Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.3 | The History Cooperative

The Virtues of Liberalism. By James T. Kloppenberg. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. xiv, 240 pp. $35.00, isbn 0-19-512140-6.)

Just a year after the publication of Uncertain Victory (1986), his magisterial study of modernist thought in Europe and the United States, James T. Kloppenberg published in this journal "The Virtues of Liberalism: Christianity, Republicanism, and Ethics in Early American Political Thought" (June 1987), thus announcing his engagement with the full historic sweep of the nation's intellectual traditions. This new volume of articles, written over the ensuing decade, demonstrates both the urgency of Kloppenberg's desire to work out a moral philosophy for our democratic practices and the consistency with which he has framed the problems that make that task so challenging. 1

His title notwithstanding, the virtues of liberalism are insufficient; Kloppenberg urges Americans and their historians to attend as well to the strains of republicanism and Christianity that have always contended with liberal affirmations in the American past. Rather than lament the cacophonous results of that contest or the fact that the vocabularies of liberalism, republicanism, and Christianity are as incompatible as their forms of reasoning are irreconcilable, he celebrates the range of moral commitments and cautions against avoiding strife by rushing to a facile resolution of the interests connected to the differing perspectives. . . .

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