Freedom’s Power: The True Force of Liberalism
By Paul Starr
Basic Books £15.99, 256 pages
FT bookshop price: £12.79

Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing: The New Liberal Menace in America
By Stephen Marshall
Disinformation £9.99, 384 pages
FT bookshop price: £7.99

Liberalism is a series of paradoxes. It weakens autocratic power, and strengthens the democratic state. As it builds a strong state, it limits that state’s power over its citizens. Classic, pre-19th-century liberalism held out the promise of rights for all, but in practice denied them to the majority. As liberal democratic practice developed in the 20th century, state intervention to provide welfare grew - and liberals became less censorious, and more respectful, of private behaviour. Private life became more truly private while public life, the practice of government, became more open.

Paul Starr has in his comparatively slim book, Freedom’s Power, provided an account of the historical flow and present state and travails of liberalism that is limpid in brevity and graceful in judgment. As an evocation of the central importance of liberalism to the modern world, and the shape it takes in democratic states, it will be very hard to beat.

Liberalism grew in opposition to the powers that sought to crush it (and often succeeded). These were, on the other hand, often infected by it and evolved gradually in a liberal direction. The classic instance of this, as Starr stresses, is England from the 17th century on. It was, as he puts it, “the exception to the rule that medieval constitutionalism had collapsed into absolutism”. English liberalism evolved whereas France sought to achieve it in one bound: though the latter offered a more complete vision of human emancipation, the former was a firmer basis for a liberal society.

Starr is very much a “welfare liberal”, stressing how classic liberalism accommodated the demands of the enfranchised industrial working class. In a rare sardonic comment, he writes that “by enabling workers to avoid the loss of… independence that comes with destitution, these [welfare] programmes preserved their liberty and self respect at the most vulnerable moments in their lives”. In the long run, welfare liberalism killed socialism, the latter now no longer regarded in the democratic world as providing a strategy for government in any but the mildest form.

Starr commends liberal internationalism, seeing in democracy a “breathtaking” endorsement of human rights, self-determination and free trade. He also says he supported the first Gulf war and the Afghan invasion, but is deeply opposed to the invasion of Iraq. Here, he lapses from a tough-minded to a conventional liberal posture, and it is the most unsatisfactory part of the book. The arrogant, deeply illiberal and incompetent conduct of the war is a fit subject for any pen, liberal or conservative, but the responsibility of the critic is to consider the object of the attack - the regime of Saddam Hussein - and give some account of why refraining would have contained the threat. This isn’t a rhetorical point - there is such an account. But only if it is delivered can a judgment be made on the critique.

He gives two warnings, which are apposite. First, that politics in the US (and less dramatically elsewhere) is increasingly dominated by the rich - who are now demanding more political power. And, linked to that, the fact that citizens are disengaging. “For some time,” he writes, “the imperative has been clear. Liberalism has no way to advance without a majoritarian politics capable of restoring the kind of inclusive democratic partnership that was the basis of modern liberalism’s achievements.” American liberals seeking the key to a “majoritarian politics” had better read this.

And not read a book that is as silly as Starr’s is wise. Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing is a ramble through a series of attitudes that Stephen Marshall has towards the “new liberal menace in America” - which, he believes, brings capitalism, and thus poverty; democracy, and thus chaos. It is, to be sure, a product of and a reaction to a Bush-led America. But where Starr has thought about what this means for politics, Marshall thinks of what it means for hyperbole. “The traditional liberal foundation of American politics is being sucked out of the equation,” he intones at the beginning of his book. At the end of his, Starr writes: “The story of America is of a nation that has grown greater and stronger by becoming more diverse and inclusive and extending the fruits of liberty more widely among his people.” These fruits remain fresh.

John Lloyd is a contributing editor to the FT Magazine.