Liberal Imagination: 2 (Hardcover)

by Lionel Trilling (Author)
Key Phrases: departing powers, timely utterance, visionary gleam, The Liberal Imagination, The Princess Casamassima, Henry James (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review
“The Liberal Imagination (1950) applied the dialectical method to cultural themes by exploring the ways in which literary masterworks deflated the pieties of trendy left-wing politics. Trilling, who identified himself as a liberal, called for a new kind of criticism that 'might find its most useful work not in confirming liberalism in its sense of general rightness but rather in putting under some degree of pressure the liberal ideas and assumptions of the present time.' That statement was almost a blueprint, or prophecy, of the neoconservative creed.” –The New York Times

“Trilling’s best and most influential collection of essays shows how criticism, written with grace, style, and a self-questioning cast of mind, can itself become a form of literature, as well as a valuable contribution to how we think about society.” –Morris Dickstein

“A literary critic of major stature.” –The Times (London)

“The essays in [The Liberal Imagination] are remarkable for persuasiveness with which they draw attention to the importance for much, if not all great literature, of the tragic, the ironic, and the basically unjust elements in life.” –The Times (London)

"The Liberal Imagination, [is] a book that sold more than seventy thousand copies in hardcover and more than a hundred thousand in paperback, and that made Trilling a figure, a model of the intellectual in Cold War America... The argument of The Liberal Imagination is that literature teaches that life is not so simple for unfairness, snobbery, resentment, prejudice, neurosis, and tragedy happen to be literature's particular subject matter." --Lewis Menand, The New Yorker

“Lionel Trilling...is undergoing a slow but effective resurgence...everything suggest that both his persona and oeuvre are attracting a young generation of scholars eager to understand his echoes, present and future.” –Forward

“One felt that the essays of The Liberal Imagination were helping to generate a new kind of discourse; in them the traditional disparities between English and American ways of discussing both literature and society were being transcended. The specific means of this transcendence had largely to do with the intensity and luminosity of Trilling’s mind...” –The New York Times Book Review

The author "shows that literature is relevant to politics not because it affirms any political doctrine but because it provides a corrective to any political ideology whatsoever." –Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI)

“Lionel Trilling was so compelling that he mesmerized many of his Columbia students for life, away from what he regarded as the illusions about progress fostered by the liberal imagination.” –Los Angeles Times

“One of the most important literary critics of mid-20th century America.” –The Wall Street Journal

“This liberal critic of liberalism was revered for his reasonableness, the elegance of his dialectical style, the refinement of his ideas.” –The New York Times

“After his death, Lionel Trilling still exerts great influence on the landscape of American culture.” –The New York Times

“‘The Function of the Little Magazine’ is as enchanting as when it first appeared in 1946 and remains a superior lesson on the juxtaposition of the highbrow intellectual elite and a democratic mass audience.” –Foreword

“The dialectical method at its peak, honed to revelatory art.” –Sam Tanenhaus --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Description
The Liberal Imagination is one of the most admired and influential works of criticism of the last century, a work that is not only a masterpiece of literary criticism but an important statement about politics and society. Published in 1950, one of the chillier moments of the Cold War, Trilling’s essays examine the promise —and limits—of liberalism, challenging the complacency of a naïve liberal belief in rationality, progress, and the panaceas of economics and other social sciences, and asserting in their stead the irreducible complexity of human motivation and the tragic inevitability of tragedy. Only the imagination, Trilling argues, can give us access and insight into these realms and only the imagination can ground a reflective and considered, rather than programmatic and dogmatic, liberalism.

Writing with acute intelligence about classics like Huckleberry Finn and the novels of Henry James and F. Scott Fitzgerald, but also on such varied matters as the Kinsey Report and money in the American imagination, Trilling presents a model of the critic as both part of and apart from his society, a defender of the reflective life that, in our ever more rationalized world, seems ever more necessary—and ever more remote. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: Viking Adult (January 1, 1950)
• ISBN-10: 0670427519
• ISBN-13: 978-0670427512
• Product Dimensions: 20 x 20 x 20 inches
• Shipping Weight: 20 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,898,150 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Literary Criticism At Its Finest", December 8, 2008

By	Stanley H. Nemeth (Garden Grove, CA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Liberal Imagination (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)

It is an undeniable asset to have this classic work by one of America's greatest twentieth-century critics readily available again. Let me mention right off that the vast majority of the essays here have nothing to do with the fashionable Freudianism or bygone politics of the 1950's. Trilling's concerns as a literary critic and commentator on society go much deeper. He wishes to perform for his time a similar service to that John Stuart Mill rendered contemporaries in the nineteeth-century: the reminder that in disputable questions one has the obligation to see if one's intellectual opponents may possess some necessary portion of the truth. Mill, Trilling reminds us, found in the thought and poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a man, by the way, Mill profoundly disagreed with from metaphysics on down, a vivifying opposition and a liberating opponent, surprisingly able to cure the disabling aridity in Mill's earlier emotionless soul. Trilling feared that the majority "liberals" of the 1950's were especially open to the perennial temptation of bien-pensants of all sides, times, and places - a devolution into mere conformity and rigid ideology, an abandonment of the necessity as thinkers and citizens to be ever vigilant. Trilling's equivalent of Coleridge in this volume is the Master, Henry James, an author he thought certain to offend progressives mindlessly resentful of social hierarchy and supposed aestheticism. Trilling maintained that the James of "The Princess Casamassima" had much insight about art and politics that such "advanced" types ignored at their peril. (In a later volume, the self-identified "liberal" Trilling assigned a similar teaching function to Jane Austen's "Mansfield Park," a novel heavily on the side of tradition whose greatness he declared "was commensurate with its power to offend" the complacent "liberals" of its own day, his day, and most importantly - of any other day.

4 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Anachronistic. And what does Freud have to do with liberalism?, November 12, 2008

By	Stephen R. Laniel (Cambridge, MA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Liberal Imagination (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)

This book wasn't really designed for me, and I wonder whether it was designed for anyone born a quarter-century after it was written. If you read the Louis Menand introduction after you've read the book -- which was my approach -- you'll be puzzled that The Liberal Imagination is apparently anti-Stalinist. If it's pro- or anti-anything, it's pro-Freud. Those of us with a scientific temperament, living as we do under the watchful gaze of Karl Popper, roll our eyes at the first mention of the Austrian psychoanalyst.

But we're openminded folks, and we're eager to learn that Freud, like Marx, has been filtered too many times through popular media. Sadly, if this is what we want, then Lionel Trilling's Liberal Imagination is not the book we want to turn to.

Instead we get chunks like so, on the subject of Freud's interpretation of dreams:

'Freud showed, too, how the mind, in one of its parts, could work without logic, yet not without that directing purpose, that control ofintent from which, perhaps it might be said, logic springs. For the unconscious mind works without the syntactical conjunctions which are logic's essence. It recognizes no because, no therefore, no but; such ideas as similarity, agreement, and community are expressed in dreams imagistically by compressing the elements into a unity. The unconscious mind in its struggle with the conscious always turns from the general to the concrete and finds the tangible trifle more congenial than the large abstraction. Freud discovered in the very organization of the mind those mechanisms by which art makes its effects, such devices as the condensations of meanings and the displacement of accent.'

The writing there is almost so boring that I can't pay attention to how empty the content is. All I see in the content is that Freud locates the roots of art in the logic of dreams. It's not at all clear why Freud was responsible for this: surely people before Freud realized that dreams are often illogical and, in their own way, magical. What does Freud add to this? In Beyond The Pleasure Principle, Freud writes that dreams are a way of conquering our fears; or, as Trilling puts it,

'The dream, that is, is the effort to reconstruct the bad situation in order that the failure to meet it may be recouped; in these dreams there is no obscured intent to evade but only an attempt to meet the situation, to make a new effort of control.'

Is there any good reason to think that this is what dreams "mean"? Is there any reason to think dreams mean anything whatsoever? On this topic, I like Peter Medawar's jab at Arthur Koestler:

'[Writes Koestler,] `There is no need to emphasize, in this century of Freud and Jung, that the logic of the dream ... derives from the magic type of causation found in primitive societies and the fantasies of childhood.' But those who enjoy slopping around in the amniotic fluid should pause for a moment to entertain ... the idea that the content of dreams may be totally devoid of `meaning'. There should be no need to emphasize, in this century of radio sets and electronic devices, that many dreams may ... convey no information whatsoever: that they may just be noise."'

I could multiply without end the examples of Trilling's love for Freud. They all sound anachronistic and faux-scientific -- as, for instance, when Trilling quotes (in "Art and Neurosis") a "Dr. Bergler" to the effect that "there is a particular neurosis of writers, baed on an oral masochism which makes them the enemy of the respectable world...". It is hard to read this today without laughing.

What has all of this to do with liberalism? My best guess is that Trilling is addressing the same point that Saul Bellow made in his Nobel Prize speech: that the artist is in constant revolt against the ideologue. The ideologue dwells in abstractions, whereas the artist lives in the details. In a world where we've become numbers on a government's or a corporation's hard drive, some literary theorists would assert that the age of the individual man is over. Bellow would insist that the novel -- based as it is around characters painted to perfection -- is our last stand against the age of anonymity. Trilling seems to be making the same points, only with substantially less clarity. This lack of clarity isn't especially surprising, since Trilling seems to venerate the dream at the expense of the essay.

Finally, Trilling deals in epigrams which I think are supposed to sound profound, but which instead elicit one "Oh, come on" per page. E.g., his claim in "Manners, Morals, and the Novel" that "The characteristic work of the novel is to record the illusion that snobbery generates and to try to penetrate to the truth which, as the novel assumes, lies hidden beneath all the false appearances." That's it, huh?

I suppose that if you want a particular picture of intellectual life among the anti-communist left in the 1950's, this book is for you. If not, there are better ways to spend your time.