Liberalisms, not Liberalism.

The article discusses the future of American liberalism. The future of American liberalism has long concerned not merely the modern professional intellectuals who have thought themselves responsible for it, but numerous people beyond them who have feared for what they interpret to be their liberties. The author of a valuable thesis, The Idea of Progress in America, 1815-1860 (1944), concluded that the idea "was the most popular American philosophy, thoroughly congenial to the ideas and interests of the age." He has undertaken to define liberalism "rigidly," as containing the essence of individualism; and by that measure can find no important deviation from a road of events which, from colonial times to the present, runs downward and away from liberalism, through capitalism (both liberal and monopoly) and through two world wars to the garrison and police states. The book "The Decline of American Liberalism" professes a certain impersonality. It concedes that there may have been a rise in democracy, and that there may well be worthy, or, at least, defensible, values in other non-liberal aims and accomplishments which author finds in progressivism, socialism, and nationalism.