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In this trenchant challenge to social engineering, Paul Gottfried analyzes a patricide: the slaying of nineteenth-century liberalism by the managerial state. Many people, of course, realize that liberalism no longer connotes distributed powers and bourgeois moral standards, the need to protect civil society from an encroaching state, or the virtues of vigorous self-government. Many also know that today's "liberals" have far different goals from those of their predecessors, aiming as they do largely to combat prejudice, to provide social services and welfare benefits, and to defend expressive and "lifestyle" freedoms. Paul Gottfried does more than analyze these historical facts, however. He builds on them to show why it matters that the managerial state has replaced traditional liberalism: the new regimes of social engineers, he maintains, are elitists, and their rule is consensual only in the sense that it is unopposed by any widespread organized opposition.


Throughout the western world, increasingly uprooted populations unthinkingly accept centralized controls in exchange for a variety of entitlements. In their frightening passivity, Gottfried locates the quandary for traditionalist and populist adversaries of the welfare state. How can opponents of administrative elites show the public that those who provide, however ineptly, for their material needs are the enemies of democratic self-rule and of independent decision making in family life? If we do not wake up, Gottfried warns, the political debate may soon be over, despite sporadic and ideologically confused populist rumblings in both Europe and the United States.

Tabla de contenidos provista por Syndetics

• Introduction(p. vii)
• Chapter One In Search of a Liberal Essence(p. 3)
• Chapter Two Liberalism vs. Democracy(p. 30)
• Chapter Three Public Administration and Liberal Democracy(p. 49)
• Chapter Four Pluralism and Liberal Democracy(p. 72)
• Chapter Five Mass Democracy and the Populist Alternative(p. 110)
• Conclusion(p. 135)
• Notes(p. 143)
• Index 177

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CHOICE Review

Liberalism as known in 19th-century America and Europe has long departed, an historical development often described and now again lamented by Gottfried (humanities, Elizabethtown College). What is commonly known as liberalism today is the quest to end social and economic discrimination and provide benefits that guarantee all citizens a minimum standard of living. Whereas the minimal state was the centerpiece of classical liberalism, the instrument of 20th-century liberalism is the managerial state. The ethos of this state is mass democracy, globalism, and cultural pluralism, expressed in generous immigration policies and efforts to socialize the public to accept this ethos. The shift began in an ongoing cycle of influence: the public demands benefits, the managerial state eagerly meets the demands, and the state's policies encourage additional demands. In the process, Gottfried warns, not only liberty but the cultural distinctives on which this nation was built will be lost. His wide-ranging survey of European and American views covers advocates of the new liberalism such as John Dewey and the libertarian and populist critics of this trend. This is clearly a polemic but one well documented from both sides of the argument. Upper-division undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty. W. C. Johnson Bethel College (MN)

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

Paul Edward Gottfried is Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College and author of, among other books, Carl Schmitt: Politics and Theory, The Search for Historical Meaning; and The Conservative Movement. Editor in chief of This World, he is also a senior editor of Telos and a contributing editor to Chronicles and Humanitas.