Eugene Goodheart, Holding the Center: In Defense of Political Trimming

Excerpt

The reviews, essays, and books that Eugene Goodheart has written constitute a major contribution to humanist discourse and cultural criticism, to the liberal imagination at its best. Not political liberalism, though this son of Russian Jews, raised on May Day parades and socialist dreams, and inspired as a young man by Paul Robeson and Theodore Dreiser, identifies himself as a liberal Democrat. The liberalism that Goodheart represents in his writing is non-partisan, informed by a moderate temperament and shaped by a centrist perspective. It locates him in a tradition of affiliated (however different) thinkers and multi-faceted inquiring minds that includes Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold, George Orwell, and, especially, Lionel Trilling, who was Goodheart’s teacher at Columbia University, where he received his PhD in 1961. …