Eight prominent scholars consider whether Louis Hartz's interpretation of liberalism in his classic 1955 book should be repudiated or updated, and whether a study of America as a "liberal society" is still a rewarding undertaking.

Here, leading scholars-including Hodgson himself-confront the longstanding theory that a liberal consensus shaped the United States after World War II. The essays draw on fresh research to examine how the consensus related to key policy areas, how it was viewed by different factions and groups, what its limitations were, and why it fell apart in the late 1960s.

In the history of Western thought, friendship's relationship to politics is checkered. Friendship was seen as key to understanding political life in the ancient world, but it was then ignored for centuries. Today, friendship has again become a desirable framework for political interaction. In Friendship Reconsidered, P. E. Digeser contends that our rich and varied practices of friendship multiply and moderate connections to politics. Along the way, she sets forth a series of ideals that appreciates friendship's many forms and its dynamic relationship to individuality, citizenship, political and legal institutions, and international relations. Digeser argues that, as a set of practices bearing a family resemblance to one another, friendship calls our attention to the importance of norms of friendly action and the mutual recognition of motive. Focusing on these attributes clarifies the place of self-interest and duty in friendship and points to its compatibility with the pursuit of individuality. She shows how friendship can provide islands of stability in a sea of citizen-strangers and, in a delegitimized political environment, a bridge between differences. She also explores how political and legal institutions can both undermine and promote friendship. Digeser then looks to the positive potential of international friendships, in which states mutually strive to protect the just character of one another's institutions and policies. Friendship's repertoire of motives and manifestations complicates its relationship to politics, Digeser concludes, but it can help us realize the limits and possibilities for generating new opportunities for cooperation.

How did liberalism, the great political tradition that from the New Deal to the 1960s seemed to dominate American politics, fall from favor so far and so fast? In this history of liberalism since the 1930s, a distinguished historian offers an eloquent account of postwar liberalism, where it came from, where it has gone, and why. The book supplies a crucial chapter in the history of twentieth-century American politics as well as a valuable and clear perspective on the state of our nation's politics today. Liberalism and Its Discontents moves from a penetrating interpretation of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal to an analysis of the profound and frequently corrosive economic, social, and cultural changes that have undermined the liberal tradition. The book moves beyond an examination of the internal weaknesses of liberalism and the broad social and economic forces it faced to consider the role of alternative political traditions in liberalism's downfall. What emerges is a picture of a dominant political tradition far less uniform and stable--and far more complex and contested--than has been argued. The author offers as well a masterly assessment of how some of the leading historians of the postwar era explained (or failed to explain) liberalism and other political ideologies in the last half-century. He also makes clear how historical interpretation was itself a reflection of liberal assumptions that began to collapse more quickly and completely than almost any scholar could have imagined a generation ago. As both political history and a critique of that history, Liberalism and Its Discontents, based on extraordinary essays written over the last decade, leads to a new understanding of the shaping of modern America.

Shifting faculty roles in a changing landscape Ernest L. Boyer's landmark book Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate challenged the publish-or-perish status quo that dominated the academic landscape for generations. His powerful and enduring argument for a new approach to faculty roles and rewards continues to play a significant part of the national conversation on scholarship in the academy. Though steeped in tradition, the role of faculty in the academic world has shifted significantly in recent decades. The rise of the non-tenure-track class of professors is well documented. If the historic rule of promotion and tenure is waning, what role can scholarship play in a fragmented, unbundled academy? Boyer offers a still much-needed approach. He calls for a broadened view of scholarship, audaciously refocusing its gaze from the tenure file and to a wider community. This expanded edition offers, in addition to the original text, a critical introduction that explores the impact of Boyer's views, a call to action for applying Boyer's message to the changing nature of faculty work, and a discussion guide to help readers start a new conversation about how Scholarship Reconsidered applies today.

The Soul of the American University is a classic and much discussed account of the changing roles of Christianity in shaping American higher education, presented here in a newly revised edition to offer insights for a modern era. As late as the World War II era, it was not unusual even for state schools to offer chapel services or for leading universities to refer to themselves as “Christian” institutions. From the 1630s through the 1950s, when Protestantism provided an informal religious establishment, colleges were expected to offer religious and moral guidance. Following reactions in the 1960s against the WASP establishment and concerns for diversity, this specifically religious heritage quickly disappeared and various secular viewpoints predominated. In this updated edition of a landmark volume, George Marsden explores the history of the changing roles of Protestantism in relation to other cultural and intellectual factors shaping American higher education. Far from a lament for a lost golden age, Marsden offers a penetrating analysis of the changing ways in which Protestantism intersected with collegiate life, intellectual inquiry, and broader cultural developments. He tells the stories of many of the nation's pace-setting universities at defining moments in their histories. By the late nineteenth-century when modern universities emerged, debates over Darwinism and higher criticism of the Bible were reshaping conceptions of Protestantism; in the twentieth century important concerns regarding diversity and inclusion were leading toward ever-broader conceptions of Christianity; then followed attacks on the traditional WASP establishment which brought dramatic disestablishment of earlier religious privilege. By the late twentieth century, exclusive secular viewpoints had become the gold standard in higher education, while our current era is arguably “post-secular”. The Soul of the American University Revisited deftly examines American higher education as it exists in the twenty-first century.

Highlighting the social tensions that confront the liberal tradition, Pierre Manent draws a portrait of what we, citizens of modern liberal democracies, have become. For Manent, a discussion of liberalism encompasses the foundations of modern society, its secularism, its individualism, and its conception of rights. The frequent incapacity of the morally neutral, democratic state to further social causes, he argues, derives from the liberal stance that political life does not serve a higher purpose. Through quick-moving, highly synthetic essays, he explores the development of liberal thinking in terms of a single theme: the decline of theological politics. The author traces the liberal stance to Machiavelli, who, in seeking to divorce everyday life from the pervasive influence of the Catholic church, separated politics from all notions of a cosmological order. What followed, as Manent demonstrates in his analyses of Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau, Guizot, and Constant, was the evolving concept of an individual with no goals outside the confines of the self and a state with no purpose but to prevent individuals from dominating one another. Weighing both the positive and negative effects of such a political arrangement, Manent raises important questions about the fundamental political issues of the day, among them the possibility of individual rights being reconciled with the necessary demands of political organization, and the desirability of a government system neutral about religion but not about public morals.