Love. Death. Sex. Sacrifice. Killing. Pornography. The Erotic Body. Will. These are not the words one expects a book about liberal theory to take as its main concerns. Instead, one thinks of words like: Justice, Distribution, Equality, Public, Fairness, Reason, Equity, Private, Tolerance. But this is just the problem with liberal theory, according to Paul W. Kahn, in his striking Putting Liberalism in its Place. For liberalism, he claims, "is a political philosophy of a loveless world" (141). Kahn aims, accordingly, to reinstate love and sacrifice into their proper places in our political lives and to resituate liberalism into its appropriate, but subordinate, position therein. Overall, the book succeeds admirably at these tasks. It poses a serious challenge not to the content of liberal theory, but to the scope of the liberal imagination.

Liberals as Clumsy Lovers

Kahn takes on liberalism in two major sections, the first largely critical, the second constructive. Each contains three chapters.

Kahn uses the liberal-communitarian debate to frame his critical chapters. That debate terminates in aporia that cannot be addressed without the interpretive categories Kahn himself introduces. Liberals abstract from historical context and seek to found a new moral order in reason. Communitarians bind identity to a social world and seek to situate it in terms of collective histories. Yet, Kahn argues, neither perspective can grasp the experiences of collective sacrifice and faith by which a specifically political community establishes its hold on its members. For these experiences precede und underlie communitarian history and liberal abstraction: both communitarianism and liberalism "fail just at the moment when politics begin" (61).

To fill this gap, Kahn offers a brief genealogy of American liberalism as a political experience. This genealogy is extremely compact and complex, as Kahn tries, in less than 50 pages, to narrate the history of American political liberalism in terms of the lived tensions between two strands of liberal experience: one that emphasizes public discourse and public reason ("the liberalism of speech") and one that emphasizes the ultimacy of religious faith ("the liberalism of faith). This story is too intricate to retell here, but Kahn's aim is clear enough. He wants to show that despite its veneer of acontextual universality and its hope for a global brotherhood in reason, commitment to liberalism as a political program can only be understood through the ongoing, particular political sacrifices -fighting, killing, and dying - that have made and continue to make liberal practices worthy of faith and love. Thus, Kahn writes, "there is more at stake for us in liberalism than liberalism itself can grasp" (111).

At stake are the conditions of a meaningful life. Liberalism alone cannot meet these conditions, Kahn claims, because it separates desire from morality. This is because liberal discourse encourages the incessant rationalization of all aspects of life. There is no natural limit to reason's extension, and the "restless, critical quality of reason" presses on to a sharp dichotomy between pure practical reason and the mute, particular promptings of the body. And so reason and interest are the only tools left us to make meaningful decisions within a liberal framework -- and that is not nearly enough to construct a meaningful life. Neither respecting moral demands nor satisfying bodily interests can alone establish a committed relation to moral rules. There must be something more to "a well lived life."

The Power of Love

That something more, Kahn proposes, is love. And love, contrary to the claims of liberalism, is not merely a private affair. Love, he claims, "always founds a public order" (141). The remainder of the book aims to bring together these questions about love, meaning, and politics. It defends two linked, but not fully distinguished, claims: first, that erotic striving (which Kahn identifies with "the will") fills the "meaning deficit" described above, and, second, that attention to the power of love illuminates those elements of political experience that liberal theory passes over.

For Kahn, the Western tradition has located three fundamental sources of political meaning: reason, interest, and the will. Each points toward a different horizon of ultimate meaning: Reason toward the universal conditions of justice; Interest toward the satisfaction and coordination of immediate desires; and Will toward the distinct history of a confessional community. Liberal theory, however, blinds itself to the role of will in politics, for it effaces particular histories in favor of a moral future and an imaginary, pre-social, "original position." From the perspective of the will, however, political life always depends on a revelatory act that expresses a community's identity. For us moderns, that act is revolution. Revolution is not simply the result of correctly applying a set of abstract norms. Rather, revolution breaks into the existing world and creates a new symbolic order. Insofar as liberalism obscures this expressive, revolutionary, element in modern politics, it will always see continuing demands for collective sacrifice and allegiance to the symbols of the revolution (the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, etc.) as archaic irrationalisms.

Here, Kahn's discussion could have been helpfully supported by recent work in social and political theory on political culture. Kahn's Reason, Will, and Interest seem to correspond exactly to what Daniel Elazar has called America's three sub-cultures: Puritan moralism, Southern traditionalism, and Mid-Atlantic individualism. Much of the best recent work in social and political theory seeks to understand American political debate through the lens of these cultural divides. Moreover, concern with the erotic underpinnings of liberalism is in fact present even in classical liberal authors like Montesquieu, as Diana Schaub has shown in her Erotic Liberalism. Kahn sometimes writes as if he were the first to see through the loveless mask of liberalism, but in these disciplines there have been vibrant discussions of the cultural, political, and emotional conditions of liberal practice for some time.

Kahn's final task is to show what it means to think the problems of politics through love. Our most basic erotic attachments, he argues, are to family and country. Yet love threatens to depoliticize these attachments: eros encourages extra-temporal ecstasies -- such as intense personal romance and pornography -- beyond the family and the state. Both break free from larger symbolic orders. The former renders love divinely mute, and the latter strips sexuality to the inarticulate encounter of meaningless bodies. States resist pornography not because porn is "dirty," but because it constitutes an act of political rebellion. Accordingly, from an erotic perspective, the task of politics is to domesticate love and channel its energies into social and familial reproduction.

Kahn's discussion of love might have been improved by more explicit engagement with what, following Harry Frankfurt (whom Kahn cites once as "Frankfurter"), has become a burgeoning literature on the topic in philosophy. And some discussion of what it would mean to understand political failure on the model of falling out of love, becoming bored with one's beloved, would seem to have been an important topic for Kahn to broach. George Steiner's essay on post-Revolutionary ennui, "In Bluebeard's Castle," would be the locus classicus for such questions.

Kahn concludes with a very creative appropriation of Aristotle's four causes to his own account of the structure of liberal politics. This section is highly original, but does not add much new to Kahn's previous insights, serving mostly as a useful way to draw the entire project together. Finally, Kahn speculates about the future of the nation-state. Here, he argues that globalization and the Internet might be weakening the nation-state, but ultimate horizons of meaning beyond liberal reason persist: the immediacy of parent-child attachments, religious fundamentalism, and multi-culturalism all react against the New World Order of the Web. However, none of these, in Kahn's view, is a likely surrogate to the nation-state as an ultimate source of meaning. But speculation about a future without such an ultimate source is idle, Kahn announces in a puzzling closing line that seems to erase the book's usual identification of "the political" with the "nation-state," because "the rest of the world will continue to invest ultimate meanings in their own political forms. If that is so, the era of nation-states may be ending, but that of politics still has a long way to go" (313).

Putting aside the difficult questions about what political life without the nation-state might look like, Putting Liberalism in its Place is a real success. It is learned, clear, forceful, and loaded with quotable lines. Most importantly, it takes a much needed shot across the bow of academic liberal theory. One hopes that shot will merit an equally forceful -- and equally erotic -- response.

Dan Silver, The University of Chicago

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