Patrick Link

“It was in part because he understood Zionism’s roots in nineteenth-century thought—crossing into its Romanticism, Hegelianism, and historicism—that Berlin could sometimes be half-sympathetic to “the nations,” as he once put it, “which feel that they have not yet played their part (but will) in the great drama of history.”93 Yet there was an undeniable disparity between his Zionism and his far less indulgent attitude toward other new states after World War II. He felt free to criticize “the resentful attitude of those new nations which have exchanged the yoke of foreign rule for the despotism of an individual or class or group in their own society, and admire the triumphant display of naked power, at its most arbitrary and oppressive, even where social and economic needs do just call for authoritarian control.”94 The tension with Berlin’s Zionism, which didn’t invite such criticism, was glaring. Postcolonial emancipation was not just necessary but moving—for one people.”
― Samuel Moyn, Liberalism against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times

“It is for this reason that this book dramatizes how Cold War liberals reimagined the canon of political thought. Perhaps the greatest recent nominalist historian of liberalism, Duncan Bell, has reminded us that one part of the reshuffling of the liberal tradition is recanonization. Nothing about this, of course, is specific to liberalism; if all history is contemporary history, then all canonizing is too, as the past is reconfigured in light of the present. There may, indeed, be no better way into understanding political thought than by studying what ancestry it claims—and whom it censures or expels. “It is well known that each age writes history anew to serve its own purposes and that the history of political ideas is no exception to this rule,” Shklar observed in 1959. “The precise nature of these changes in perspective, however, bears investigation. For not only can their study help us to understand the past; it may also lead to a better understanding of our own intellectual situation.”13 Yet how mid-twentieth century liberalism invented its own past has barely been broached. In Bell’s classic article, he makes the destabilizing but narrow claim that it was only in the twentieth century that Locke was anointed the founder of liberalism. There is much more to say about the canonization process. It overturned a prevalent nineteenth-century version of liberal theory with perfectionist and progressivist features that Cold War liberalism transformed. Creative agency had been liberalism’s goal, and history its forum of opportunity. The mid-twentieth century changed all that.”
― Samuel Moyn, Liberalism against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times

“The Soviet Union was allowed exclusive inheritance of the Enlightenment in its own self-presentation as the secular progeny of the historic breakthrough to reason and science. That this proprietary relation to the Enlightenment was implicitly granted looks in retrospect almost like a confession: Cold War liberals were not sure they could defend the Enlightenment from Soviet appropriation, or even that they wanted emancipation, when communists arrogated the project for themselves. It is both regrettable and revealing that, instead of opposing the claim of enemy communists to inherit the Enlightenment by showing how opportunistic it was, Cold War liberals accepted the communists’ claim and indicted the Enlightenment instead.”
― Samuel Moyn, Liberalism against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times

“The Times was founded by the Korean cult leader Reverend Sun Myung Moon in 1982 as a conservative counterweight to The Washington Post, but also as a beachhead for his Unification Church in D.C. Another investor was the government of apartheid South Africa, which funneled several million dollars to Moon’s outfits for an interest in the paper.”
― John Ganz, When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s