A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism

by Adam Gopnik

There is a tragic rule of twenty-first-century life, a rule of double amnesia: the right tends to act as though the nineteenth century never happened, while the left tends to act as though the twentieth century never took place. The right acts as if the socialist responses to capitalism—economic planning, the welfare state, even Keynesian economics—were the result of crazy abstract ideas of statism imposed on a pliant population by power-mad intellectuals, not, as they actually were, initial responses to mass immiseration and the daily show of extreme poverty and the relentless anxiety that industrial capitalism had produced. The left treats the obvious and inarguable lessons of the twentieth century about radical revolutions—lessons about the failure of revolution in the absence of free speech and open debate, of parliamentary procedures and small-scale experiments in change—as though they had never been learned and learned in the hardest of hard ways.