Abstract

Liberalism, History, and Mr. Trilling

The article quotes about Lionel Trilling's new book of essays, "The Liberal Imagination," The book has as its central purpose a criticism of the liberal mind "as it drifts toward a denial of the emotions and the imagination." Trilling's indictment charges this mind with an emotional shallowness that often reduces life to a problem in ameliorative legislation, a drab rationalism indifferent to the possible varieties of experience, an unevaluative obsession with measurement and "quantification" that passes as science, a feeling that poetry, while possibly laudable, is ultimately frivolous. Trilling relates this liberal shallowness to excessive dependence on the moral passions" that accompany ideology. He warns that moral passions can be even more willful and restrictive than the "self-seeking passions," and that while it is right to act against social injustice, such action does not settle all moral problems but raises difficult new ones.