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The Liberal Imagination (New York Review Books Classics) Paperback – September 23, 2008

by Lionel Trilling (Author), Louis Menand (Introduction)

4.6 65 ratings

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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.

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“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

About the Author

Lionel Trilling (1905–1975) was born in New York and educated at Columbia University, to which he returned as an instructor in 1932, and where he continued to teach in the English Department throughout his long and highly distinguished career as a literary critic. Among the most influential of his many works are three collections of essays, The Liberal Imagination, The Opposing Self, and Beyond Culture; a collection of lectures, Sincerity and Authenticity; a critical study of E.M. Forster; and one novel, The Middle of the Journey (available as an NYRB Classic). The Journey Abandoned, an unfinished novel, was published posthumously in 2008. Lionel Trilling was married to the writer and critic Diana Trilling.

Louis Menand is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of English at Harvard University, and a staff writer at The New Yorker. He is the author of Discovering Modernism, The Metaphysical Club and American Studies.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ NYRB Classics; Main edition (September 23, 2008)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1590172833
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1590172834
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12.1 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.1 x 0.7 x 8.01 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #673,471 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,211 in Essays (Books)
- #2,321 in Literary Criticism & Theory
- #7,067 in Short Stories Anthologies

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Christopher (o.d.c.)

Lionel Trilling: the Professor as Prophet

Reviewed in the United States on March 7, 2015

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Publication date: 1950

Lionel Trilling was a professor at Columbia, and the familiarity with the "Great Books" engendered by teaching the Common Core is evident on nearly every page. Thus he invokes Stendhal in an essay on Sherwood Anderson, and, in an essay on Huckleberry Finn, he brings up Moliere:

"... In form and style Huckleberry Finn is an almost perfect work. Only one mistake has ever been charged against it, that it concludes with Tom Sawyer’s elaborate, too elaborate, game of Jim’s escape. Certainly this episode is too long—in the original draft it was much longer—and certainly it is a falling off, as almost anything would have to be, from the incidents of the river. Yet it has a certain formal aptness— like, say, that of the Turkish initiation which brings Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme to its close."

... which has always struck me as somewhat far-fetched, although it has stuck in my mind for more than twenty years.

The essay on The Kinsey Report, which certainly contributed to the surprise best-sellerdom of this uncompromisingly highbrow book, has some of Trilling's funniest remarks, and shows that with a little common sense, an intelligent layman can prick holes in the methodology of 'social science,' and that literary criticism need not feel subservient to anyone in a lab coat.

Here is the opening of the magnificent "Tacitus Now":

The histories of Tacitus have been put to strange uses. The princelings of Renaissance Italy consulted the Annals on how to behave with the duplicity of Tiberius. The German racists overlooked all the disagreeable things which Tacitus observed of their ancestors, took note only of his praise of the ancient chastity and independence, and thus made of the Germania their anthropological primer. But these are the aberrations; the influence of Tacitus in Europe has been mainly in the service of liberty, as he intended it to be. Perhaps this influence has been most fully felt in France, where, under the dictatorships both of the Jacobins and of Napoleon, Tacitus was regarded as a dangerously subversive writer. In America, however, he has never meant a great deal. James Fenimore Cooper is an impressive exception to our general indifference, but Cooper was temperamentally attracted by the very one of all the qualities of Tacitus which is likely to alienate most American liberals, the aristocratic color of his libertarian ideas.

In a sense, this book is almost too rich. Many times I have put this book aside, and turned to more immediately lovable critics of this era, like Leslie Fiedler or Randall Jarrell. Ultimately, however, it is Trilling who looms largest:

"... We are creatures of time, we are creatures of the historical sense, not only as men have always been but in a new way since the time of Walter Scott. Possibly this may be for the worse; we would perhaps be stronger if we believed that Now contained all things, and that we in our barbarian moment were all that had ever been. Without the sense of the past we might be more certain, less weighted down and apprehensive. We might also be less generous, and certainly we would be less aware. In any case, we have the sense of the past and must live with it, and by it."

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Aran Joseph Canes

The Importance of Imagination in a Liberal Age

Reviewed in the United States on October 5, 2021

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It’s hard to imagine a time when a work of literary criticism was a bestseller but Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination was such a book some seventy years ago. In some ways it betrays its age, the reliance of Freudian interpretations being a salient example, but in other ways the criticism is as relevant as a current issue of the New York Review of Books.

Its theme is a defense of imaginative or romantic literature against the then enthusiasm for so called realism. According to Trilling, the realist ideal is to portray life as accurately as possible within the confines of a novel. Often this resulted in emphasizing the harsh and painful aspects of twentieth century America.

In contrast, Trilling argues for the active use of the imagination. By this he means that the point of literature is not to be a metaphorical camera on society, but to engage the reader in eras, situations and characters that they would never encounter in their life. It is precisely the opposite of the realist’s animus towards romanticism. While the realist believes that depicting harsh conditions is the best way to effect social change, Trilling argues that imaginative, romantic literature is the best to engage the reader’s empathy outside the bounds of their day to day life.

There is much more to the book than this. Incisive commentary on American authors like Henry James, Mark Twain and F. Scott Fitzgerald also make for perennial interest. While not essential reading, all those who are devotees of literary criticism that is not only incisive and influential, but has something of the art of literature itself, should budget some reading time to enjoy (and you will enjoy) reading this book.

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Bryan Byrd

3 1/2 Stars - Criticism and Politics

Reviewed in the United States on September 2, 2010

According to this edition's excellent introduction by Louis Menand ( The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America ), 'The Liberal Imagination' sold 170,000 copies in hardback and paperback upon its initial release. So when he also states that this collection of essays on literature and culture made literary criticism matter to people who were not literary critics, it is hard to doubt it. There are also a great many other things Mr. Menand points out in his brief remarks, yet after finishing the collection, what stands out most is what he says the quietest.

First, it's important to note that this book is not a random collection of essays simply recycled from literary journals - Trilling had a particular intention in mind when he gathered and revised these selections. Above all, from both his preface and from the inherent points within his writing, it is apparent that he believed in a liberalism that, in its purity, seems to barely resemble today's common usage - often as not used as a shortcut term for certain political positions rather than a belief in social betterment through systemic change. Regardless, though, of how liberalism's definition may have changed over the years, Trilling sought, with this book, not to confirm 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'. These ideas Trilling understood to have been somewhat corrupted by the process of dissemination and implementation, and he hoped with his critiques 'to recall liberalism to its first essential imagination of variousness and possibility, which implies the awareness of complexity and difficulty'. Thus, 'The Liberal Imagination'.

Lionel Trilling found the 'liberal ideas and assumptions' in both contemporary (to him) literature, and in the writers of the past who 'command our continuing attention'. That is how a book of literary criticism is also a book about culture and politics. If each selection here were only a microcosmic example of that criticism, then Mr. Trilling would have fulfilled his goal - yet he takes it a step further still. Surely it is no accident that the first essay is 'Reality in America', and the last is 'The Meaning of a Literary Idea' - enforcing a structure over the entire book that moves from 'what is' to 'recalling liberalism to its imagination'. It is an extremely subtle dialectical approach, where each essay builds on previous material not so much like links in a chain but rather like equidistant guideposts just barely within sight of one another.

Lastly - by way of summary - there was also one other goal. Since Mr. Trilling was well aware of the possible abuses inherent in pursuing liberal social theory, he designed 'The Liberal Imagination' to warn of those excesses and to refute Stalinist ideology. This was admitted by Mr. Trilling himself, years later, as noted in the introduction. So indirectly does he approach it though (or because of the gulf that separates the last sixty years) that frankly, many readers may miss this idea entirely without help, as this reader would have. This blind spot accurately summarizes the sea change of reference points between his time and ours, and it also illustrates what Mr. Menand lightly touches on near the end of his introduction - what level of relevance can this book have to today?

That isn't to suggest there is none - to the extent that the two time periods share similarities, the author's comments are still worthwhile - but the liberal imagination of the 1950's seems essentially different from the liberal ideology of today, so much so that they might not recognize one another if they were to meet. Political commentary through literary criticism has fragmented into special interest agendas instead of a call for cohesiveness, and Lionel Trilling's attempt to be liberalism's gadfly is quaint and outdated, no matter how appealing that intellectual tradition appears in the rear-view mirror.

Despite this, there are still good reasons to spend time with these essays. Taken individually, they are of interest purely on the literary level, and Trilling's challenging style is excellent mental exercise. Concerning subjects as varied as Huckleberry Finn, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and the Kinsey Report, these essays examine the country's moral life as often as its political one, though perhaps in his day, these two were not yet divorced from one another. Yet even this simpler approach to Trilling's work has its problems, as the upheavals of the 1960's - and the resultant attitude shifts - were still almost two decades away from the time of his writing. In retrospect, social changes of the last forty years make his assumptions and conclusions incomplete.

But in his cautionary statements, he could be prescient. 'Where misunderstanding serves others as an advantage, one is helpless to make oneself understood'. If that doesn't describe our current situation, nothing does.

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Robert M

A superb book on books

Reviewed in Spain on June 10, 2020

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The lists of "the best books of the year" (or decade or Century or else), are all useless, futile - a tad silly. But we like and enjoy them. I read those lists to make sure my favourites are usually in them. It is with relief that I always see this book in the best non-fiction very often - notoriously in the Time, best non-fiction books of the XXth Century.
And quite deservedly so, because it is an excellent book that came to be a best-seller with sections like "Tacitus Now" and "Art and Neurosis" (which seems a line of dialogue straight out of a Woody Allen movie). But these were the pre-Internet and even pre-television times. The authors then were trying to set the bar of knowledge to attract the audience, and not lowering the same bar (and writing how long it will take to read the pieces) to be more "popular".
The essays are all wonderful and do paint a priceless picture of the America right after the second War World, still celebrating but already worry for the Cold War. As I said, all articles are bits of wisdom but some are outstandingly good - like those on Kipling and also Huckleberry Fynn. Together they make for a wonderful shot of pure culture.
Two further notes:
A very special mention to the introduction of Louis Menand, author himself of another dose of the best American culture, The Metaphysical Club. The introduction is superb and at the same time short, not to be in the way of a wonderful read.
And last but not least, a word of praise to the New York Review of Books edition: sober, classic, making for a perfect item - a book to keep and re-read.

Dr. George Pollard

Most highly recommended.

Reviewed in Canada on August 17, 2017

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A remarkable set of middle twentieth century critical essays. Not one loses its relevance when re-read, repeatedly. Most highly recommended. dgp

Dave L

Fine essays on various books and authors and their social ...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 27, 2014

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Fine essays on various books and authors and their social surroundings, full of insights, they actually make you want to read the books he deals with. His essay on the first volume of the Kinsey Report (when it was promoted as a best-seller) shows a humane, tolerant, but sceptical view of this early attempt to quantify and analyse people's sex lives.

Nakita Morrison

Delight The Intellect

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 29, 2017

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I'm pleased that Christopher Hitchens thought of the masses in persuading Lionel Trilling's wife to release these essays, they are delightful on the brain, and I never tire of bobbing in and out of this vernacular.

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