T wentieth-century American liberals have a record of glorious achievements. In the 1920s, they responded to the hysteria unleashed in the wake of World War I by crafting the modern First Amendment. In the 1930s, they mobilized to succor the suffering of millions in the midst of the Great Depression. In the 1960s, they were at the forefront of the movement for civil rights for African-Americans and economic security for the sick and elderly.

For the first seven decades of the twentieth century, liberal intellectuals were buoyed by a historical narrative that assumed the world was progressing their way. They saw themselves as a vanguard guiding the country into a future that resembled their ideals. But in the years since the 1960s, liberals, drawn into the interest-group ideologies that emerged during that era, have largely lost their way. Paul Starr’s important new book Freedom’s Power: The True Force of Liberalism tries to reconnect contemporary liberalism with its illustrious past.

Freedom’s Power is designed to guide a liberal restoration by scraping away the barnacles of past political shipwrecks so that a refitted ideology can sail to success. Indeed, with Republicans in disarray and Democrats in a position to possibly control both elective branches of government after 2008, liberalism looks as though it could be poised to make a comeback. A co-founder and co-editor of the liberal magazine the American Prospect as well as a professor at Princeton University and a widely published author, Starr is in a strong position to seize the moment. But Starr’s zeal for a purified, ahistorical liberalism makes it impossible for him to come to grips with its past failures and future opportunities, a reckoning necessary for a liberal rebirth.

There are few books that state their thesis as straightforwardly and effectively as does this relentlessly upbeat effort. As Starr explains in the preface, the book is "about what some may regard as the counterintuitive propositions that freedom requires power in the form of a strong and capable constitutional state and that modern democratic liberalism–by enlarging that state in some respects while constraining it in others–makes it possible for a society to achieve both greater power and greater freedom." Time and again, he restates his thesis that the modern liberal society is successful because its state is "strong yet constrained"indeed strong because constrained. This is the classical theory of freedom’s power."

Starr sees contemporary liberalism as a juste milieu. He explains, in the somewhat dated framework of the New Deal era, that while leftists wanted to "socialize the means of production" and the right to "rely on the free market," liberals "lacking an equally comprehensive remedy" had been willing "to mix state and market and testing out different hybrid approaches." His liberalism represents an appealing tradition of open-minded gradualist experimentation. And yet Starr is anxious to refute perhaps the most common criticism of American liberalism, namely that its talk about experimentation implies an absence of long-held underlying principles. Liberalism, say its conservative detractors, lacks a navel, an organic connection to the American political tradition. Not so, insists Starr, who, presenting himself as a great-great-great grandson of the Enlightenment, explains, "Unlike those who see a sharp discontinuity between classical and modern liberalism"–usually differentiated between the original small and later large "l" version–I see the two as closely related–the latter growing out of the former in response to historical experience." And to prove his point he spends four chapters and 100 pages on a longuer-laden, potted history of English and American liberalism in an attempt to teach the untutored reader the correct conceptual table manners for enjoying the feast offered up by the current variety. Mature readers would be advised to skim this primer-like exercise about the inevitable march of the liberal spirit through the problems of the division of powers, separation of church and state, and the public/private distinction.

Nevertheless, what’s peculiar about Starr’s presentation is that, after having marched the liberal spirit across this historical landscape, he then falters, barely discussing the intellectual origins of liberalism as we know it today. Following the conventional narrative, Starr sees liberalism as an early twentieth-century reaction to the growth of monopoly corporations under the regime of limited-government liberalism. He’s right as far as that goes. But modern liberalism was much more than that. It was, at the time of the founding of the modern American university, an attempt by Progressive intellectuals to literally re-found the Republic.

When Virginia Woolf made her famous assertion that "on or about December 1910 human character changed," she (perhaps unknowingly) spoke directly to the hopes of a new generation of American intellectuals. They had shed the Founding Fathers’ pessimism about human nature; they hoped, in the words of the modernist poet Ezra Pound, to "make it new." The notions of continuity Starr insists on would have seemed odd to men like Herbert Croly, founding editor of the New Republic, who saw reverence for the constitution as a form of "monarchism"; Charles Beard, the ground-breaking constitutional critic and author of An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States; and, despite the stray quote that Starr produces, pragmatist John Dewey, who dismissed the Founding Fathers’ idea of natural rights in favor of what he called "creative intelligence." From journalists to professors, these progressive thinkers saw themselves breaking sharply with the American past even as they employed some of its elements to create a re-founded regime led in large measure by disinterested intellectuals, experts, and social scientists like themselves.