is not willing to be so accommodating to this project. George Scialabba, writing a review of Berman’s book for The Nation, claims that “For Terror and Liberalism has a practical as well as an analytical purpose: to stiffen America's backbone for the War on Terror.” There is some truth to the claim, of course, but it captures none of what is engaging or interesting about the book, none of the intellectual struggle that is at its core.  

There are two remarkable sections of Terror and Liberalism and they sandwich a third, important core of the book where Berman examines the thought of Sayyid Qutb. In the opening chapter, “Against Nixon,” a very fine line is laid down, one that weaves between the ‘realists’, the neo-cons, liberals, and the anti-imperialist Left. “[I]n the many months of crisis and then of war,” he writes, 

almost everyone who supported the first President Bush and his Iraqi policy rested the case on grounds like Nixon’s. ‘Vital economic interests’, ‘credibility’—those were the arguments. There were a handful of neoconservatives on the right, veterans of the Reagan years, who never did approve of Bush the Elder and who resisted his businessman’s approach to the war. The neoconservatives, though, had an odd way of mixing their foreign policy opinions with their larger outrage at the cultural and political reforms of the 1960s, which made no sense to me. I couldn’t understand those people; and I think the feeling was returned. The neoconservatives had a revulsion to drippy, Left-wing words like ‘progressive’ and the rest of my anti-fascist vocabulary. As for the people who did appreciate that kind of language, my stouthearted comrades on the democratic Left and some of the liberals—those people tended to oppose the war altogether. 

The dialectical reversals within the paragraph are many and telling. They speak of a position that doesn’t want to settle down into any of the available categories. The realism of the Nixonians is simply naked economic and political self-interest. The neoconservatives are more interested in principle but unwilling to connect a progressive bent in foreign policy with the progressive strands of the domestic political Left. And then the democratic Left, while sympathetic to progressive arguments, can only see the Gulf War in a narrative dominated by Vietnam and thus opposed to American military intervention in principle. Thus the political space continues to contract. In the end, a position emerges that is as fragile as it is complicated. It is a Left pro-war position that disavows the stated motivations of the vast majority of the pro-war camp. It would replace these with a language of anti-fascism, democratic process, civil society, and the extension of the legal-juridical framework that characterizes, in the broad Weberian sense, modernity.  

The tenuousness (one is even tempted to say, the dangerousness) of this position is heightened by Berman’s tendency to look over his shoulder. It is a good tendency and it is at play in the second important section of the book, the Note to the Reader at the very end. After giving some general information about the sources he has used and some of his nomenclature, Berman gives an explanation as to his usage of the term ‘new radicalism’ as he has picked it up from Arthur Schlesinger’s book, The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom:

The boldness in that phrase appeals to me. But the phrase comes freighted also with a cautionary history, and this should be borne in mind. Christopher Lasch wrote a book called The New Radicalism in America 1889-1963: The Intellectual as a Social Type, in which he glanced at Schlesinger’s Vital Center and at the Cold War liberals and the anti-Communist Left of the mid-twentieth century. And Lasch worried. The rhetoric of ‘freedom’ and ‘totalitarianism’ and such terms struck him as extreme and rigid. Nor was this foolish on his part. The black-and-white attitudes of the years around 1950, the quaking fear of Soviet Communism, the new radicalism of that era—these things did lead to problems later on. Soviet Communism lost its sting, after a while. But some of the liberals and radicals, in the fervor of their anti-totalitarianism, failed to notice the change in circumstances, and they ended up cheering the plunge into Indochina. In proposing to resurrect the term ‘new radicalism’ and the spirit of the anti-Communist Left, I do not wish to forget that particular lesson—the memory of some of the liberals and radicals of half a century ago who, in their fierceness, lost the ability in later years to make sound and nuanced judgments.  

It is moments like this when Berman is best. It’s like he’s talking to himself, taking one position and then warning himself about its dangers. And this accounts for the great pace of the book; it reads almost like a novel in the way it unfolds.  

At the core of the book is a confrontation with Sayyid Qutb and an attempt to sort out the forces at play over the last generation of political thought in the Islamic world. Looming behind all of that is the thesis about the clash of civilizations put forward by Samuel Huntington. There is a core truth to the proposition, Berman allows, but it is framed and understood in all the wrong ways. For there really aren’t, as many have since pointed out, two such self-contained civilizations with the kind of consistency that would make the clash coherent. What exists is a lot of porosity. The historical importance of Islamic civilization for the West (witness the re-introduction of Aristotle via Averroes) can help remind one of that truth, but Berman makes a more contemporary discovery. It is simply a fact that neither Ba’ath-style (national) Socialism nor the various strains of Islamicism can be understood outside of contemporary Western social and political history. It is, by now, no secret that the Ba’ath party was founded in deep dialogue with early 20th Century political movements and that figures like Michel Aflaq, who studied in France, were interested in German fascism and European strains of Communism. It is also the case that Qutb, Mawdudi, and other intellectual founders of Islamic fundamentalism saw their fundamentalism as profoundly in response to Western traditions of modernity and were thereby, perhaps sometimes despite themselves, in constant dialogue with it.

This is a more complicated situation than suggested by the rather brutal distinctions often bandied about on the Left and the Right. For the Right, it often seems that Islam will do as the next enemy and further discussion need not occur. For the Left, Islam’s very otherness is what makes it noble and worthy of protection. But Berman’s intellectual leap is more ambitious. It is to say that they are already us and vice versa. They are fighting the same fights and dealing with the same tensions, mutatis mutandis, that have bestrode Western modernity ever since it began to emerge. Whether there is a metaphysics here for Berman, a claim about the necessary irrational, fascistic, nihilistic underbelly to any essentially rational project of modernization is not the core point. The passages of the book that analyze the nihilistic urge that animates terrorism in general are, therefore, the most inchoate and speculative moments. He is, perhaps, unsure where he wants to go with those thoughts, at best, and willing to obscure some of these important questions, at worst. As many would argue, this is a typical blind spot of Liberalism in general.

The more impressive idea is that there needs to be a new language, a new set of concepts for the War on Terror that would redefine the struggle as the Left would imagine it and identify with it. In a phrase, there needs to be a new project of Left Internationalism, a new intellectual engagement with the ideas and movements that have emerged from Islamic society: one that takes a stand, that actually identifies and is willing to fight for one option versus another. 

The Terror War was fated to be fought . . . on the plane of theories, arguments, books, magazines, conferences, and lectures. It was going to be a war about the ‘cultural influences’ that penetrate the Islamic mind, about the deeper concepts of modern life, about philosophies and theologies, about ideas that draw on the most brilliant writers and the most moving of texts. It was going to be, in the end, a war of persuasion—a war that was going to be decided in large part by writers and thinkers whose ideas were going to take root, or fail to take root, among the general public. And where was that war going to take place, geographically speaking? My edition of Qutb’s writings list these cities on the publication pages: Cairo, Doha, Qatar; Kano, Nigeria; Nairobi, Kenya; Karachi, Pakistan; New Delhi and Bombay, India. The war of ideas was certainly going to take place there. And in other cities, likewise listed: Leicester, United Kingdom; and Oneonta, New York. 

The counter-factual pose of these lines, ‘was going to’, is characteristic of another theme running through the book and in other recent writings by Berman. It comes out of the sense of a modernity forestalled, possibilities as yet to be actualized. As Berman well recognizes, the Liberalism which he basically defends has entered a period in which it gazes, glassy-eyed, at the End of History. Fukuyama appears in Terror and Liberalism as he does in a review written recently for Dissent. The thesis of the End of History would have it that as liberal democracy has settled into the places where it has and sealed itself off from the places where it hasn’t there comes also an end to classical politics and big projects, to ideologies and competing meta-narratives. And this becomes an inertia of gray mediocrity.

The Left has had some trouble over the last decade or so trying to negotiate a position with respect to the collapse of its most transformative visions (Socialism). As Berman says in his Dissent review, “But the feeling of having come to an ‘end’, the feeling that Marxism and some other doctrines of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have become hopelessly antique—this feeling had better give way to a feeling of new promise, and soon.” And he goes on “We have got to find a language for speaking about equality and fraternity and not just about liberty – a new socialism, whatever it will be called, to replace the several failed socialisms of the past.” He speaks of an “An urge to get started with something new. Quickly, quickly.” Connecting these reflections with the counter-factual passages from Terror and Liberalism creates the feeling that the struggle against terror and the urge for ‘something new’ are not unrelated. For it is simply the case that the kind of engagement with the Islamic world that Berman proposes will also have another effect. It will amount to a recreating and transforming of ourselves. It will mean substantive and contentful changes to the versions of modernity that have developed hitherto. It will mean some more history.

Morgan Meis is an OTR Editor.