Conservative liberalism

...It would be hard to find a more classical case than this book—as which it is well worth reading—of the bewildered liberal who,. accustomed for two hundred years to being the enfant terrible, suddenly finds himself dismissed as an old fogey. (Is there, for instance, any word which sounds more comically conservative today than the word “progressive”? 

Liberalism began as a protest against the vices of the Old Order, political tyranny which claimed eternal validity for temporal structures, religious fanaticism which attempted to impose by physical force beliefs which, however vital to salvation, can only be acquired by subjective acts of faith, human ignorance which held many things as beliefs which were really propositions verifiable by experiment, and human fear which evaded responsibility for its desires by denying them consciousness. Against these enemies, liberalism have the proper offense of weapons, skeptical rationalism, pragmatism, naturalism, pedagogy–all forms of reflection. But now– and no one knows this better than Mr. Mumford– it is on the defensive and against quite another enemy. The new tyrant is a technician, the new fanatic a pedagogue, the new ignoramus a relavist, the new coward a naturalist, the new ultramontane an agnostic. What is poor Little Bo-Peep, whose liberal Super-ego, as Mr. Mumford would call it, is shocked by carnivorous habits, to do when her very own sheep start behaving like wolves?

The emergence of the New Order within a liberalized culture, is itself proof of how brilliantly liberalism has succeeded in its historic mission of unmasking. From Montaigne to Freud it has shown up the pretender to faith, justice, chastity, but in the assumption that men were required to be pious, just, and chaste, the unmasker and the hypocrite were all time at one. Neither foresaw that round the corner lay another and much more dangerous problem, that Requiredness itself.

“In Poor Shape,” [a review of The Condition of Man by Lewis Mumford], The Sewanee Review, Autumn 1944. In E. Mendelson, ed., W. H. Auden: Prose, Vol,. II 1939-1948, p. 222.