Book Review
No Child Is An Island
Freedom’s Orphans: Contemporary Liberalism and the Fate of America’s Children by David L. Tubbs
Princeton University Press, 2007
(232 pages, $27.95, hardcover)
reviewed by Gerald J. Russello
Modern liberalism sometimes seems eminently practical, even attractive: A community of free and equal citizens, each (reasonably) exercising his choices as he wishes, so long as those choices do not harm others, with the government there to ensure that no one vision, or any vision, of the good life is imposed on others or considered superior to any other.
But people are not built that way, and the liberal vision of individuals does not reflect people as they really are. People are members of communities, in particular, of families. The inclusion of children in a family erases the liberal dream of a society of fully rational adults, each individually ordering his own affairs. Children are dependent, and their needs burden, and sometimes oppose, the needs of the adults caring for them.
Yet the influence of thirty years of liberal theory remains embedded in our law and public culture. Often forgotten in political and academic discussions of individual rights is the fact that there are members of society who are not developed enough to exercise their rights. Liberal theory has little to say to (or about) them.
Liberalism has had no coherent answer to the needs of children and other dependent persons to be cared for or protected, especially when doing so would limit (by law or otherwise) the free decisions of liberal adults. In this provocative book, David L. Tubbs exposes liberalism’s neglect of children in its understanding of society.
Reluctant Liberalism
Tubbs, a professor at King’s College in New York City and a fellow of the Witherspoon Institute, begins with the English philosopher Isaiah Berlin’s influential 1958 lecture, “Two Concepts of Liberty.”
Perhaps responding to the struggle against totalitarianism, Berlin focused on what he called “negative liberty,” which, in essence, means liberalism as we know it: One’s right to pursue his own life however he chooses, even if others think his choices dangerous or wrong-headed. Negative liberty recognizes, for Tubbs, “a realm of personal inviolability, a private sphere beyond the reach of the state. Violating that sphere, regardless of the good that might accrue to the state or other citizens, would degrade or deny the victim’s humanity.”
Contemporary liberals have taken this one step further, into what Tubbs calls “moral reticence.” This is the reluctance—or in some cases, such as that of influential philosopher Thomas Nagel, the inability—to see the “difference between the good and bad use of legally protected freedoms.”
In other words, once liberal theorists have demonstrated to their satisfaction that a given behavior—the use of pornography, say, or no-fault divorce—must be legal, their analysis ends. They have nothing more to say about whether such activities should be discouraged in other ways, or even whether they can tend to denigrate liberty or harm those (such as children) whose personalities are not yet fully formed.
Gerald J. Russello is Editor of The University Bookman and a Fellow of the Chesterton Institute at Seton Hall University.
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