Liberalism as a political contender has been on the ropes for the past few decades, pummeled relentlessly by an aggressive conservatism. But as the conservative movement has faded in Great Britain and increasingly fractured in the United States, advocates of liberalism are getting back on their feet and looking to regain the offensive. Paul Starr, a Pulitzer Prize–winning sociologist and cofounder of The American Prospect, has written a wide-ranging brief for liberalism that aims to reach beyond the academy to a general audience. Freedom's Power, he writes, “may be read both as a rebuttal to contemporary conservatism and as a corrective to some currents of liberal thought and progressive politics. I set about writing it because it seemed to me that there was no cogent, concise, accessible, and up-to-date account of the liberal project, at least not as I understand it” (p. x).

Starr's account of the “liberal project” takes a historical form. His story begins with the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and ends with the Bush administration's debacle in Iraq. The first part of his narrative traces the development of “constitutional liberalism.” Revolutionaries in Britain and America most obviously succeeded in placing limits upon a previously arbitrary and overweening state. Yet Starr wants to stress the overlooked achievement of constitutional liberalism: In controlling the power of the state, it actually fostered stronger national governments. By setting limits to state intrusion into private life, economic activity, and religious practices, liberalism engendered the energy and trust that underpinned prosperity and national greatness. He writes: “How to subject government to a discipline that would protect liberty and strengthen overall societal powers was a central challenge for classical liberalism” (p. 53).

Classical liberalism, for all of its emancipatory capacity, however, was not democratic: Despite its universalistic language, it excluded many from political rights and hamstrung governments from fostering the conditions for human development. It was only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that “democratic liberalism” emerged to bring the liberal project to fruition. Now liberalism took on its contemporary meaning (though some free-market advocates still contest ownership of the word), signifying equal education, the rights of labor, control of corporate power, cultural freedom, and human rights. This modern version of liberalism, Starr argues, has an exceptional record, weathering “the long crisis” between 1914 and 1991 by defeating every illiberal foe while enhancing the lives of people from all walks of life.

The final section of Freedom's Power takes up “The Liberal Project of Our Time” (pp. 181–237). Here, Starr's story assumes a more ambiguous cast: While liberalism has made dramatic strides in Western and Eastern Europe in recent years, in the United States it has lost its grip on political power and been successfully framed by its opponents in pejorative terms. Yet the escalating failures of the conservative project in the hands of President George W. Bush provide an opening for a revitalization of liberalism. The author emphasizes how liberalism offers the most promising alternative to Bush's disastrous undertakings in unilateralism both abroad and at home (i.e., preventive war and uncontrolled executive power): “At its best, modern liberalism has stood for inclusive, democratic partnerships at home and abroad. These partnerships … supply the political power for realizing the ends of a free and just society and a secure world. And the partnerships themselves express the core liberal values of mutual respect and equality” (p. 220).

This account of liberalism is gracefully written and frequently perceptive, although scholarly readers may become impatient at times with the lengthy treatment of stock material. What political scientists are likely to find most interesting about the book—and most controversial—is the particular twist that Starr gives to liberalism. As the title and the subtitle of the book suggest, his is a muscular liberalism. “The charge,” he writes, “used to be leveled by Fascists and Communists; now it comes chiefly from conservatives. Liberalism, they say, is a form of weakness” (p. 15). Rebutting current talk that liberals are a bunch of “peaceniks” and the Democratic Party is the “mommy party,” Starr is intent on demonstrating that liberal virtues are the source of liberalism's power, which has, throughout its history, bested all rivals.

Portraying liberalism as an engine of power links the author to a tradition in American political theory whose most cogent proponent, perhaps, was Herbert Croly. Like Croly, Starr looks to a statist liberalism that follows Hamiltonian methods to achieve Jeffersonian ends. He has an impressive case to make about liberalism's accomplishments in national and domestic security from Woodrow Wilson to the 1960s. At the same time, in his admiration for Cold War liberals, he is insufficiently attuned to their own hubris about American might. The conservatives who worked for George W. Bush were not the first to stretch presidential power in the service of imperial misadventures. The contemporary liberals whom Starr chides for their “overly broad rejection of force” (p. 217) in reaction to the war in Vietnam seem to have drawn a lesson about the meaning of that war that he himself has not confronted.

The liberalism that Starr advocates is well disposed to the creative uses of state power yet skeptical about the potential for citizens to have a more direct impact upon it. Democratic liberalism, as he describes it, depends upon a productive capitalist economy intelligently managed by the state for common purposes. Liberals who want something more, such as “economic democracy” or “communitarianism,” are wandering into political irrelevancies. And as for the watchword of the 1960s, “participatory democracy,” he says that it is “unrealistic about human energies and interests” (p. 202).

If liberalism's principal vulnerability in contemporary discourse is that it is too easily caricatured as “effete,” Starr has written a powerful rejoinder. However, if liberalism is equally vulnerable to the charge that it has become “elitist,” his work may come off more as a symptom than as a remedy for its weakness in the popular imagination.