Polls indicate that Rudy Giuliani — the thrice-married, twice-divorced, pro-choice and civil-union-supporting former New York City mayor — has become the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination. In key states, Giuliani is polling even with or ahead of likely Democratic challengers. Meanwhile, commentators, particularly on the left, are forecasting with increasing confidence the coming of a conservative crackup.

So which is it? Is conservatism, as led by a tax-cutting, crime-fighting, socially liberal big-city blue-state mayor, about to remake itself by reclaiming the center of American politics? Or is it about to collapse from the combined force of its internal contradictions, the legacy of congressional Republicans’ profligacy and the errors, real and imagined, of the Bush administration?In assessing conservatism’s prospects, it is important to recognize that President Bush has been no ordinary conservative. Therefore it would be a mistake, no less for conservatism’s opponents than for conservatives themselves, to assume that the fate of American conservatism stands or falls with that of the Bush administration.

Bush is a hybrid conservative. Although he favors, and has brought about, lower taxes, he did not run against the welfare state and indeed has enacted education and prescription drug bills that have expanded it. Although he won and has kept the confidence of social conservatives, he has not spoken out against abortion, has liberalized Clinton-era restrictions on embryonic stem cell research and has spent as little political capital as possible supporting a constitutional amendment restricting marriage to a man and a woman.

Although he has pushed the outside of the legal envelope when it comes to the detention, interrogation and prosecution of enemy combatants, he sought authorization of the war to remove Saddam Hussein in Congress and then at the United Nations. In doing so, Bush respected legal forms in the run-up to hostilities to an extent rivaled since the end of World War II only by his father, for the first war against Iraq in 1991.

In 2000, Bush presented himself to the nation as a compassionate conservative, combining a typically progressive emphasis on caring for the least well-off and a conservative confidence in private-sector solutions. He made clear in his first campaign that neither his compassion nor his conception of American national interest extended to nation building. Yet he has staked his post-Sept. 11 presidency on a grand task — promoting democracy in Iraq — that shows a confidence in government’s ability to improve the world that terrifies most progressives.

As distinctive as the mix that Bush presents is, all modern conservatives are, in a sense, hybrid conservatives. That’s because modern conservatism itself is the offspring of a family of competing opinions and principles.

Modern conservatism derives above all from Edmund Burke, the great 18th-century Anglo-Irish orator and statesman. Burke was a lover of liberty and tradition who saw a great threat to liberty in the tradition-overthrowing forces unleashed by the French Revolution. He was solicitous of established ways but acutely aware that the preservation of liberty required “prudent innovation” in response to the constantly changing circumstances of political life.

Yet since individual liberty can never be entirely divorced from the French revolutionaries’ ambition to remake society in the name of equal freedom for all, modern conservatism contains a built-in instability.

There is no settled recipe, and there are no fixed proportions, for determining the prudent innovations that balance liberty and tradition. For example, reasonable people who agree on the importance of both may differ on whether the benefits that come to the poor and vulnerable from government efforts to cooperate with faith-based charities outweigh the dangers of mixing church and state.

All three of the leading candidates for the Republican nomination embody a mix of conservative elements different from Bush and from each other. All three have evidently rejected Karl Rove’s maximize-the-base strategy in favor of a formula that will allow them to appeal to moderates while keeping the confidence of the base. And all three face a delicate balancing act.

Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney puts his social conservative credentials first, opposing abortion and embryonic stem cell research and supporting a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage. At the same time, he is a successful businessman who has learned to woo and work with Democrats by serving as governor of the bluest of blue states.

Sen. John McCain of Arizona is the foreign policy hawk, which is in keeping with the importance the conservative mind attaches to order, as well as its appreciation of the diversity of human types, including the types that present a deadly menace to one’s nation. During his 24 years in Congress, McCain has been consistently anti-abortion. But he has alienated many Republicans with the campaign finance reform law that bears his name, because it puts its trust in government regulation rather than in individuals and the marketplace of ideas.

Giuliani is running as a problem-solver whose mind is concentrated on the urgent requirements of homeland security. He prefers market solutions in education and health care, but he has a prudent understanding that the solution to the problems of government is not always less government but sometimes — as in the case of protecting the nation from terrorists — better government. And, in insisting on his commitment to appoint judges in the mold of Alito and Roberts, he may well manage to quell social conservatives’ anxieties about his socially liberal opinions.

At this early juncture, one prediction, suggested by the classic liberal tradition, seems reasonable: The competition and conflict that is developing among the leading conservative candidates should prove invigorating, not only for conservatism in America but for the nation as a whole.

In Excommunication for Thee…, I gave reasons for agreeing with Boston College professor Alan Wolfe, who, writing in the Sunday New York Times Book Review, concluded that Dinesh D’Souza’s The Enemy at Home was a deeply flawed and incendiary book. At the same time, I defended D’Souza against Wolfe’s call for conservatives to excommunicate him. In the process, I noted the irony that in a post-9/11 essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Wolfe himself, like D’Souza, had declared that America was endangered by an enemy at home, except that for Wolfe the enemy within was not the cultural Left but the fascist Right.

It turns out that D’Souza and Wolfe see eye-to-eye on another point, namely, that I am a vicious and clueless critic. As Wolfe, in responding to my essay in The New Republic, contrasted his generous liberalism to my rank partisanship, so now D’Souza, in his four part reply to conservative critics in NRO, touts his open-mindedness as against my closed-mindedness.

D’Souza’s contention that he is a paragon of intellectual virtue is as self-refuting as was Wolfe’s. For a hallmark of open-mindedness and the liberal spirit is the capacity to benefit from disagreement and debate. Yet like Wolfe, D’Souza is for the most part unable to treat his interlocutors with respect, and generally unable to draw insight or instruction from the objections that his arguments have provoked.

I will not trouble NRO readers with a response to D’Souza’s sneering asides, ad hominem attacks, and caricature of the criticism to which his book has been subject, except to note that his recurring rhetorical excesses belie his boast that he adheres to standards of scholarly excellence.

And my colleagues in this symposium have ably replied to many of the salvos that D’Souza aims at conservative critics of The Enemy at Home.

So I’ll focus on the chief criticism that D’Souza aims directly at me, which is that, on a crucial issue, I have put words in his mouth:

At one point, Berkowitz accuses me of holding that “the cultural left presents a threat to America as grave as that posed by radical Islam.” What? The Left is as dangerous to America as al Qaeda, the radical mullahs in Iran, the jihadist insurgents in Iraq, and the worldwide network of radical Islam? Nowhere do I say this, and I challenge Berkowitz to substantiate his allegation.

I accept D’Souza’s challenge. Let’s begin with page one of The Enemy at Home and its remarkable opening sentences:  

In this book I make a claim that will seem startling at the outset. The cultural left in this country is responsible for causing 9/11.

D’Souza’s preliminary elaboration of his thesis carries over to page two:

I am saying that the cultural left and its allies in Congress, the media, Hollywood, the nonprofit sector, and the universities are the primary cause of the volcano of anger toward America that is erupting from the Islamic world.

In his book’s last paragraph, on page 292, D’Souza provides a summation of the “two-front war” in which America is now engaged. It is 

a military fight against the radical Muslims abroad and a political battle against the radical left at home. These two forces have formed a strange coalition—a kind of alliance of the vicious and the immoral—and they are now working together against us. We have to recognize this, and take them on simultaneously. There is no way to restore the culture without winning the war on terror. Conversely, the only way to win the war on terror is to win the culture war. Thus we arrive at a sobering truth. In order to crush the Islamic radicals abroad, we must defeat the enemy at home.

The very purpose of D’Souza’s book is to demonstrate that the cultural left is the flame that has ignited and sustained the jihadists’ rage, the source that continues to give life and meaning to the “world wide network of radical Islam.” The cultural left is a threat as grave as radical Islam, on D’Souza’s account, because its conduct drives the jihadists to make war against the United States. But for “the cultural left,” D’Souza says on page two, “9/11 would not have happened.” For readers who are interested in further substantiation, I urge them to consult pages 3-291 of The Enemy at Home.

But perhaps I misunderstand the cause of D’Souza’s indignation. Perhaps he threw down the gauntlet not on the grounds that I absurdly inflated the threat that he ascribed to the cultural left but because I significantly understated it. Since on his account the cultural left is the “primary cause” of radical Islam’s rage against America, perhaps D’Souza is aggrieved because I failed to appreciate that he views the cultural left as the graver threat.

Indeed, owing to the opportunity that D’Souza has presented to reconsider his argument, I realize that this is a better interpretation of his views. To substantiate it, one need only pay more careful attention than I originally did to the long epigraph that introduces his book.

D’Souza took the epigraph from a stirring address, “The Perpetuation of our Political Institutions,” which, in 1838, the 28-year-old Abraham Lincoln gave to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois. Alarmed by the intensifying conflict over slavery, Lincoln warned that the most dangerous threat to America came not from abroad but arose from within:

Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step over the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest, with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years. At what point, then, is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.

By placing this passage at the front of The Enemy at Home, D’Souza could not more forthrightly or effectively have highlighted his belief that the cultural left is not, as I originally put it, a threat equal in seriousness to that posed by the enemy abroad, but a graver threat than al Qaeda, the Iranian mullahs, and the worldwide jihadist networks.

Indeed, thanks to D’Souza’s public challenge, which provided the occasion to reexamine his work, I now realize that his central claim is still more extravagant and incendiary than I initially appreciated. Reading his book in light of Lincoln’s discerning assessment in 1838 of the surpassing danger that the contest over slavery posed to the nation, it becomes clear that D’Souza believes that in our post 9/11 world the cultural left at home presents the gravest danger we face.

I stand corrected.

Alan Wolfe is a distinguished public intellectual. He is professor of political science and director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College. He is a longtime contributing editor to the New Republic. He is a frequent contributor to the Sunday New York Times Book Review. And over the course of many years, he has earned a reputation for overcoming political cant and scholarly rigidities to write penetratingly for the public about American political ideas and institutions.

So when Wolfe, from the platform provided by the aforementioned Times Book Review, calls for the excommunication of a conservative public intellectual, as he did on January 21 in a scathing critique of Dinesh D’Souza’s The Enemy at Home, the judgment resounds. The force of that judgment, however, would have been greatly diminished had Times readers been aware that, like D’Souza, Wolfe has engaged in an immoderate post-9/11 attempt to expose the real enemy at home. Wolfe, it would seem, believes that one set of standards applies to conservative intellectuals, and another to intellectuals, like himself, who are on the left.

D’Souza has written a book that slides all too easily from the provocative to the polemical to the incendiary. Wolfe finds nothing right with the book and everything wrong with it. D’Souza’s attempt to explain how Osama bin Laden is understood from the inside, by believing Muslims, is akin to “the Stalinist apologetics of the popular front period,” and exhibits “a soft spot for radical evil.” D’Souza’s claim that conservative religious believers in America can find common ground with peaceful Muslim traditionalists, based on shared dismay over the decline of the family and the degradation of popular culture, warrants a scornful mention from Wolfe but not a refutation. Deriding D’Souza for the creation of a McCarthyite enemies list of leading leftists, Wolfe concludes by laying down criteria for the formation of a list of his own: “I look forward to the reaction from decent conservatives and Republicans who will, if they have any sense of honor, distance themselves, quickly and cleanly, from the Rishwain research scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.”

There is ample reason to reject D’Souza’s central theses. He contends that the “cultural left in this country is responsible for causing 9/11,” but he provides no systematic inquiry and little evidence in support of so extreme an accusation. Moreover, his contention is undermined by his own discussion of Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian-born intellectual father of radical Islam. For Qutb famously was scandalized by the popular culture he encountered at a church social in America in the late 1940s, two decades, on D’Souza’s own account, before the emergence in the 1960s of the contemporary cultural left. Contrary to D’Souza, the jihadists hate America not in the first place because of feminism and egalitarianism, but because of our classical liberal beliefs in individual freedom and equality under the law, and their reverberations throughout all aspects of American society and culture.

Furthermore, D’Souza’s assertion that left and right in America inhabit different moral universes distorts the situation. There is no doubt that tempers today are short and some policy differences do run deep. But generally, the disputes between right and left in America are not over rival conceptions of the political good but rather over competing ideas of what policies best serve individual freedom and equality under law.

As for D’Souza’s charge that the cultural left represents a “domestic insurgency,” it recklessly conflates disagreement, even vehement disagreement, which citizens are nonetheless inclined to settle through debate and elections, with war, which adversaries are disposed to resolve through death and destruction. Perhaps, as D’Souza asserts, some on the left, including some perched in and pontificating from high places, remain so convulsed with Bush hatred that in their hearts they would rather see America defeated in Iraq than the Bush administration vindicated. Yet it would still be wrong to confuse a fellow citizen’s twisted passions with the murderous hatred of al Qaeda jihadists and Baathist insurgents.

To claim that by promoting, among other things, abortion, gay marriage, pornography, and atheism, the cultural left presents a threat to America as grave as that posed by radical Islam is seriously wrong and foolishly divisive. To make such an argument while America is at war with a fanatical adversary who regards all Americans as combatants and who seeks not concessions or reforms but America’s annihilation is to blur critical issues when the rediscovery of our common ground is what is urgently called for.

So Wolfe is on solid ground with his hard-hitting criticism of The Enemy at Home and certainly has plenty of company on the right. Prominent and widely read conservative websites including HughHewitt, Power Line, FrontPageMagazine, and National Review Online have found severe flaws in the book, as has D’Souza’s and my Hoover colleague, military historian Victor Davis Hanson, at Townhall.com and Real Clear Politics.

Wolfe’s attack, though, is distinguished by his demand that decent and honorable conservatives “distance themselves, quickly and cleanly” from D’Souza. Apparently, conservatives who fail to promptly and unambiguously pronounce anathema are tainted by and complicit in D’Souza’s errors and excesses. This is more than ironic coming from a writer who, like D’Souza, darkly proclaimed that America is menaced by an enemy at home. For Wolfe, as it happens, the enemy within does not arise from the cultural left but rather springs from Republicans and the right. His thesis no more withstands scrutiny than does D’Souza’s, but by comparison has received very little.

Wolfe put forward his accusation in April 2004 in an essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education entitled “A Fascist Philosopher Helps Us Understand Contemporary Politics.” Likewise proceeding from the provocative to the polemical to the incendiary, Wolfe argued that “to understand what is distinctive about today’s Republican Party,” you have to understand the ideas of Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt. Wolfe named names–heading the list are Ann Coulter and Bill O’Reilly–but his aim was to illuminate a widely shared sensibility. While conceding that Republicans and conservatives have probably not studied Schmitt, he nevertheless maintained that “Schmitt’s way of thinking about politics pervades the contemporary zeitgeist in which Republican conservatism has flourished, often in ways so prescient as to be eerie.”

Wolfe had in mind Schmitt’s analysis in an essay from the early 1930s, The Concept of the Political. But to contrive the case for an affinity between Nazi political theory and contemporary American conservatism, Wolfe distorted the essence of Schmitt’s doctrine.

Schmitt argued that “the political,” which represents “the most intense and extreme antagonism,” rests on the distinction between “friend and enemy.” The distinction “denotes the utmost degree of intensity of a union or separation, of an association or disassociation.” Seeking an understanding of the distinction that was precise and pure, Schmitt asserted that “the friend and enemy concepts are to be understood in their concrete and existential sense, not as metaphors or symbols, not mixed and weakened by economic, moral, and other conceptions.” So understood, the enemy involves “the real possibility of physical killing.” In essence, the enemy is the people or state with whom another people or state goes to war:

The enemy is not merely any competitor or just any partner of a conflict in general. He is also not the private adversary whom one hates. An enemy exists only when, at least potentially, one fighting collectivity of people confronts a similar collectivity.

Notwithstanding Schmitt’s argument that the political, properly understood, concerns a people’s or a state’s determination to resolve disputes by force of arms, Wolfe is determined to understand conservative party politics in America as Schmittian in character. It is true, as Wolfe subsequently argued in the Chronicle in an exchange of letters with critics (including me) in which he did not yield an inch, that for Schmitt, “‘an antithesis and antagonism remain . . . within the state’s domain which have relevance for the concept of the political.’” It is also true, as Wolfe noted, that in extraordinary circumstances domestic politics deteriorates into civil war. But it is just as true that Schmitt was specifically concerned not with the residue, not, as he emphasized, with conceptions that are “mixed and weakened,” but rather with “the nature of the political.” And civil war is no longer party politics.

It is risible, therefore, for Wolfe to seek to assimilate Ann Coulter’s vitriol and Bill O’Reilly’s grandstanding to Schmitt’s concept of the political. They are writers and talkers, often shouters, public performers, and certainly culture warriors. But they are no more disposed to take up arms against the left than is the left disposed to take up arms against them. In their acceptance, for all practical purposes, of individual rights and the democratic process, they are, from a Schmittian point of view, liberals indistinguishable from Wolfe himself.

The supposed fascism of today’s conservatives, argues Wolfe, helps us understand their electoral successes: “Conservatives win nearly all of their political battles with liberals because they are the only force in America that is truly political.” For conservatives, he contends, “politics never stops” and is driven by rank partisanship indifferent to the public interest; liberals are “unworthy of recognition”; rights must be trampled upon and the power of the state to deal with emergencies must be relentlessly expanded because “conservatives always find cases of emergency.” By contrast, claims Wolfe, liberals such as himself seek consensus, believe in pluralism, honor toleration, question their own convictions, and respect individual rights. Thus does their vastly superior morality doom liberals in their battle with today’s ruthless neofascist conservatives. Except when it doesn’t, for example a few months ago, in the 2006 midterm elections.

Wolfe’s incendiary accusation, however, goes beyond this election or that, and is not affected by the existence of some on the left who may support Bush administration foreign policy and some on the right who may oppose it. What is critical, according to Wolfe, is to recognize that conservatives in America “stand against not only liberals but America’s historic liberal heritage.”

The threat posed by America’s conservative enemy at home, in Wolfe’s view, can hardly be exaggerated. By importing to America’s shores a style of thought that is un-American, Wolfe explained in his response to his critics, conservatives have disfigured American politics:

Conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court broke with principle to decide the 2000 election on naked partisan grounds; the president so chosen has pursued the most partisan course of any president since Reconstruction; and he has used an attack on all Americans to pursue an agenda that benefits only some of them. Our politics are ugly because conservatives have disproportionately contributed to making them ugly.

Wolfe seems incapable of entertaining the possibility that Bush v. Gore was a hard case, one of whose reasonable resolutions was the path chosen by the Supreme Court; that in domestic politics Bush has rather consistently pursued the policies he has publicly defended, has done little to stir the pot on abortion and affirmative action, has formally but not aggressively opposed same-sex marriage (as did Senator John Kerry in the 2004 campaign), and has made his peace with the welfare state; and that driven by partisan rage, Bush’s opponents have often shamelessly misrepresented the administration’s arguments and actions on national security. Yet given the available evidence in support of these propositions, shouldn’t entertaining them, in our angry times, be one distinguishing mark of a liberal mind?

Wolfe’s contention that conservatives are animated by the spirit of a Nazi political theorist is scarcely less incendiary or more defensible than D’Souza’s claim that the cultural left forms a de facto alliance with al Qaeda. Yet whereas numerous prominent conservatives have been quick to publish their disagreements with D’Souza, who on the left rose to challenge Wolfe’s excesses?

By Alan Wolfe’s standards, a decent and honorable left would have cleanly excommunicated the Boston College professor long before he used the pages of the New York Times Book Review to demand the excommunication of a conservative for speech unbecoming a public intellectual. Happily, Wolfe’s standards don’t govern. And in a liberal democracy that cherishes open and vigorous public debate, they shouldn’t.

Herzliya Pituach, Israel
Last Wednesday night, beleaguered Prime Minister Ehud Olmert delivered the dinner speech that capped the seventh annual Herzliya Conference on Israel’s security. Over the course of four days, more than a thousand leading members of the country’s political and intellectual class attended the conference. Rarely had Olmert’s audience been as united about national security. Unfortunately for Olmert, their unity embraced the judgment that he–and even more his hapless defense minister, Amir Peretz, as well as Lieutenant General Dan Halutz, an honorable man who only two weeks ago resigned as chief of staff of the Israeli Defense Forces–had proved themselves in the Lebanon war last summer unfit to continue to lead the nation.

The unity also extends to the assessment of the nation’s three major national security challenges. The first concerns the Palestinians. Few Israelis believe that much good is likely to come of the three-way talks among the United States, Israel, and Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas proposed by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on her recent trip to Jerusalem. Not that Israelis, including most on the right, are opposed in principle to talking with the Palestinians or doubt that, in the end, final resolution of the conflict requires the establishment of a viable Palestinian state. Rather, a substantial majority of Israelis, including many on the left, have concluded that Abbas is too weak today and cannot deliver on any meaningful promise he might make. Moreover, the military establishment is dominated by the conviction that withdrawal from the West Bank anytime soon would do nothing so much as ensure that Hamas-launched rockets would begin falling on the center of Tel Aviv.

The second challenge involves Hezbollah. To meet it, Israel must learn the proper lessons from the Lebanon war. According to Yitzhak Ben-Israel, a retired major general and the head of the Israel Space Agency, in a technical sense the war cannot be considered a victory. The stated objectives were to rescue the two soldiers taken captive by Hezbollah last July in a cross-border raid (which left eight Israeli soldiers dead); deal Hezbollah a knockout blow by destroying Hassan Nasrallah’s fighters and weapons; and enhance Israeli deterrence by showing Israel’s enemies that, when roused, Israel will respond with devastating force. Israel met none of these objectives.

There is little serious dispute as to why. It was not, as many in the United States suppose, because Hezbollah’s network of tunnels and underground installations and its anti-tank missiles proved too formidable for the IDF. As retired general Amos Yaron, commander of the ground forces in the first Lebanon war in 1982, explained, in that war Fatah had tunnels and underground installations, and in that war Fatah was equipped with anti-tank missiles that, while much more primitive than those used by Hezbollah in 2006, were more effective against Israel’s much more primitive 1982 tanks. This did not prevent Israel from achieving, within a few days, its stated goal in June 1982 of pushing the PLO back 25 miles and, within the week, reaching the outskirts of Beirut.

The failures in Lebanon stem primarily from poor leadership. The prime minister, the defense minister, and the chief of staff were wracked by indecision. They focused too much on casualties and too little on achieving valid military objectives. And budget cuts over the last several years had impelled the IDF to reduce training and stockpiles of equipment.

Yet all this does not mean, as many U.S. critics of the Bush administration are only too delighted to announce, that Israel lost the second Lebanon war.

When pushed, many military analysts acknowledge that Israel’s strategic situation in October 2006, after the war, was in critical ways superior to what it had been in June 2006, before the war began.

First, in the early days of the conflict, Israel destroyed most of Hezbollah’s intermediate and long-range missiles. Second, Israel destroyed Hezbollah’s south Beirut stronghold, including its financial and technical infrastructure. Third, Israel killed roughly a third of Hezbollah’s fighting force, about 750 out of a 2,000 to 3,000-man army (while 119 Israeli soldiers were killed). Fourth, the war resulted in the Lebanese army being deployed to the south of the country, bringing that region under the government’s control for the first time in more than 30 years. Fifth, the war focused European and American attention on the extent of Iranian influence in Lebanon and Syria. And sixth, the unprecedented statements in the opening days of the war by three pro-American Sunni monarchies–Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan–blaming the outbreak of this war not on Israel but on Israel’s Arab antagonist, evidenced a momentous transformation in the region. For 60 years the fundamental fault line had run between Israel and the Arabs or Israel and the Palestinians. The second Lebanon war demonstrated that the fundamental fault line had shifted dramatically: It now runs between Sunnis and Shiites, or Sunni Arabs and Shiite Iran.

Indeed, what to do about Israel’s third national security challenge–the threat posed by Iran–is on everybody’s mind. On Tuesday evening, in a speech to the conference via satellite, Senator John McCain declared that “there is only one thing worse than a military solution, and that’s a nuclear armed Iran.” Israelis agree. Despite the distance, dispersion, and fortification of the Iranian nuclear program, members of the national security establishment believe that, between submarines, missiles, aircraft, bunker-busting bombs, and intelligence, Israel certainly has the military capability to set back substantially Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

But what is to be done in the near term? How can Israel take advantage of the growing rift in the Arab world and the receding importance of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to undermine Hamas, to isolate Hezbollah, and to stop Iran from fomenting terror and becoming a nuclear power?

Prime Minister Olmert’s Herzliya address, which focused on the “Iranian threat,” provided few concrete answers. It began with the one sentence that drew applause, an assertion that the president of the country, Moshe Katsav–recently informed that the state’s attorney intended to indict him for rape and abuse of power based on complaints made by four women–must step down (half an hour before Olmert’s speech, Katsav began a rambling, resentful hour-long address broadcast to the nation in which he declared that he would take a leave of absence but would not resign unless formally indicted).

Turning to his evening’s subject, Olmert stressed that Iran threatens not only Israel but also the region and the West. The gravity of the threat, he insisted, is recognized in Israel by both the public and politicians. The threat includes Iran’s systematic funding of terror–Shiite fighters in Iraq, Shiite Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, and Sunni Hamas in Gaza and the West Bank–and Iran’s determination to acquire nuclear weapons, particularly given President Ahmadinejad’s vow to wipe Israel off the map. International pressure must be brought to bear, and diplomacy and sanctions may, given Iran’s vulnerabilities, prove effective. Although Israel prefers to live in peace with Iran, it is prepared, if all else fails, to defend itself “with all the means at our disposal as necessary.” On this matter, Israelis are united. As Olmert put it, “Faced with the Iranian threat, there is not, never was, and will never be any difference between opposition and coalition, between right, center, and left.”

Olmert’s speech, if devoid of policy specifics and innovations in approach, was a perfectly serviceable affirmation of the Israeli consensus on Iran. But such is the disdain for the prime minister–because of his lackluster performance in the Hezbollah war, because of the collapse of his policy calling for Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank, and because of the several criminal investigations looming over him–that Israelis were unwilling to cut him any slack. As my dinner companion, a former prosecutor in the state attorney’s office and now a distinguished lawyer in private practice, put it a moment after Olmert concluded, “You don’t get any credit for giving a speech pointing out that tomorrow the sun will rise in the east.”

Perhaps the most immediate national security challenge Israel faces comes from within. It consists in reforming the Israeli political system so that it will raise up leaders of whom the nation can be proud and who can be trusted to refine and carry out the people’s will.

Mark Halperin and John F. Harris.  The Way to Win: Taking the White House in 2008.  Random House. 454 pages. $26.95

The pre-election message, pronounced separately by a trio of distinguished professors but reflecting broader anxieties among Democratic Party activists and media elites, was grim. In Is Democracy Possible Here? Principles for a New Political Debate (Princeton University Press, 2006), Ronald Dworkin of New York University School of Law argued that “the very legitimacy of our political society is now threatened.” In Does American Democracy Still Work? (Yale University Press, 2006), Alan Wolfe of Boston College warned that changes in American democracy “threaten to undermine some of America’s most cherished values, including the liberal values that encourage robust debate, rely on the separation of powers, and recognize the need for a loyal opposition.” And in Our Undemocratic Constitution: Where the Constitution Goes Wrong (and How We the People Can Correct It) (Oxford University Press, 2006), Sanford Levinson of the University of Texas School of Law contended that nothing short of a new constitutional convention could remedy the “many structural provisions of the Constitution that place almost insurmountable barriers in the way of any acceptable notion of democracy.” Learned though all the books are, a skeptical reader could be forgiven for suspecting that the professors’ fears that democracy in America was limping along perilously close to collapse were connected to their dismay at the people’s recent propensity to return Republicans to office. 

And then, notwithstanding the professors’ considered opinion that democracy in their country was on the demise, the people in election 2006 changed course and brought congressional Democrats back to power. Despite years of hand-wringing by scholars and journalists about the bitter polarization of American politics, despite alarm about the partisan redistricting over the past 20 years that has amplified incumbent advantage, and despite dread that George W. Bush and his evil-genius political strategist Karl Rove had managed to assemble an evangelical Christian-led majority that was cementing its hold on all three branches of government, the center stood up and swung from right to left. It was not only that the war in Iraq was unpopular and that Bush was blamed for a slow and sluggish response to Hurricane Katrina’s inundation of New Orleans. Republicans in Congress had grown fat, lazy, and profligate, abandoning the limited-government and reformist principles that had swept them into power in 1994. Discontented voters registered their unhappiness, giving Democrats majorities in the House and the Senate.

In the aftermath of election 2006, and contrary to the apocalyptic anxieties to which professors Dworkin, Wolfe, and Levinson give voice, it’s worth underscoring that the system is working: The public remains closely but not deeply divided; a significant segment of the electorate is capable of voting for a Democrat or a Republican depending on the qualities of the candidate and the priorities of the moment; and any presidential candidate who neglects the center will put his or her election 2008 prospects very much at risk.

Illuminating the challenges that candidates will face in the next presidential election — and explaining how the candidates can overcome them — is the task that journalists Mark Halperin and John Harris take on in their entertaining and informative book. Halperin is political director of ABC News and creator of “The Note,” a daily online compendium of news and gossip about Washington power players that has become indispensable reading for media types. Harris is the best-selling author of The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House, former national political editor for the Washington Post, and now editor in chief of the recently launched and much ballyhooed website “The Politico.” They are two of the best in the business, and together they bring a wealth of reportorial experience and political savvy to their task.

Halperin and Harris also bring to their task, and indeed define it by, one of their business’s proclivities: “As political reporters we share the obsession with electoral strategy and maneuver, not to mention with the gaudy carnival of presidential elections.” This obsession — disciplined by the authors’ sense of humor and desire to get the story right — gives their book’s profiles — of Bill and Hillary Clinton, of Al Gore and John Kerry, of George W. Bush and Laura Bush, of Matt Drudge, and of Karl Rove — their vivid colors, supple texture, and acutely observed details. Their careful scrutiny of the political process does not quite extend to a thorough examination of the characteristic prejudices of their own profession, however, and this omission impedes their assessment of the current relation between candidates and the media — a relation which, the authors rightly insist, has undergone dramatic changes in the past decade and has substantially altered our politics.

Halperin and Harris’s main theme is, quite simply, how to become the next president of the United States.

We do not know who will win the presidency in 2008, but we feel sure it will be the candidate who has the smartest and most disciplined approach to three basic challenges: fashioning a political strategy that addresses the elemental changes in media and technology that have reshaped current politics; executing this strategy despite innumerable and unpredictable distractions; and combining personal ambition with credible and concrete ideas about how to change the country.To meet these challenges, candidates will have to understand what Halperin and Harris call the “Freak Show,” or “the new arena in which presidential politics is waged.” The authors contend that a new carnival-style environment of shouting, mockery, character assassination, and extreme partisanship has displaced civilized and measured consideration of political issues and candidates. The new milieu is already well-entrenched, they argue, and it has changed the rules and requirements of politics at all levels, but especially at the presidential level:

The Freak Show is about the fundamental changes in media and politics that have converged to tear down old restraints in campaigns and public debate. The power of the Freak Show has developed through a confluence of generational and technological forces, including the destabilization of political journalism practiced by the so-called Old Media, which includes the broadcast television networks, major newspapers, and national weekly news-magazines. The relative decline of the Old Media has been caused partly by the rise of the New Media, which includes the Internet, talk radio, and cable television.The new media did not invent polarization but greatly amplify it by encouraging “more extreme and uncompromising positions, provoking the ruthless tearing down of adversaries.” On the Freak Show stage, “opponents are portrayed not simply as wrong but as morally flawed.” The last candidate standing in November 2008 will be the one who manages to maintain “control of his or her public image in the face of the Freak Show’s destructive power.”
Despite their insistence on the new media’s transformation of America politics, the ultimate secret to success in the new environment, according to Halperin and Harris, is surprisingly straightforward. Echoing the observation of the ancient Greek historian Polybius that the best way to appear virtuous is to be virtuous, Halperin and Harris assert early on in their book that the best way to overcome the Freak Show “is to have something important to say.” And they identify a kind of modern-day corollary to Polybius: “The way to be a successful political hack is to be something more than a hack.” In other words, showing character and defending principle can be conducive to victory. Indeed, notwithstanding the dozens of maxims they disseminate about how to manage the new media, they keep coming back to the conclusion that a key to winning in 2008 is to convince voters that one is seriously committed to serious ideas: “The most underappreciated assets in presidential politics are a coherent rationale and the ability to defend that rationale, not just with words but with convictions that flow from experience.”Yet if, in the end, old-fashioned common sense provides the answer to the Freak Show’s destructive power, perhaps the eclipse of the old media by new may not have the revolutionary impact on American politics that Halperin and Harris ascribe to it. And it may have consequences that they don’t contemplate.

Halperin and Harris assert that Freak Show politics favors Republicans and offers “virtually no advantages for Democrats,” a claim hard to separate from their charge that the sphere of the new media “is largely indifferent to the truth of charges and elevates the personal and negative over impartial appraisal of an allegation’s relevance in determining a person’s qualifications for the office.” The implication seems to be that the new media benefit Republicans because the new media have driven out ideas and debased political debate. That this is so, maintain Halperin and Harris, is illustrated by John Kerry’s loss of control of his public image in 2004.

Although their portrait of Kerry’s undoing is loaded with interesting detail, the role played by the new media in sending Kerry to defeat shows something rather different from what Halperin and Harris emphasize. Consider the case of the attack on Kerry’s Vietnam war record and his anti-war activism in 1971 and 1972. In late July 2004, in an effort to blunt Bush’s advantage as a war president, Kerry made the decision to place his military service, for which he received three Purple Hearts, front and center at the Democratic National Convention. Surrounding himself on stage in Boston with several of his fellow Vietnam veterans, Kerry opened his speech accepting the nomination by saluting and proclaiming, “I’m John Kerry, and I’m reporting for duty.”

The decision to present himself to his party and the nation as, first and foremost, a war hero was a dubious one for several reasons: because of his controversial opposition to the Vietnam War, including the leveling of war crimes accusations against his fellow soldiers in 1971 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; because of a dovish 20-year Senate career; and because of the anti-Iraq war stance he adopted in 2004 (though voting to authorize the use of military force against Iraq in October 2002 and, notoriously, initially voting in favor of a supplemental appropriation of $87 billion for troops in Iraq before he ultimately voted against it in November 2003). Making a big show of his military service could have been expected to galvanize opposition among those who took a different view of the war, especially the small group of veterans who, like Kerry, served on swift boat duty patrolling coastal waters and rivers in Vietnam and who had been dogging him ever since his Senate testimony more than 30 years earlier. They claimed that Kerry lied about his exploits and injuries to secure his three Purple Hearts, which enabled him to cut short his one-year tour of duty after four months, and that Kerry smeared his fellow soldiers in his nationally televised Senate testimony and in appearances on the Dick Cavett Show and Meet the Press.

Thanks to robust discussion on high-powered conservative websites such as Captain’s Quarters and Powerline and leading centrist ones such as Instapundit and thousands of smaller blogs, Unfit for Command, by John O’Neill (who assumed command of Kerry’s boat [PCF 94] some months after Kerry had already completed his abbreviated tour) [Editor's Note] and Jerome Corsi, which made the case against Kerry, skyrocketed to the top of Amazon rankings in the first two weeks of August. And short ads that a new organization, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, made and posted at its website ricocheted around the Internet. According to Washington Post reporters Lois Romano and Jim Vandehei, writing on August 19, 2004, “During the week ending Aug. 8, 966,000 people visited the anti-Kerry group’s Web site, 34,000 fewer than those who visited Kerry’s official site, according to Nielsen/Net Ratings. The new CBS poll found Kerry winning 37 percent of veterans’ votes to Bush’s 55 percent. (The two were tied at 46 percent after last month’s Democratic National Convention, where Kerry highlighted his service.)”

Kerry and his supporters cried foul. Indeed, many on the left insisted that the accusations against Kerry were so false and malicious that they should not even have been covered by respectable newspapers, magazines, and networks. In truth, the old media were slow and sluggish in their coverage, but eventually found themselves unable to ignore the story, though the standard line among them was that Kerry’s critics were partisan hacks peddling outrageous lies unworthy of public notice. Halperin and Harris seek to assimilate the new media-led attack on Kerry’s war record and anti-war activism to Freak Show politics. Yet the facts don’t fit their theory. Indeed, Halperin and Harris themselves note that “the Swift Boaters pointed out authentic flaws and contradictions in some of Kerry’s assertions about his war service and protest activity.” Consistent with the authors’ acknowledgment, and providing a notable exception to old media coverage, was a fine article in Harris’s newspaper, “Swift Boat Accounts Incomplete,” by Michael Dobbs (Washington Post, August 22, 2004), which, focusing on one of several disputed incidents, found that neither Kerry’s account nor his critics’ entirely squared with the evidence.

In other words, instead of seeking, in good liberal and democratic fashion, to confront arguments they opposed with better arguments, left-liberal opinion makers sought to preempt an entirely warranted public debate by claiming that the opinion they opposed should not be heard. But for the new media, the debate over Kerry’s military service would not have existed, even though it was Kerry himself who made it a central issue in the campaign. In an important sense, then, the new media did influence a change in the terms of political debate in 2004 — not, as old media stars Halperin and Harris suggest, by lowering the tone, but rather by contributing to the breaking down of the old media’s gatekeeper monopoly on determining what news is fit to print and when it deserves to be printed.

Consider also the case of former CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather’s September 2004 report on Sixty Minutes II reviving old allegations that three decades earlier President Bush had shirked his Air National Guard service obligations. In conjunction with the broadcast, CBS posted online documents supposedly proving that Bush disobeyed a direct order. Within hours, conservative bloggers from around the country had raised serious questions about the documents’ authenticity. Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs posted one of the damning letters cbs had displayed along with the same letter typed in Microsoft Word using default settings, flashing in sequence. The documents were virtually identical. Within days, bloggers, reaching out to experts in typography and printing technology, had demonstrated that the cbs documents, replete with proportional spacing and raised and miniaturized superscripts, could only have been produced in the early 1970s on sophisticated typesetting equipment not to be found in offices of the National Guard. Once again, the old media’s reaction was slow and sluggish. Indeed, for weeks after it had become clear to all disinterested observers that Dan Rather had been duped and that, but for blog-driven reporting and analysis, he might have duped the nation right through the presidential election, Rather continued to insist on the documents’ authenticity and the critics’ ignorance and partisanship. Perversely, Halperin and Harris present the episode as a routine matter instead of seeing it for the dramatic reversal it was — a stunning contribution to accuracy in reporting by the new media which prevented disgracefully unprofessional old media journalism from swinging an election.

The most revealing parts of The Way to Win consist in portraits of Internet impresario Matt Drudge and Bush political strategist Karl Rove. Growing up on the edge of Washington, D.C., in Takoma Park, Maryland, Drudge was a loner and a slacker. He had a fascination with the entertainment industry and, after graduating from high school, moved to Los Angeles, where he rose from obscurity as manager of the cbs Studios gift shop in the mid-1990s to become an Internet pioneer and now, going on ten years, one of its most influential voices. Halperin and Harris even call Drudge “the Walter Cronkite of his era.” His site contains links to a mixture of salacious gossip, weird events, daily headlines, and political scoops. Sometimes the links are a combination. For example, it was Drudge who, in 1997, forced Newsweek’s hand by revealing that it was conducting internal deliberations about a story in the works by investigative reporter Mike Isikoff concerning Kathleen Willey’s allegations of sexual harassment against Bill Clinton. Halperin and Harris report that “Drudge receives between 180 and 200 million page views a month, along with around three million unique visitors.” Drudge himself admits that no more that 80 percent of his items are entirely true.

Yet “Members of the Gang of 500 — which according to the New Yorker includes ‘the campaign consultants, strategists, pollsters, pundits, and journalists who make up the modern-day political establishment’ — all read the Drudge Report. Gang members have the site bookmarked.” For those readers, Drudge is not merely a guilty pleasure but, according to Halperin and Harris, a must read. The old media types’ need to consult Drudge daily, if not hourly, comes from Drudge’s capacity to break stories that often, though by no means always, are based on tips fed him by Republican operatives who lack access to or do not trust the old media. By widely disseminating conservative opinions about what is newsworthy, Drudge plays a starring role in the new media’s erosion of the old media’s control over the content of political debate in America, compelling the old media to report stories many would prefer to pass over.

Like Drudge, Karl Rove has made a career out of finding ways around the old media monopoly. Dispelling the myth of Rove as an evil genius (the authors note that a Google search for the epithet will produce tens of thousands of hits), Halperin and Harris show that the man Democrats love to hate has become the premier campaign consultant of his era through hard work, determination, and intelligence. Rove, according to the authors, is a renaissance man who understands all facets of campaigns, cultivates a wide circle of acquaintances, puts himself at the center of an “information universe,” and, unlike many campaign consultants, studies political history, contemporary ideas, and the intricacies of public policy.

He first made a name for himself in the early 1970s as an undergraduate at the University of Utah by becoming the national executive director of the College Republicans. In 1978, he entered Texas politics, working on the campaign of, and then serving as the deputy chief of staff to, Bill Clements, “the first Republican elected governor of Texas in 104 years.” After leaving state government in 1981, Rove opened Rove & Co., a political consulting firm that specialized in direct mail, a technique for getting the message out then still in its infancy. Rove became a master of the new approach, which enabled the conservative candidates whom he advised to communicate with the conservative segment of the electorate unfiltered by old media judgments. The importance of circumventing the old media was a lesson Rove carried with him to the presidential campaign of George W. Bush., and it played a crucial role in enabling his candidate to win two close national elections in 2000 and 2004, both of which were well within the reach of his Democratic Party opponents. Carrying the lesson too far may have contributed to Republicans overplaying the base strategy in 2006 and neglecting the center.

In addition to offering an engaging chronicle of campaign politics and the media since 1992, Halperin and Harris offer advice on taming the Freak Show. They believe that “political success can be demystified — reduced to tangible rules that can be labeled and replicated.” They call these rules “Trade Secrets” and disseminate dozens throughout their book, but there is nothing very secret in what are really recommendations of political prudence in a media-saturated age: “Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow — Clinton and Bush share this ability.” “Never forget who is boss, and never let others forget either.” “Ensure that you are defined principally by your popular positions, and that the political damage from unpopular ones is effectively contained.”

Their rules also suggest that in our media-saturated age, as in previous ages, a public reputation for manipulation undermines the capacity to manipulate and to win elections and that political victory in the United States remains available to candidates who have the courage of their convictions and the wherewithal and wit to persuade voters of their readiness to stand by their principles in a pinch and to compromise, when necessary, for the public interest.

In heaping reproach on the new media for corrupting presidential politics in America, Halperin and Harris overlook that democratic politics has always had a low-down and dirty side, and so long as it remains democratic, politics probably always will. Evidence of the persistence of underhandedness and viciousness can be gleaned from a look back at, say, campaign 1800; confirmation of the inevitability of ambition and the partisan spirit in democratic politics can be found in a glance at the analysis in the opening pages of The Federalist of the interplay among interest, passion, and reason in public affairs.

Moreover, Halperin and Harris exaggerate the responsibility of the new media for the current state of American politics. In fact, the new media are both cause and effect, transcending mere “freak show” as a response — and in crucial ways a corrective — to the old media behaving badly.

In October 2006, on new media star Hugh Hewitt’s radio show, Halperin himself acknowledged, in the face of questioning of the sort that the old media are in the habit of subjecting candidates to but rarely face, that the old media suffer from severe bias:

I will say that many people I work with in ABC, and other old media organizations, are liberal on a range of issues. And I think the ability of that, the reality of how that affects media coverage, is outrageous, and that conservatives in this country for forty years have felt that, and that it’s something that must change.Accordingly, progress in reforming the political culture of “personal attack, unyielding partisanship, and prurient indulgence” that Halperin and Harris deplore depends on grasping that the old media, in which Halperin and Harris have prospered, have been part of the problem and that the new media, notwithstanding its members’ own prejudices and excesses, are part of the cure. Halperin and Harris end on a hopeful note: “Someday an enlightened public will punish the politics of cynicism and destruction and reward the politics of creativity and civil dialogue. That truly will be the way to win.” But in a representative democracy an enlightened public needs leaders and an elite worthy to represent it — and worthy to inform it. Public opinion data convincingly show that in contrast to polarized party activists and leaders, and intellectual and cultural elites, the center in American politics remains wide. One way to win in 2008 will be for an enlightened leader to overcome the polarizing tendencies of the parties and the media, old and new alike, and harness the untapped energies of the underrepresented center in American politics. EDITOR’S NOTE: The original print version of this article incorrectly said “Unfit for Command, by John O’Neill (who served with Kerry in Vietnam)…” Corrected February 12, 2007.

This essay is based on a lecture originally titled “John Stuart Mill’s Idea of a University, and Our Own,” delivered at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, Sept. 15, 2006, at a symposium honoring the 200^th anniversary of Mill’s birth and the address on liberal education he delivered there in 1867.

An auto repair shop in which mechanics and owners could not distinguish a wreck from a finely tuned car would soon go out of business. A hospital where doctors, nurses, and administrators were unable to recognize a healthy human being would present a grave menace to the public health. A ship whose captain and crew lacked navigation skills and were ignorant of their destination would spell doom for the cargo and passengers entrusted to their care.

Yet at universities and colleges throughout the land, parents and students pay large sums of money for — and federal and state governments contribute sizeable tax exemptions to support — liberal education, despite administrators and faculty lacking a coherent idea about what constitutes an educated human being. To be sure, American higher education, or rather a part of it, is today the envy of the world, producing and maintaining research scientists of the highest caliber. But liberal education is another matter. Indeed, many professors in the humanities and social sciences proudly promulgate in their scholarship and courses doctrines that mock the very idea of a standard or measure defining an educated person and so legitimate the compassless curriculum over which they preside. In these circumstances, why should we not conclude that universities are betraying their mission?

To be sure, universities and colleges put out plenty of glossy pamphlets containing high-minded statements touting the benefits of higher education. Aimed at prospective students, parents, and wealthy alumni, these publications celebrate a commitment to fostering diversity, developing an ethic of community service, and enhancing appreciation of cultures around the world. University publications also proclaim that graduates will have gained skills for success in an increasingly complex and globalized marketplace. Seldom, however, do institutions of higher education boast about how the curriculum cultivates the mind and refines judgment. This is not because universities are shy about the hard work they have put into curriculum design or because they have made a calculated decision to lure students and alumni dollars by focusing on the sexier side of the benefits conferred by higher education. It’s because university curricula explicitly and effectively aimed at producing an educated person rarely exist.¹
Universities do provide a sort of structure for undergraduate education. Indeed, it can take years for advisors to master the intricacies of general curriculum requirements on the one hand and specific criteria established by individual departments and proliferating special majors and concentrations on the other. The Byzantine welter of required courses, bypass options, and substitutions that students confront may seem like an arbitrary and ramshackle construction. In large measure it is. At the same time, our compassless curriculum gives expression to a dominant intellectual opinion. And it reflects the gulf between the requirements of liberal education and the express interests of parents, donors, professors, and students. The dominant opinion proclaims that no shared set of ideas, no common body of knowledge, and no baseline set of values or virtues marking an educated human being exist. To be sure, the overwhelming majority of all American colleges adopt a general distribution requirement.² Usually this means that students must take a course or two of their choosing in the natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities, with perhaps a dollop of fine arts thrown in for good measure. And all students must choose a major. Although departments of mathematics, engineering, and the natural sciences maintain a sense of sequence and rigor, students in the social sciences and humanities typically are required to take a smattering of courses in their major, which usually involves a choice of introductory classes and a potpourri of more specialized classes, topped off perhaps with a thesis on a topic of the student’s choice. But this veneer of structure provides students only the most superficial guidance. Or rather, it sends students a loud and clear message: The experts themselves have no knowledge worth passing along concerning the core knowledge and defining qualities of an educated person. Take two political science majors at almost any elite college or university: It is quite possible for them to graduate without ever having read the same book or studied the same materials. One student may meet his general distribution requirements by taking classes in geophysics and physiological psychology, the sociology of the urban poor and introduction to economics, and the American novel and Japanese history while concentrating on international relations inside political science and writing a thesis on the dilemmas of transnational governance. Another political science major may fulfill the university distribution requirements by studying biology and astronomy, the sociology of the American West and abnormal psychology, the feminist novel and history of American film while concentrating in comparative politics and writing a thesis on the challenge of integrating autonomous peoples in Canada and Australia. Both students will have learned much of interest but little in common. Yet the little in common they learn may be of lasting significance. For both will absorb the implicit teaching of the university curriculum, which is that there is nothing in particular that an educated person need know. The interests of the different groups involved in producing, purchasing, and consuming higher education also create obstacles to reforming the contemporary curriculum. University education is a peculiar good. Generally speaking, and particularly at elite universities, those who receive the service, the students, do not pay for it. Instead, the cost of undergraduate education is borne by parents, wealthy donors, and taxpayers through exemptions and government grants for faculty research support. At America’s finest private universities, parents pay about $50,000 a year to put their children through college, or approximately $200,000 for a bachelor’s degree. For that hefty price tag, parents understandably want a credential that enables their sons and daughters to land good jobs and gain entrance to valuable social networks. But what of the character and quality of their children’s education? No less an observer of the American scene than Tom Wolfe recalls an unplanned opening remark he made in 1988 to a group of graduating Harvard seniors:

You know, I come from a town, New York City, where families are rated according to whether or not their children get into Harvard. But I have never met a single parent — not one — who has ever shown the slightest curiosity about what happens to them once they get here or what they may have become by the time they graduate.³

Distant and dispersed, parents can monitor their children’s academic performance, which is measurable by grades, but even if they were concerned they would be in a weak position to evaluate, much less influence, course content and curriculum structure. Besides, professors and administrators are the experts.

At most elite universities, student tuition rarely covers more than two-thirds of the full cost of education. Much of the other third comes from alumni through new gifts and investment earning on endowment or old gifts. Alumni establish chairs, fund buildings, and sponsor university-wide programs and initiatives. As with parents, alumni interests do not necessarily coincide with the requirements of a liberal education. Having made their mark in the world, alumni look at the university suffused with warm remembrances of their carefree college days. They may donate out of a commitment to basic research and liberal education. They may also donate for a variety of other reasons: to give back to the institution that helped launch their adult lives, to reconnect with their youth, and, not always least, to provide a dramatic demonstration to fellow alumni of their worldly success. Universities aggressively encourage alumni to give large sums of money but frown upon their playing a role in overseeing how the money is spent — for professors and administrators are the experts.

The capacity of alumni who seek to ensure that their donations are spent in accordance with their intentions, particularly if their intention is to promote liberal education, is extremely limited. For example, in 1995 Yale University was forced to return a 1991 gift of $20,000,000. Donor Lee Bass wanted to support the creation of a program for undergraduate study in Western civilization. One would have thought that such an undertaking would fit easily with Yale’s mission. But during the four years that Yale held the Bass money, the faculty could not come to agreement about the benefits of such a program or how to implement it. Many members of the faculty regarded a program on Western civilization to be so narrowly conceived or political in character as to infringe on their right and responsibility to make curriculum decisions on academic grounds. In addition, faculty complained loudly to the administration about a request made by the donor, late in the controversy, to have a voice in the approval of university decisions about how to fill professorships created by his gift. For they are the experts.

This brings us to the impediment posed by professors to the reform of the contemporary curriculum. In fact, whereas parents’ and donors’ interests may fail to coincide with the requirements of a liberal education, professors’ interests increasingly diverge from those requirements. Because advancement in today’s academy is closely tied to scholarly achievement and publication record, it is in professors’ interests to teach narrowly focused and highly specialized courses. Here, professors assign scholarship that underpins their own approach, examine cutting-edge contributions to the field, and perhaps review work that is critical of their way of doing things. Such courses can be a valuable ingredient in an undergraduate education. But generally and for the most part these courses, which often represent a substantial portion of departmental offerings, serve to advance professors’ research programs and to train professional scholars, though few undergraduates will go on to be professors.

Finally, one must consider students’ interests. On the one hand, often just having left their parents’ home but not yet having become responsible for supporting themselves, students are as fresh and open to learning as they will ever be. On the other hand, like their parents, they are, with reason, credential conscious, keenly interested in launching their careers and gaining access by means of their college degree to the right people and the right networks. And they present a classic case in which expressed preferences or interests and actual interests are likely to differ. This is because the capacity to make an informed decision about the structure and value of a liberal education itself depends on a liberal education, or on a knowledge of the subjects — history, literature, philosophy, natural science, ethics and politics broadly understood, and religion — that have for at least 150 years been thought to stand at its center. Many are the students at fine American colleges and universities who have remarked wistfully in the days before graduation that only now, as they prepare to depart, do they feel capable of choosing wisely and cobbling together for themselves out of the hodgepodge of university offerings a coherent slate of classes. But even those days may be passing, as universities increasingly fail to give students more than a dim intimation that a liberal education has a distinctive shape and a coherent and cumulative content.⁴

Of course, if parents, alumni, professors, and students are happy, why worry? So what if universities, for lack of a standard, are unable to say whether their graduates are well-educated? A college degree remains a hot commodity, a ticket of entry to valuable social networks, a signal to employers that graduates have achieved a certain proficiency in manipulating concepts, performing computations, and getting along with peers. If universities continue to offer parents a good return on investment, donors a pleasant place to practice philanthropy, professors good research opportunities, and students a convivial four years in which to get ready for their careers, why not leave well enough alone? And supposing that some harm is inflicted on students through exposure to foolish ideas and sloppy intellectual habits, the fact is that undergraduate education lasts only four short years. How seriously in that brief time can university education injure students? In any case, once they leave campus, graduates will encounter the everyday world of work, spouses, mortgages, and children. Won’t their new responsibilities, by focusing their minds and disciplining their habits, overcome any lingering bad effects of their educations?

This way of thinking about the university is common and dangerously complacent. We would not be content to learn that our auto repair shops cause no permanent damage to our cars, our hospitals are not systematically making patients sicker, and our captains and crews are not sinking their ships. So why should we be content to conclude that our universities do no lasting harm to the country’s young men and women?

In fact, universities can cause lasting harm. In many cases, the mental habits that students form and the ideas they absorb in college consolidate the framework through which as adults they interpret experience, assign weight to competing claims and values, and judge matters to be true or false and fair or inequitable. A university that fails to teach students sound mental habits and to acquaint them with enduring ideas handicaps its graduates for both public and private life.

Moreover, properly conceived, a liberal education provides invaluable benefits for students and the nation. For most students, it offers the last chance, perhaps until retirement, to read widely and deeply, to acquire knowledge of the opinions and events that formed them and the nation in which they live, and to study other peoples and cultures. And the nation benefits as well, because a liberal democracy presupposes an informed citizenry capable of distinguishing the public interest from private interest, evaluating consequences, and discerning the claims of justice and the opportunities for — and limits to — realizing it in politics. Indeed, a sprawling liberal democracy whose citizens practice different religions and no religion at all, in which individuals have family heritages that can be traced to every continent, and in which the nation’s foreign affairs are increasingly bound up with local politics in countries around the world is particularly dependent on citizens’ acquiring a liberal education.

In no small measure, the value of a liberal education comes from a distinctive quality of mind and character that it encourages: the ability to explore moral and political questions from a variety of angles. This involves putting oneself in another’s shoes, distinguishing the essential from the contingent, imagining the contingent as other than it is, and reasoning rigorously without losing sight either of what is or what ought to be.

John Stuart Mill was convinced that cultivation of the virtue that in On Liberty he called “many-sidedness”⁵ is at the heart of a liberal education. Mill defends this conviction most fully and forcefully in a little known but remarkable work, originally entitled “Inaugural Delivered to the University of St. Andrews on February 1st 1867.”⁶ Mill was 60, and the delivery of a formal address on liberal education was an obligation that came with his election by students to the post of honorary Lord Rector of the University, which he held from 1865 to 1868 (during which time he also served as an independent member of Parliament). Although he never taught at or even attended a university, Mill was among the best-educated men then alive, perhaps England’s premier public intellectual, and certainly its leading student of modern liberty. At the same time, he was intimately familiar with commerce and foreign affairs, thanks to the more than 30 years he had spent working in the office of the British East India Company. So he was well suited to take up the challenge of exploring the contribution that a liberal education, well understood, can make to the many dimensions of life in a free society.

Yet it is not Mill’s “Inaugural Address” but Cardinal John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University that has come to be regarded as the classic statement on the aims and benefits of a liberal education. A collection of lectures delivered to Irish Catholic laymen in Dublin between 1852 and 1858, The Idea of a University certainly deserves the high regard in which it is held. Still, its preeminence is surprising. Newman’s contention that liberal education culminates in the acquisition of religious truth rests on assumptions about knowledge and faith very different from those on which most university education in America today rests. This does not undermine the value of Newman’s analysis, least of all from the perspective of a liberal education. But it does suggest that Mill’s short essay, which both rests on assumptions about knowledge and faith shared by most university education today and challenges the contemporary university curriculum, has a distinctive contribution to make.

Like Newman’s mid-nineteenth-century discourses, Mill’s essay from the same period requires some translation, some separating of educational principle from particular conclusions about the appropriate content of the university curriculum. For example, Mill suggests that “the leading facts of ancient and modern history” should not be taught at universities because if students have not mastered the facts by the time they get to college, then it’s too late for them to learn. For an age such as our own, in which universities do not expect, much less require, students to acquire even a rudimentary knowledge of history, Mill’s judgment will sound absurdly harsh. Yet his underlying point, that historical knowledge is an essential component of a liberal education and that it must be acquired in order to progress to later and higher stages of understanding, does not depend on contingent features of a Victorian English sensibility. Rather, it reflects a compelling opinion about the enduring structure and abiding imperatives of a liberal education.

II. Mill’s idea of a university

In the opening lines of his address, Mill calls attention to the vastness of his topic and the need to combine learning and freshness of mind in exploring it. Indeed, among the chief benefits that flow from studying Mill’s address on liberal education is the lesson he provides throughout in combining goods often thought to be mutually exclusive. By stressing at the outset the wisdom of custom along with the need for creativity and insisting on the riches of what has been said about education in past ages and also the challenge of carrying the conversation forward into the future, Mill highlights the dependence of liberal education on both conserving and progressing.

As the serious study of education encourages a liberal mind, so too does it require one:

For, of all many-sided subjects, it is the one which has the greatest number of sides. Not only does it include whatever we do for ourselves, and whatever is done for us by others, for the express purpose of bringing us somewhat nearer to the perfection of our nature; it does more: in its largest acceptation, it comprehends even the indirect effects produced on character and on the human faculties, by things of which the direct purposes are quite different; by laws, by forms of government, by the industrial arts, by modes of social life; nay even by physical facts not dependent on human will; by climate, soil, and local position. Whatever helps to shape the human being; to make the individual what he is, or hinder him from being what he is not, is part of his education.

While it does not nearly cover the whole of education, the university’s mission, which is to provide a liberal education, is essential to preparing students to understand the other constitutive elements of education, or the variety of material, moral, and political forces that form the mind, shape character, and direct judgment. Liberal education concerns “the culture which each generation purposely gives to those who are to be its successors, in order to qualify them for at least keeping up, and if possible for raising, the level of improvement which has been attained.” Professional education is something different. The professions belong under the superintendence of the university, but they are not part of, and must not be allowed to displace, “education properly so-called,” or that cultivation of the mind and transmission of knowledge on which further progress depends. Mill does not mean to denigrate the professions or to deny that there is a vital moral dimension to the practice of law, medicine, and business. The question is the most effective manner in which higher education can contribute to making professionals moral: “Men are men before they are lawyers, or physicians, or merchants, or manufacturers; and if you make them capable and sensible men, they will make themselves capable and sensible lawyers or physicians.” In other words, the cultivation that they bring to professional schools from their liberal education goes a long way to determining whether professionals practice their trade sensibly and decently.

Nor should a university, Mill argues, be concerned with elementary instruction. Students ought to acquire the basics before arriving so that universities can concentrate on providing students with a “comprehensive and connected view” of the fields of human knowledge, “the crown and consummation of a liberal education.” Yet he acknowledges that universities must adjust to realities. When, as in mid-nineteenth-century Scotland, high schools fail to perform their part, universities have no choice but to play a remedial role. At the same time, universities must sometimes break with tradition, as those in Scotland led the way in doing by incorporating in their curricula the study of natural science and the systematic study of morality. In deciding what to include in the curriculum and how to establish priorities, universities should focus on their role in “human cultivation at large,” or the making of an educated person. It is to this task that Mill devotes the remainder of his address.

The content of the higher education curriculum was hotly debated in Mill’s time, and the liberal education he championed represented a serious correction of traditional university education. The controversy was over whether general education should be classical and literary or scientific. This was a continuation of the early modern quarrel over whether the university should focus on the ancients or the moderns, immortalized in Jonathan Swift’s A Full and True Account of the Battle Fought Last Friday, between the Ancient and the Modern Books in St. James’s Library (1704). In Mill’s view, the quarrel had a clear and compelling solution: Teach both.

But wasn’t study of classical languages a tedious and consuming undertaking? Mill was acutely aware of the sterile manner in which universities taught Greek and Latin, concentrating on rote memorization, mechanical translation, and mindless verse composition. At the same time, having learned both languages before he was ten, he insisted that the teaching of the classics at the university level could be made considerably more efficient, creating room to study the natural sciences, and considerably more educational by concentrating on the content of classical writings. Of course, dividing the curriculum between literary studies and science meant that students would be unable to specialize in either. But from Mill’s point of view, this was a salutary consequence. He regarded specialization, the learning of more and more about a single subject, as a potential enemy of liberal education. If practiced prematurely, it dwarfs individual minds and threatens human progress. In contrast, liberal education aims to teach students a subject’s “leading truths” and “great features.” Such knowledge does not make students masters of a field or discipline, but it does enable them to recognize the masters and form intelligent judgments about expert opinion. It also fits them for study of “government and civil society,” which Mill considers “the most complicated of all subjects accessible to the human mind.”

Mill would confine literary study at the university to classical languages and literatures. This is not because he doubted that knowledge of foreign languages and literatures in general was valuable. Indeed, he observed a half-century before Wittgenstein that such knowledge is intrinsically valuable because it prevents the confusion of words with objects and facts and enables us to understand other peoples by understanding the terms through which they interpret the world. But a university must establish priorities. Although students should know modern languages, they learn them best, Mill insists, out of school through a few months living abroad among native speakers. Accordingly, liberal education should concentrate on the languages and literature of the ancients, of the Greeks and Romans, because of both their farness and their nearness. On the one hand, the circumstances and sensibility of classical authors differ the most profoundly from ours (without being, Mill stipulates, like those of Asia, “so totally dissimilar, that the labor of a life is required to enable us to understand them”). On the other hand, their writings are rich in the wisdom of the common life of humanity. The classics both challenge our moral and political assumptions and provide models of human excellence. Particularly the writings of Plato and Aristotle represent “the perfection of good sense.” Moreover, the complex logical structure of the grammar of classic languages disciplines the mind. And classical authors do not embroider. In their writings, “every word is what it should be and where it should be.” Yet to rely entirely on the classics, he is keen to point out, is to miss an important dimension of humanity. They lack that appreciation, which characterizes modern poetry, of the mind as “brooding and self-conscious.” Nevertheless, Mill concludes that like the learning of modern foreign languages, so too the study of modern literature can and should be undertaken outside the university.

As with classical languages and literatures, Mill gives the natural sciences a place of honor in a liberal education, both because of their content and because of the intellectual discipline they foster. While it is not to be expected that many will achieve mastery of the laws to which the physical world is subject, students should acquire the basics that will enable them to distinguish those who are competent to provide the public advice on scientific and technological matters. In addition, science provides “a training and disciplining process, to fit the intellect for the proper work of a human being.” This is because “the processes by which truth is attained, reasoning and observation, have been carried to their greatest known perfection in the physical sciences.” Mill would not scant the study either of empirical science or mathematics and logic. He would also include in the curriculum an introduction to what he regarded as a young and imperfect science, physiology, because of its usefulness in making decisions about public sanitary measures and personal hygiene and because its subject, the physical nature of man, sheds more light on social and political life than any of the other physical sciences. He would also include psychology, which overlaps with physiology and explores the laws of human nature. The great philosophical controversies to which psychology gives rise, Mill maintains, in no way disqualify it as a subject fit for study at the university. To the contrary: “it is a part of liberal education to know that such controversies exist, and, in a general way, what has been said on both sides of them.”

The literary and scientific studies that form the foundation of a liberal education should culminate in “that which it is the chief of all the ends of intellectual education to qualify us for — the exercise of thought on the great interests of mankind as moral and social beings — ethics and politics, in the largest sense.” These great subjects have “a direct bearing on the duties of citizenship.” Students should begin with the close and familiar, the major civil and political institutions of their own country, and then move outward in their studies to the civil and political institutions of other countries. Then they should learn about the laws of social life, particularly political economy, which deals with “the sources and conditions of wealth and material prosperity for aggregate bodies of human beings”; jurisprudence, or the philosophical, moral, and institutional foundations of law; and the law of nations, which “is not properly law, but a part of ethics: a set of moral rules, accepted as authoritative by civilized states.” The principal readings on ethics and politics should be drawn from both contemporary authorities and what today we would call the great books, but only “on condition that these great thinkers are not read passively, as masters to be followed, but actively, as supplying materials and incentives to thought.” Here too, Mill stresses, liberal education can only provide an introduction. But the well-crafted introduction to ethics and politics in the largest sense confers a benefit “of the highest value by awakening an interest in the subjects, by conquering the first difficulties, and inuring the mind to the kind of exertion which the studies require, by implanting a desire to make further progress, and directing the student to the best tracks and the best helps.”

The “inevitable limitations of what schools and universities can do” comes into focus in considering the place of morality and religion in the university curriculum. It is not the place of schools in general and universities in particular, Mill holds, to provide the principal instruction in these matters:

It is the home, the family, which gives us the moral or religious education we really receive: and this is completed, and modified, sometimes for the better, often for the worse, by society, and the opinions and feelings with which we are there surrounded. The moral or religious influence which a university can exercise, consists less in any express teaching, than in the pervading tone of the place.

The tone is set by the manner and spirit in which professors discharge their duty to seek truth and transmit knowledge:

Whatever [the university] teaches, it should teach as penetrated by a sense of duty; it should present all knowledge as chiefly a means to worthiness of life, given for the double purpose of making each of us practically useful to his fellow-creatures, and of elevating the character of the species itself; exalting and dignifying our nature.

Professors teach by example, but the most important example they set involves the integrity they bring to learning and thinking. In teaching the history of morals and religion, professors must resist the powerful temptation to proselytize for their favorite moral and religious — or immoral and irreligious — doctrines:

There should be, and there is in most universities, professorial instruction in moral philosophy; but I could wish that this instruction were of a somewhat different type from what is ordinarily met with. I could wish that it were more expository, less polemical, and above all less dogmatic. The learner should be made acquainted with the principal systems of moral philosophy which have existed and been practically operative among mankind, and should hear what there is to be said for each: the Aristotelian, the Epicurean, the Stoic, the Judaic, the Christian in the various modes of its interpretation, which differ almost as much from one another as the teachings of those earlier schools. He should be made familiar with the different standards of right and wrong which have been taken as the basis of ethics: general utility, natural justice, natural rights, a moral sense, principles of practical reason, and the rest. Among all these, it is not so much the teacher’s business to take a side, and fight stoutly for some one against the rest, as it is to direct them all towards the establishment and preservation of the rules of conduct most advantageous to mankind.

But then liberal education requires professors both to maintain an open and flexible mind and to favor the great liberal and Enlightenment aspiration to articulate universal principles of right conduct. Does it not thereby take the side of the moderns against the ancients, of reason against faith, of liberalism and Enlightenment against romantic and conservative critics? And is this not a contradiction or an invitation to hypocrisy? In fact, tensions inherent in liberal education do present a stiff challenge for educators. A liberal education reflects and reinforces a modern, liberal, and enlightened sensibility, and it does serve democracy based on equality in freedom. Faculty, Mill suggests, should be self-aware and candid about these presuppositions of the education they provide. At the same time, liberal education as he conceives it is particularly well-equipped to resist the descent into didactic or dogmatic education provided that it heeds its own imperatives to appreciate what modernity owes tradition, the knowledge of diversity and common humanity acquired through study of the classics, and the dependence of freedom on studying the history of rival and incompatible teachings on ethics, politics, and religion.

Although professors must never compel their students to embrace one or another side in the great historical debates about how human beings should organize their private and public lives, they cannot help but make judgments about truth and falsity in teaching the history of moral and religious ideas:

There is not one of these systems which has not its good side; not one from which there is not something to be learnt by the votaries of the others; not one which is not suggested by a keen, though it may not always be a clear, perception of some important truths, which are the prop of the system, and the neglect or undervaluing of which in other systems is their characteristic infirmity. A system which may be as a whole erroneous, is still valuable, until it has forced upon mankind a sufficient attention to the portion of truth which suggested it. The ethical teacher does his part best, when he points out how each system may be strengthened even on its own basis, by taking into more complete account the truths which other systems have realized more fully and made more prominent. I do not mean that he should encourage an essentially skeptical eclecticism.

But the encouraging of a “skeptical eclecticism” is more of a danger inherent in liberal education than Mill allows. Passing from the examination of one system of morals and religion embraced by its proponents as the whole truth to another and then on to another and another can be disorienting. Professors must be able to place ideas in context without reducing them to their context, which requires knowledge of both and a sense of proportion. Indifference, hastiness, or haughtiness — to name a few of the vices to which professors may be prone — at the head of a class on the history of morality and religion risks engendering in students a moral relativism that treats all ideas as equally valid or a nihilism that holds all claims about justice and the human good to be equally false. Thus does the abuse of liberal education produce the opposite of a liberal spirit.

Liberal education requires professors to make evaluative judgments in the classroom because they are essential to the teaching of the great systems of ideas about how human beings should organize their private and public lives. However, these judgments must be put in the service of forming students capable of fashioning their own judgments:

While placing every system in the best aspect it admits of, and endeavoring to draw from all of them the most salutary consequences compatible with their nature, I would by no means debar him from enforcing by his best arguments his own preference for some one of the number. They cannot be all true: though those which are false as theories may contain particular truths, indispensable to the completeness of the true theory. But on this subject, even more than on any of those I have previously mentioned, it is not the teacher’s business to impose his own judgment, but to inform and discipline that of his pupil.

While a liberal education unavoidably reflects the needs and ethos of a liberal society, the needs and ethos of liberal society call for an education that is essentially Socratic in character. But a Socratic education, in its classical form, requires a Socrates for a teacher and students of surpassing gifts. The liberal education that deserves public support in a liberal democracy represents a democratization of Socratic education insofar as it is made widely available. But it also preserves an aristocratic root, remaining dependent to a high degree on virtue, or the qualities of mind and character that teachers and students bring to it. Liberal education is the civic education, or education for citizenship, proper to liberal democracy because it aims to form a human being fit for freedom:

The proper business of a University is . . . not to tell us from authority what we ought to believe, and make us accept the belief as a duty, but to give us information and training, and help us to form our own belief in a manner worthy of intelligent beings, who seek for truth at all hazards, and demand to know all the difficulties, in order that they may be better qualified to find, or recognize, the most satisfactory mode of resolving them.

By remaining aloof from narrow partisan politics, liberal education makes a critical political contribution, doing its large but limited part to form citizens capable of both conserving and improving a free society. But liberal education aims at more than civic education, in part because in a free society citizenship is not the only, or in many cases the highest, sphere in which individuals reasonably hope to flourish. Liberal education also prepares students for, though it does not provide, what Mill calls aesthetic education, or “the culture which comes through poetry and art, and may be described as the education of the feelings, and the cultivation of the beautiful.” Indeed, at the end of his address, Mill exhorts the students of St. Andrews to appreciate the deepest and most enduring benefits of a liberal education:

Now is your opportunity for gaining a degree of insight into subjects larger and far more ennobling than the minutiae of a business or a profession, and for acquiring a facility of using your minds on all that concerns the higher interests of man, which you will carry with you into the occupations of active life, and which will prevent even the short intervals of time which that may leave you, from being altogether lost for noble purposes. Having once conquered the first difficulties, the only ones of which the irksomeness surpasses the interest; having turned the point beyond which what was once a task becomes a pleasure; in even the busiest after-life, the higher powers of your mind will make progress imperceptibly, by the spontaneous exercise of your thoughts and by the lessons you will know how to learn from daily experience. So, at least, it will be if in your early studies you have fixed your eyes upon the ultimate end from which those studies take their chief value — that of making you more effective combatants in the great fight which never ceases to rage between Good and Evil, and more equal to coping with the ever new problems which the changing course of human nature and human society present to be resolved.

The highest justification of liberal education is that by forming free and well-furnished minds it prepares students to fashion for themselves a good life.

III. Liberal education and Mill’s
larger liberalism

The central importance to Mill’s idea of a liberal education of drawing truth from rival systems of opinions and goods reflects the spirit of the larger liberalism to which his voluminous writings are devoted. For example, in Principles of Political Economy (1848), he seeks to give both the free market and government intervention their due. In On Liberty, he shows how the formation and flourishing of free individuals depend on the discipline of virtue, education, the family, and civil society. In Considerations on Representative Government (1862), he emphasizes the need both for a party of order, whose main tasks are to maintain the basic framework within which political life takes place and to conserve what society has achieved, and a party of progress, whose guiding purpose is to implement more fully a free society’s promise of liberty and equality under the law. In The Subjection of Women (1869), he makes an impassioned case for the formal equality of women while respecting differences between the sexes. And in his Essays on Religion (1874), which Mill chose to have published posthumously, he seeks to give expression to a religious sensibility that respects the power as well as the limits of reason.⁷

But nowhere does he more forcefully demonstrate the practical and theoretical necessity of combining presumed contraries than in his tributes to the progressive rationalist Jeremy Bentham (1838) and the conservative romantic Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1840), which Mill published while editor of the London and West Minster Review.⁸ To appreciate the audacity of his contention that both the thought of Bentham and the thought of Coleridge are essential, imagine a contemporary progressive intellectual declaring in a left-of-center journal that, say, both John Rawls and Allan Bloom are indispensable thinkers of our age.

In Mill’s judgment, Bentham’s progressive rationalism was blind to the intricacies of human affairs. But in part because of that blindness, Bentham was able to focus his intellectual energies, expose much nonsense in the common language used to discuss morals and politics, and bring to light inefficiencies and injustices in the organization of social and political life. At the same time, Coleridge’s conservative romanticism, Mill contended, was blind to the positive features of modern society and to the advantages of modern systematic empirical inquiry. But, again, in part because of that blindness, Coleridge could concentrate on discerning the wisdom embodied in traditional practices and on making vivid the shared values and social bonds on which political life, even liberal and democratic political life, depended. Through his appreciation of their strengths and weaknesses, Mill aims to demonstrate the necessity of the progressive and conservative minds, and the superiority to both of the liberal mind.

In his tribute to Coleridge, Mill observes that the manner in which Bentham and Coleridge each supplied an essential perspective lacking in the other illustrated “the importance, in the present imperfect state of mental and social science, of antagonist modes of thought.” Lest one think that Mill wrote in the expectation that anytime soon such need would diminish, he instead looks forward to when it “will one day be felt” that antagonist modes of thought “are as necessary to one another in speculation, as mutually checking powers are in a political constitution.” In fact, this necessity is enduring, and for good reason. It is not grounded in “indifference between one opinion and another,” but rather in the irreducible diversity of knowledge’s sources and the abiding process of comparing and contesting ideas by which truth comes to light.

Twenty-five years before he delivered his St. Andrews address and sketched the liberal education that can be seen as a fortification against it, Mill warned in his tribute to Coleridge of “the besetting danger” to which moral and political understanding was subject:

All students of man and society who possess that first requisite for so difficult a study, a due sense of its difficulties, are aware that the besetting danger is not so much of embracing falsehood for truth, as of mistaking part of the truth for the whole. It might be plausibly maintained, that in almost every one of the leading controversies, past or present, in social philosophy, both sides were in the right in what they affirmed, though wrong in what they denied and that, if either could have been made to take the other’s views in addition to its own, little more would have been needed to make its doctrine correct.

This suggests a test to determine whether the education a university provides is liberal in the large sense. It is to be expected, and indeed welcomed, given differences in background, talents, and tastes, that some students will, on reflection, become progressives and some conservatives. But universities that purport to provide a liberal education will be failing in their mission unless their graduates, progressives and conservatives alike, prove capable of sympathetically understanding the positions of the political party to which they do not belong and discerning what is true and enduring in the beliefs of their partisan opponents. For Mill, the virtues cultivated by a liberal education sustained a higher form of toleration. Of course the political toleration involved in suffering the expression of an opinion one knows to be false or foolish is indispensable to liberty of thought and discussion in a free society. But respecting a person’s right to be wrong is not the only form of toleration. Respecting a person’s right to be right about truths one is inclined to find awkward or disconcerting is imperative to the flourishing of thought and discussion in a free society. A liberal education transforms this imperative into a pleasure.

IV. Reforming the twenty-first-century
university

M ill’s nineteenth-century analysis of liberal education is relevant to the twenty-first-century university not for the specific curriculum he proposes but because of the larger principles he outlines and the greater goods he clarifies. His analysis suggests several lessons. First, a liberal education aims to liberate the mind by furnishing it with literary, historical, scientific, and philosophical knowledge and by cultivating its capacity to question and answer on its own. Second, a liberal education must, in significant measure, provide not a smorgasbord of offerings but a shared content, because knowledge is cumulative and ideas have a history. Third, a liberal education must adapt to local realities, providing the elementary instruction, the stepping stones to higher stages of understanding, where grade school and high school education fail to perform their jobs. Fourth, the aim of a liberal education is not to achieve mastery in any one subject but an understanding of what mastery entails in the several main fields of human learning and an appreciation of the interconnections among the fields. Fifth, liberal education is not an alternative to specialization, but rather a sound preparation for it. Sixth, a liberal education culminates in the study of ethics, politics, and religion, studies which naturally begin with the near and familiar, extend to include the faraway and foreign, and reach their peak in the exploration, simultaneously sympathetic and critical, of the history of great debates about justice, faith, and reason. Seventh, all of this will be for naught if teaching is guided by the partisan or dogmatic spirit, so professors must be cultivated who will bring to the classroom the spirit of free and informed inquiry.

What might a four-year curriculum for a liberal education, devised in accordance with these lessons, look like? No doubt a variety of reasonable answers is possible, particularly in a nation as large and diverse as the United States, in which students can choose among private research universities, small liberal arts colleges, state universities of many sizes and descriptions, and religious colleges. And owing to differences in aptitude and interest, a liberal education will not be for everybody. Nevertheless, some elements are simple and straightforward and will be common to all colleges and universities that wish to provide students a liberal education worthy of the name. For starters, in view of the sorry state of high school and grade school education in the country,⁹ the curriculum will need to contain a large remedial element. In view of the need created by our advanced economy for depth or specialization, the curriculum will continue to require students to choose a major to concentrate in during their last two years. Most importantly, in view of the need for breadth, or knowledge of the civilization of which one is a part and of other civilizations, the curriculum should have a solid core.

As with the other parts of the curriculum, the structure and content of the core will be subject to legitimate dispute and reasoned compromise. Also, as with the rest of the curriculum, the core must strike a balance between the realities of education in America and the enduring imperatives of liberal education. It should not revolve around any single one of the main models for a core curriculum — general distribution requirements, great books, survey courses, or the modes of inquiry approach — but should partake of elements of all four.¹⁰ And it should not suppose that there is one right path or a single correct syllabus for the courses it contains. But faculty should fashion common core courses whose purpose is to awaken interest, sharpen critical thinking, and provide students with a shared store of essential knowledge and fundamental questions.

As it happens, crafting a core consistent with the demands of a liberal education will involve both a substantial break with today’s university curriculum and a long overdue alignment of higher education with common sense. Such a core would, for example, require all students to take a semester course surveying Greek and Roman history, one surveying modern European history, and one surveying American history. It would require all students to take a semester course in great works of European literature and one in American literature. It would require all students to take a semester course in biology and one in physics. It would require all students to demonstrate proficiency in a foreign language by carrying on a casual conversation and accurately reading a newspaper in the language, a level of proficiency usually obtainable after two years of study or four semester courses. It would require all students to take a semester course in the principles of American government, one in general economics, and one in the history of political philosophy. It would require all students to take a semester course comparing Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. And it would require all students to take a semester course of their choice in the history, literature, or religion of a non-Western civilization.

Such a core is at best an introduction to liberal education. Still, students who met its requirements would also have acquired a common intellectual foundation that would enhance their understanding of whatever specialization they chose, improve their ability to debate politics responsibly, and enrich their appreciation of the delightful and dangerous world in which they live.

It is a mark of the clutter of our current curriculum and the confusion that it spreads that these requirements will strike many faculty and administrators, and perhaps also students, as so onerous as to be a nonstarter for a serious discussion about curricular reform. Yet assuming four courses a semester and 32 to graduate, such a core could be completed in the first two years of undergraduate study. Students who met the foreign language requirement through high school study would have time left over in their first two years for four elective courses. Moreover, the core would still allow students during their junior and senior years to choose their own major, devote ten courses to it, and take six additional elective courses. And for students majoring in the natural sciences, where it is necessary to take a strict and lengthy sequence of courses, options should be available to enroll in introductory and lower level courses in one’s major during freshman and sophomore year and complete the core during junior and senior year.

Nevertheless, reform confronts formidable obstacles. The principal one is professors.¹¹ Many will fight such a common core because it would require them to teach classes outside their area of expertise or reduce the number of students for boutique classes on highly specialized topics. Moreover, one can expect protracted battles over the content of the social science and humanities component of the core of the sort that eventually led Yale to return that $20 million gift that was meant to support study of Western civilization. Meanwhile, as I have noted, students and parents are poorly positioned to effect change. Students come and go in four years, and, in any event, the understanding they need to make the arguments for reform is acquired through the very liberal education of which they are currently being deprived. Meanwhile, parents are far away and otherwise occupied and have too much money on the line to rock the boat.

But there are opportunities for those who will seize them. Change could be led by an intrepid president, provost, or dean of a major university who knows the value of a liberal education, possesses the eloquence to defend it to his or her faculty and the public, and has the skill and clout to wield institutional incentives on behalf of reform.¹² Change could also be led by trustees and alumni at private universities who acquire larger roles in university governance and by alumni who connect their donations to reliable promises from universities that their gifts will be used in furtherance of liberal education, well understood. And, not least, some enterprising smaller college or public university, taking advantage of the nation’s love of diversity and its openness to innovation, might discover a market niche for parents and students eager for an education that serves students’ long-term interests by introducing them in a systematic manner to the ideas and events that formed their civilization, the moral and political principles on which their nation and those of other nations are based, and languages and civilizations that differ from their own.

Reforming the university is as urgent as the obstacles to it are formidable. Citizens today confront a mind-boggling array of hard questions concerning, among other things, the balance of liberty and security at home; war and peace in faraway lands; the challenges some civilizations face in achieving liberty and democracy and others face in promoting them; the extent of the public’s responsibility for the poor, the sick, and the elderly; management of the extraordinary powers science provides for caring for, and manipulating, nascent human life, the unborn, and the frail and failing; the worldwide threats to the environment and appropriate national and transnational measures to combat them; the impact of popular culture on private conduct; the meaning of marriage and the structure of the family; and the proper relation between religion and politics. No citizen can be expected to master all the issues. But liberal democracies count on more than a small minority’s acquiring the ability to reason responsibly about the many sides of these many-sided questions. For this reason, liberal democracies depend on colleges and universities’ supplying their students a liberal education. Today’s educators could scarcely find a better way to begin to recover an understanding of the aim of a liberal education and their obligation to provide it than by studying John Stuart Mill’s Inaugural delivered to the University of St. Andrews in 1867.

1Derek Bok, who served as Harvard University president from 1971 to 1991 and has exercised a commanding position in American higher education for 35 years, has written the most authoritative recent book on the troubles that beset undergraduate education. Our Underachieving Colleges: A Candid Look at How Much Students Learn and Why They Should be Learning More (Princeton University Press, 2006) is in many ways illuminating. But there are bright lines that Bok, currently interim president at Harvard, cannot or will not permit himself to cross. He breezily dismisses charges leveled over the past 20 years, mainly by conservatives, most influentially by Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind (1987), that the undergraduate curriculum lacks a unifying purpose, that intellectual standards have been allowed to deteriorate, that undergraduate education is increasingly oriented toward preparing students for jobs, and that faculty neglect students in favor of scholarship. Against the conservative critics, Bok assures us that he “find[s] good reason for the satisfaction of most alumni with their education.” Yet he undercuts his assurance by proceeding to describe an alarming array of failures in undergraduate education that belie alumni satisfaction and fit well with the conservatives’ critique: “Many seniors graduate without being able to write well enough to satisfy their employers. Many cannot reason clearly or perform competently in analyzing complex, nontechnical problems, even though faculties rank critical thinking as the primary goal of a college education. Few undergraduates receiving a degree are able to speak or read a foreign language. Most have never taken a course in quantitative reasoning or acquired the knowledge needed to be a reasonably informed citizen in a democracy. And those are only some of the problems” (1–8, 310–312). In response to these failings, Bok argues effectively that universities should “conduct useful studies to evaluate existing educational programs and assess new methods of instruction” (320). And he is right to insist on the need to improve the quality of teaching and learning on campus (324–325). But he provides no reason to believe that progress will be made without reforming the compassless curriculum and the politicized classroom.

² Bok, Our Underachieving Colleges, 257.                                                                             .

³ Richard H. Hersh and John Merrow, eds., Declining by Degrees: Higher Education at Risk (Palgrave MacMillan, 2005), xi.

⁴ Bok contradicts himself on what can be learned about higher education from the opinions of students and parents. First, he asserts that undergraduate education can’t be as bad as the critics contend because parents continue to pay the bills and students and graduates continue to express satisfaction with their college experience (Our Underachieving Colleges, 7–8). Then he subverts his defense of the status quo by acknowledging that students’ concerns about social and professional advancement deflect their attention from questions about the quality of the curriculum (26–27, 36–37). Similarly, Bok mocks those who doubt that students are the best judges of the quality of their education and then endorses the proposition that they are not (compare 6–7 with 310–312, 325–326, 334). Concerning parents, Bok subsequently agrees that they are in a poor position to form a responsible opinion about the quality of their children’s college education: “The faculty’s reputation has far more to do with research than with education, since few people outside a campus have any idea how effectively its professors teach, let alone how much its students learn” (Our Underachieving Colleges, 328).

⁵ On Liberty, in < i>Essays on Politics and Society, J.M. Robson, ed. (University of Toronto Press, 1977), 252.

⁶ The address appears in Essays on Equality, Law, and Education, J.M. Robson, ed. (University of Toronto Press, 1984).

⁷ This section draws on Peter Berkowitz, “When Liberalism Was Young,”  Claremont Review of Books, Summer 2006.

⁸ Both appear in Essays on Ethics, Religion, and Society, J.M. Robson, ed. (University of Toronto Press, 1969).

⁹ “A Test of Leadership: Charting the Future of U.S. Higher Education,” a Report of the Commission Appointed by Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings (September 2006), 7–8.

¹⁰ For a discussion of these and their limitations, see Bok, Our Underachieving Colleges, 255–280.

¹¹ See also Bok, Our Underachieving Colleges, 31–57, 313–320, 323–325, 334.                                

¹² See also Bok, Our Underachieving Colleges, 335–343.

Neoconservatism: Why We Need It by Douglas Murray, Encounter, 200 pp., $25.95

Never much admired in the academy, in literary circles, or among fashionable journalists since its emergence in the 1960s and ’70s, neoconservatism in the post-9/11 world has, particularly in polite society, come into especially ill repute. For allegedly enabling George W. Bush to drag the nation into a misbegotten and catastrophically harmful war in Iraq, neoconservatives have been subject to relentless vilification. They are cowards, “chickenhawks,” who clamor to send other people’s children to fight and fall in faraway lands. They are illiberal and antidemocratic followers of Leo Strauss; in accordance with their master’s teaching, they dream of, and may be perilously well advanced in establishing, a secret elite to rule the nation and, through the nation’s empire, the world. And they flirt with dual loyalty by serving as spear carriers in America for the expansionist policies of Israel’s right-wing Likud party.

Of course, anyone who enters the public square with the intention to influence public opinion must be prepared to endure criticism, unfair as well as fair. If you don’t have a thick skin and a strong stomach, you shouldn’t join the democratic fray. This is not to say that culpable ignorance, malicious distortion, and vulgar accusation should go unanswered. But in a free society, targets of obloquy confront a choice: They can ignore the vicious among their critics, and so risk allowing the smears to fester in the public’s imagination. Or they can risk dignifying the vicious by addressing their charges directly.

Douglas Murray, a young Oxford-educated writer, has chosen the more direct approach. Avid and unabashed, he takes on neoconservatism’s harshest critics and does not yield an inch. Indeed, contrary to the many critics who have announced that the neoconservative moment has passed, Murray contends that neoconservatism is just getting started. And the future beckons brightly. In the opening pages, Murray declares his “belief that the solution to many, if not all, of our problems lies in neoconservatism–not just because it provides an optimistic and emboldened conservatism, but because neoconservatism provides a conservatism that is specifically attuned, and attractive, to people today.”

His own optimism and boldness, it must be said, sometimes lead him to overstate his case or gloss over difficulties, not least in his estimate of neoconservatism’s contemporary appeal. In fact, such appeal is hard to reconcile with the very demonization, springing from the right as well as the left, that has, in significant measure, called forth his efforts on neoconservatism’s behalf. Yet one should not be deterred by this and other occasionally exuberant opinions that pop up in Murray’s brief, invigorating book. Amid the clutter of calumnies that fill the airwaves, cyberspace, and newsprint, it provides a refreshing introduction to neoconservatism’s intellectual origins, leading ideas, and guiding aims.

Murray emphasizes that neoconservatism, being neither a creed nor a school but rather a sensibility and style of thought, has a complex lineage. Sensibly, he chooses to begin his account from the most common misunderstanding, which absurdly traces the U.S. decision to invade Iraq to the teachings of Leo Strauss. It’s not that Strauss, a lifelong scholar and teacher of the history of political philosophy, has not been a critical influence in shaping the neoconservative mind. But he did not promulgate a political program or advocate particular policies.

Strauss breathed new life into the idea of a liberal education, which he saw as an opportunity to liberate the mind from prejudices and to expose it to the treasures of human achievement in politics and thought. This liberation involved, among other things, acquiring an understanding of the weaknesses and disadvantages of liberal democracy, the better to grasp the remarkable benefits that liberal democracy confers, the enduring justice of its cause, and the institutions and ideas that sustain it. Murray emphasizes that, among the debilitating prejudices fostered by liberal democracy, was one that Strauss called relativism, and which consisted of the belief that the diversity of human views about right and wrong, and morality and immorality, were rooted in the diversity of cultures, and were all equally valid. Strauss diagnosed relativism as a decayed form of the admirable liberal doctrine of tolerance, and warned that it led to nihilism, or the belief that nothing is true and everything is permitted.

The first generation of neoconservatives–led by Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Nathan Glazer–entered the 1960s as liberals and Democrats, but rebelled against relativism’s political symptoms, finding in the Johnson administration’s Great Society welfare programs an inability to draw crucial moral distinctions and an obliviousness to the dependence of free and democratic institutions on character and culture. But by far the biggest and most dangerous expression of the relativist tendency, against which the first generation of neoconservatives rebelled, was the failure to grasp the menace of Communist tyranny and to recognize the monumental stakes of the Cold War.

Neoconservatives, Murray shows, differ from both traditional conservatives–and, to use a term that more accurately than “liberal” describes the left in America today, progressives. In contrast to traditional conservatives, neoconservatives are more comfortable with capitalism, always accepted the moral and political necessity of the welfare state, and consistently sought a prominent role for America in creating a stable and just international order.

In contrast to progressives, neoconservatives are more concerned about the costs of modernity’s disruptive ways to the family and traditional morality, strongly doubt the ability of the federal government to improve America through higher taxes and more aggressive social policies, and are skeptical of the integrity and efficacy of the United Nations, while maintaining confidence in the ability of the American armed forces, when diplomacy is exhausted, to advance American interests and ideals.

Although the label neoconservative was originated on the left as a term of reproach, it captures an important truth. In post-1960s America, neoconservatism elaborated a new kind of conservatism, one that made conserving and revitalizing the material and moral preconditions of a free society the top political priority.

Neoconservatism in America today, according to Murray, continues to do battle against relativism, which, he argues, fuels opposition to the global war on terror. To be sure, as Murray points out, there has been no shortage of voices echoing Noam Chomsky’s incoherent assertion that U.S. support for Osama bin Laden against the Soviets in the 1980s, and for Saddam Hussein in his war with Iran during the 1980s, should disqualify America from fighting terrorists and the nations that harbor them. And there are plenty, he adds, who, glossing over the U.N.’s sorry record of coddling dictators and failing to prevent bloodshed, argue in the name of cosmopolitanism, democratic humanism, or the international community that Americans who put American interests and American ideals first pose a leading threat to world peace. Yet these criticisms of the war are less an expression of relativism than an expression of poorly reasoned moral disapproval of the United States and its role in the world.

In addition to clarifying the connection between relativism and the resentment, envy, and arrogance that characterize so much progressive criticism of the United States and its fight against Muslim extremism, at least two other critical issues must be addressed to fill out Murray’s introduction to neoconservatism. First, what lessons from the neoconservative critique of social engineering at home can be applied to the program for promoting liberty and democracy abroad? And second, what steps can be taken to minimize the tensions involved in seeking to conserve liberal democracy, a doctrine and way of life whose guiding principle–individual freedom–constantly struggles against the constraints of tradition, custom, and authority?

Critics may chuckle with satisfaction at the perplexities neoconservatism confronts. But the price the critics pay is moral and political blindness. Not that neoconservative solutions are always the right solutions. But the perplexities they confront are inscribed in the American way of life. They partly define the challenges of securing liberty at home, which is not separable today (if it ever was) from promoting it abroad. It is not the least of neoconservatism’s achievements to have brought these perplexities into focus.