Liberal Futures? Emotional Investment, Surplus Value, and The Forsyte Saga

Abstract

In his preface to The Liberal Imagination (1950), Lionel Trilling articulates what has since become a common point of departure for discussions of liberalism and literary culture. Concerned with the increasing tendency within liberalism to “organize the elements of life in a rational way,” he sees it drifting “toward a denial of the emotions and the imagination.” Significantly, though, Trilling does not see a fundamental opposition between liberalism and the emotions. Rather, they stand in a paradoxical relation to each other: “The paradox is that liberalism is concerned with the emotions above all else, as proof of which the word happiness stands at the very centre of its thought, but in its effort to establish the emotions, or certain among them, in some sort of freedom, liberalism somehow tends to deny them in their full possibility.” The task for Trilling is to recuperate this “full possibility” for what has become an increasingly abstract and ratiocinated liberalism, and he sees modern literature, which, at heart, has a “bone to pick with the rational intellect,” as laying down the challenge for liberalism in the twentieth century. As he puts it in “The Meaning of a Literary Idea,” the last essay in The Liberal Imagination, modern writers demand of liberal democrats “a great agility and ingenuity in coping with their antagonism to our social and political ideals.”[1]