IN 1935, the stakes could not have been higher. Hitler ruled Germany. Mussolini had been in power for thirteen years. Civil war was brewing in Spain. Stalin was poised to begin his bloodiest purges in the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, in Paris, Louis Aragon, André Gide, Ilya Ehrenburg and other intellectuals organized an International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture.

For the stakes of culture, too, were high, not least in Paris, where Ehrenburg, a fervent Communist, was beaten up in the street by André Breton, the surrealist writer, for having denounced all art that was not suitably proletarian. The defense of culture at the writers’ congress was in fact synonymous with the defense against fascism. That is, it was a conference firmly of the left. Ehrenburg had his little moment of vengeance; Breton was excluded.

The English novelist E. M. Forster, one of the speakers at the Palais de la Mutualité (others included Heinrich Mann, Isaac Babel, Bertolt Brecht, Boris Pasternak and Tristan Tzara), soon got bored with the overheated leftist rhetoric. Forster recalled having “to sit through many eulogies of Soviet culture, and to hear the name of Karl Marx detonate again and again like a well-placed charge, and draw after it the falling masonry of applause.”

No wonder his speech on the importance of free expression failed to excite the crowd of fellow intellectuals. He must have cut a quaintly old-fashioned figure, dressed in his tweed suit, talking about literature in a soft, reedy voice. The leftists regarded him as a bourgeois individualist, hopelessly out of touch with the important struggles of his time. In the account of one sympathetic observer: “It was as if the audience considered Mr. Forster and all his kind . . . already as extinct as the dodo.”¹

In truth, Forster was anything but an old fuddy-duddy. His defense of literary freedom was sparked by a strong desire for sexual freedom, in his own case, freedom for homosexuals. But he was undeniably a champion of individual liberty rather than something so abstract as the people’s revolution. Forster was a liberal. Perhaps the term humanist would be better. “Liberalism” is open to conflicting interpretations. In the United States it is associated with leftism, and the view that the state should play a powerful role in building a more equal society. In Europe, the classic sense of liberalism means the exact opposite—conservative, laissez-faire economics. But liberalism for Forster and others of his ilk is as much a state of mind as a political program, something that might be described best in three key words: (individual) freedom, moderation and tolerance—themes that are much under attack these days, not just from Islamist and other religious fanatics, but also from some of those who have set themselves up as defenders of the West against the Islamic threat.

IN 1935, as now, this type of liberalism was under fire from both political extremes. Though in our current moment—in the wake of the death of Marxism—certainly more from the right than the left. But the lines of attack are similar. First of all, from the radical point of view, moderation—toujours, pas trop de zèle, in the phrase of Talleyrand, avoid zeal at all costs—is soft, wishy-washy and hopelessly inadequate in the war against fascism, for the rebirth of the race, the reconquista of the true faith, the proletarian revolution or whatnot. There appears to be nothing heroic about moderation or tolerance; on the contrary, they are antiheroic. The liberal temperament lacks Romantic appeal. And the stress on individual liberty, instead of collective progress or national vigor, smacks of bourgeois complacency. A radical cause demands sacrifice. The typical bourgeois is assumed to be too addicted to his comfort to sacrifice anything, least of all his own life.

I believe it was Werner Sombart (1863–1941), a German thinker of the early twentieth century, who coined the phrase Komfortismus, and he did not mean anything positive. It was certainly the French radical lawyer Jacques Vergès who once described social democracy as disgusting and debased because of its banality, its lack of grandeur.² The search for happiness, he said, is typical of bourgeois social democracy, thus despicable. A radical leftist himself, Vergès was inspired in this attitude by one of the extreme right-wing assassins of Walter Rathenau, the liberal German foreign minister in the Weimar period. In the words of the murderer, a young naval officer: “I fight to give the people a destiny but not to give them happiness.” Here is the antiliberal stance in a nutshell.

But liberalism is also denounced by others as a fraud; to their mind, liberals pretend to be tolerant and moderate, with a real agenda of protecting their own elitist interests. Tolerance, such antiliberals claim, suggests an attitude of superiority. You tolerate, but are not prepared to engage seriously with people and views you consider to be beneath you. And moderation is a deliberate ploy to neutralize radical critiques of the status quo, or indeed anything that might challenge the Komfortismus of the liberal elites.

In fact, as Forster’s speech in Paris made clear, the case for individual freedom need be neither bourgeois nor complacent, with his stress on the importance of pleasure and the freedom to enjoy life, physically, spiritually as well as intellectually. When the Rolling Stones performed in Prague in 1990, less than a year after the Velvet Revolution ended Communist rule, Václav Havel and more than a hundred thousand fans celebrated the event as a liberation—from official puritanism, from bureaucratic oppression, from a tyranny over the human spirit. Tom Stoppard wrote a beautiful play inspired by this occasion called Rock ‘n’ Roll, cast in the form of a debate. On one side were those, like Havel himself, who saw rock music as an essential tool of liberation in an oppressive society: Mick Jagger and Frank Zappa sticking their tongues out at the commissars. Others saw the sensual pleasure of rock records (smuggled into the country at some risk) as a form of frivolous individualism, politically meaningless, a naive illusion. Only direct, political action would do. Stoppard’s play nicely echoed the Paris writers’ congress of 1935. The reason, however, that rock and roll was not trivial for Havel was his liberal conviction, which matched Forster’s, that the freedom to enjoy pleasure was as much worth fighting for as the freedom of opinion or belief. And his fight did involve serious self-sacrifice; he spent years in prison for sticking to his liberal principles.

THE ANTILIBERAL case has two more angles, which are actually contradictory. One is that liberals tolerate everything, but don’t believe in anything. Belief in pleasure doesn’t count. That is just a form of Komfortismus. Liberals, so the reasoning goes, are even prepared to tolerate intolerance. Since they don’t believe in anything strongly enough to defend it, let alone sacrifice their lives for it, they end up inviting more vigorous enemies to destroy the very liberties they claim to enjoy. The barbarians will triumph precisely because they do believe in something, unlike the decadent Romans at the end of their self-indulgent empire. This particular argument is often heard today from men and women who claim to be defending Western civilization from the Islamic barbarians. They attack Islam for its intolerance, its hatred of the West, its oppression of women; but they attack liberals for their languid indifference and their cowardly appeasement with equal, if not greater, zeal. One even detects a peculiar tone of envy in these polemics, envy of the true believers, as though we Westerners need our own form of submission to an absolute faith.

The irony of this position is that the maquis of the West often claim to be fighting for so-called Enlightenment values, as though these were synonymous with Western civilization. But even if we were to grant them this self-congratulatory view of the West, much Enlightenment thinking, if anything, sets great value on individualism, skepticism, tolerance and moderation. Radical versions of the Enlightenment might have justified the burning of churches, the killing of priests and other forms of revolutionary terror, but I hope this is not quite what the anti-Muslim defenders of the West have in mind.

THE HISTORY of antiliberalism is, of course, as much a part of European civilization as the Enlightenment. In fact, it has its roots in the anti-Enlightenment. Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821), a diplomat and philosopher steeped in classical European civilization, denounced liberals for their “indifference in the guise of tolerance.” Liberals, Protestants, scientists, indeed all men who believe in reason as a positive human quality, are the enemies of Maistre’s ideal state, whose perfect order is imposed by the authoritarian rule of Church and Monarchy. Anything that threatens authority, and thus unity, has to be crushed. The hero of Maistre’s utopia, a kind of nationwide concentration camp, is the hangman, to whom falls the distasteful but essential task of enforcing public order. In Maistre’s view, freethinking always leads to anarchy. Man needs the authority of the Church and God’s firm commands as much as he needs the hangman. The very idea that people should be encouraged to think for themselves is a threat to society. Tolerance signified to Maistre, as to all antiliberals, a lack of belief, hence the idea that tolerance means indifference. And lack of belief, more than anything, signifies the Fall of Man.

ONE CAN go back much further, certainly, than Maistre’s counter-Enlightenment to find similar examples of loathing of the skeptic or the unbeliever. Disbelief has been associated with materialism since biblical times, and thus, quite logically, with merchants. Tolerance is an essential part of doing business. If there is money to be made, it does not pay to interfere in the beliefs or habits of others. One of the things Voltaire, as a fugitive from the Church and Monarchy of prerepublican France, admired about Britain was the relatively high status enjoyed in society by merchants. To him, businessmen and scientists were pillars of a society based on reason and enlightened self-interest. He took a positive view of the London Stock Exchange, where, as he put it, Jews, Christians and Muslims happily engaged in business together, and the only infidel was the bankrupt. Karl Marx had a different opinion of course; he described the stock exchange as the symbol of all that was rotten, and Jewish to boot: “What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money.” A strong dose of anti-Semitism always infected both left and right varieties of antiliberalism, because Jews, as a minority—or worse, a minority which had supposedly infiltrated the elites—stood in the way of unity. To the fascists, Jews were Bolsheviks who would destroy the organisms of nation and race. To the Communists, they were capitalist parasites who forged Zionist plots against the Soviet Union, or the united workers of the world. In all cases, the humanist (or liberal), the bourgeois individualist (or the tolerant believer in pluralism), is the enemy.

Of course, taken to its logical extreme, the moral neutrality of business interests is not a good thing even to a devout liberal: we are rightly critical of businessmen, or indeed governments, who happily deal with mass murderers and dictators in search of a fast buck. But logical extremes are always noxious. There is no question, at any rate, that money loosens the bonds of tribe, race or faith, which is why those who seek to preserve, strengthen or revive those bonds are almost always opposed to commerce.

Contempt for commerce also played a key role in early-twentieth-century German nationalism. The most famous antiliberal text expounding this view is Werner Sombart’s Merchants and Heroes. Businessmen, Sombart explains, prize moderation, law, discretion and other things that “vouch for a peaceful co-existence of merchants.”³ This he finds despicable, typical of such degenerate countries as France, the United States and England, where, to quote a friend of Kaiser Wilhelm II, citizenship could be bought for two shillings and six pence by “every Basuto nigger.” The hero, by contrast, is a man of action, who is not crippled by doubt or reflection, and least of all by any effete leanings toward moderation. He is guided by instinct and faith. This type of hero, typically German in the eyes of Sombart and others of his persuasion, is the opposite of the free individual prized by liberals. There is no room in the heroic society for individual autonomy. The heroes, in this vision of the perfect order, are like the fascist sculptures of Arno Breker, or those outsize, socialist, realistic men of stone: all muscle and brawn, square jaws and piercing eyes, fanatical but without any real individual character, like soldiers marching relentlessly toward a distant but clear goal—the racially pure society, the Communist utopia.

The heroic vision can be intoxicating, to be sure. One of the things antiliberals like to harp on is the banality, the mediocrity, the dullness of liberalism. Liberalism lacks a common dream, a vision of grandeur. But there are several things to be said about this. First, heroism doesn’t necessarily require the submergence of the individual spirit into a martial mass, or the victory of instinct over thought. The individuals who put their lives on the line to fight for the civil rights of black Americans, or indeed for freedom under Communism, seldom fitted Sombart’s notion of the hero, yet they were anything but complacently bourgeois.

The liberal disposition, then, need be neither mediocre nor boring. And some of those who have defended it in the face of harsh oppression, such as Havel or other dissidents, from Poland to China, have actually been more heroic than the warriors extolled by the likes of Werner Sombart, not in the least because their fights are usually lonely ones, demanding far more conviction than the instinctive heroes of the political Romantics.

LIBERAL TOLERANCE is not the same as indifference either. Compromise, though almost always desirable in politics, has its limits, even for liberals. The civil-rights movement in 1960s Alabama was a case in point. The Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit, in his book On Compromise and Rotten Compromises, argues that slavery is so cruel and dehumanizing that the refusal of the American Founding Fathers to abolish it should count as a rotten compromise, thus utterly unacceptable. Margalit defines the border that cannot be crossed as institutionalized inhumanity.

He distinguishes two pictures of politics, the economic and the religious. The economic picture of politics, like all business transactions, is flexible, open to give-and-take. It is essentially about interests, often but not always material interests. There are rules and laws, but the business of this type of politics is negotiation. The religious picture is quite different. There, one is dealing in ideas of the sacred, literally in the case of religious practices, or metaphorically in the sense of absolute principles which cannot be compromised.

An example of politics of the sacred is the uncompromising conflict over holy places in Jerusalem. Neither a devout Muslim nor a pious Jew finds it possible to negotiate in good faith about the Noble Sanctuary (to Muslims), or the Temple Mount (to Jews), because to give an inch of ground is to compromise the sacred. And to do that is to dilute the purity of the faith. If secular liberals—or humanists—had no absolute principles, given their skepticism toward the sacred, it would follow that they would indeed compromise on anything to further their material or individual interests.

But of course liberals do have absolute principles, and thus a religious picture of politics, too. Rotten compromises were made before World War II (the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact) and afterward as well, but they were not usually forged by liberals. Hitler’s agenda—even before the Holocaust was set in motion—was already such an assault on civilized life, indeed a perfect example of institutionalized inhumanity, that by 1940 any negotiated settlement with him would have been a rotten compromise. Winston Churchill understood this, whereas otherwise perfectly decent British statesmen such as Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax, who wanted to make a deal, did not.

About Britain, or the British “race,” Churchill was a Romantic, a man of action, a hero not a merchant. On matters to do with empire and colonial peoples, he was far from liberal. Nonetheless, Churchill’s use of religious politics, as it were, to defend the freedom of Britain and its allies was liberal. His idea of England, underneath all his bellicose growling and Romantic prose, was still one of a society based on tolerance, moderation and individual liberty. And it was his liberal supporters, not the Communists, let alone the radical Right, who first realized that compromising with the Nazis was not an option.

A notorious postwar example of an intellectual rotten compromise was Jean-Paul Sartre’s refusal, for ideological reasons, to criticize Stalin’s institutionalized inhumanity, even though he was perfectly well aware of it. He did not wish to give critics of Communism any satisfaction: “It was not our duty to write about the Soviet labor camps.” Again, as in 1940, it was often liberals, such as Raymond Aron and Albert Camus, who were the more principled voices when the horrors of Communist dictatorships became known. In the early 1970s, when Maoism still had a wide appeal among the left-wing Western intelligentsia, it was the liberal scholar, Simon Leys, who had to take it on the chin in Paris and elsewhere for drawing attention to Mao’s atrocities.

TODAY’S DEBATES on the dangers of Islam are becoming as intense as the debates in the 1930s about fascism or the 1950s about Communism. Parallels are also intentionally drawn. The term “Islamofascism” has gained currency among people who see 9/11 in terms of 1933, or 1938, or even Pearl Harbor, 1941. And liberals, who advocate moderation and tolerance, and argue that an effort must be made to accept Muslims as fellow citizens, are denounced as “appeasers” and “collaborators,” as though they are the Chamberlains and Halifaxes of our time, while the likes of Geert Wilders, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Newt Gingrich, Pamela Geller and Sarah Palin are imbued with the bulldog spirit of Winston Churchill. The plan, approved by the mayor of New York City, to build an Islamic cultural center several blocks away from ground zero, led by a moderate Sufi imam who denounced the 9/11 attacks, was compared by Newt Gingrich to Nazis setting up a sign next to a Holocaust museum.

Given the traditional animosity of radicals, from all political extremes, toward liberals, it is not surprising that Gingrich and his ilk have found allies among people who used to be proudly on the left. On the “Muslim problem,” the Left and the Right often see eye to eye. As the former-left-wing-journalist Christopher Hitchens put it to me: “The fascists are the only ones who are right about the Islamic threat to Europe.”

Quite clearly, the stakes are high. The murderous attacks on New York’s Twin Towers, commuter trains in Madrid, a discotheque in Bali, a Dutch filmmaker, the London Underground and more were carried out in the name of the Muslim faith. There are revolutionary ideologues all over the world prepared to kill and die for a utopian Islamic state. And Iran, aspiring to be the dominant Islamic power in the Middle East, might be close to developing a nuclear bomb.

None of this can, or should, be dismissed. Even a small number of terrorists can do untold damage. But is it true that liberals, calling for moderation, individual liberty and tolerance, are inadequate to face this challenge? Is a more radical form of heroism required? Is the threat of Islam to Western liberties so severe, for example, that the individual freedom to wear a veil should be sacrificed to the unity of social and cultural values within Western borders? Does the tolerance of religious orthodoxy spell surrender to a new form of fascism? Are liberal moderates “useful idiots” helping our enemies destroy Western values, Enlightenment principles or the West tout court?

I believe that a liberal approach to Islam and Islamism is best, for both tactical and philosophical reasons. Tactically, it would be a disaster to view the problems posed by Muslim radicalism in the West as a “clash of civilizations.” The only way to fight the violent extremists, for whom their religion is a revolutionary ideal, is to keep law-abiding Muslim citizens firmly on the side of liberal democracy. If we decide that we are, in the words of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, “at war with Islam,” we force allies and potential allies into a corner, creating more sympathy among alienated Muslims for the extremists. Philosophically, every person’s right to free thought and expression must be defended, and that includes the right to think in ways we might find distasteful, even abhorrent.

The line must be drawn where behavior is in breach of the law. The French scholar of Islam Olivier Roy takes the view that citizens need not share the same values in pluralistic societies, but must abide by the same laws. Honor killings, even if justified by cultural or religious mores, cannot be tolerated. Nor can incitements to violence. But the wish to ban the building of an Islamic cultural center near ground zero, and to compare the peaceful, law-abiding Sufi Muslims who want to build it with Nazis, is illiberal, foolish and, in terms of defending our freedoms against extremists, counterproductive.

Radical populists of the right, in Europe as well as the United States, claim that orthodox Muslims threaten our Western way of life, not only because of their different notions about social and sexual behavior, but because of their assaults on free speech. These assaults are aided and abetted by liberals who tolerate intolerance and fail to criticize Muslims with sufficient zeal. Freedom, to the anti-Muslim populists, means freedom to be as offensive as one likes about Islam. Any hesitation in this regard is quickly denounced as a form of appeasement.

It is true that Muslims, like many believers, can be touchy when infidels attack or mock their faith. And intimidating critics of Islam is clearly a threat to free speech. So here, too, the law should apply. Death threats and other forms of violent intimidation are against the law and should be punished. But as long as people refrain from threatening or using violence to impose their views, they should be tolerated. Does this mean that freedom of speech means the freedom to offend? In terms of the law, especially under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, the answer is yes. The liberal answer is more complicated. Since tolerance goes with moderation, as well as individual freedom, a certain degree of restraint is sometimes essential to maintain a civilized society. People may be legally entitled to claim that all Jews are greedy, and all blacks lust-filled criminals at heart, but in polite society they would not do so.

Toujours, pas trop de zèle, therefore, is still the best guideline, especially at a time when hatred is being spouted with ever-greater intent to cause offense. The legacy of Forster is still to be preferred over the legacy of Ehrenburg. Whatever threats might yet come from radical Islamism, domestic or foreign, their impact will be made far worse by crass polemics against the faith itself, or by calls for heroic gestures in the war of civilizations. As always, I believe, the most effective defenders of liberal democracy are the liberals themselves.

Ian Buruma is the Henry R. Luce Professor at Bard College. His latest book is Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents (Princeton University Press, 2010).

¹ Frances Stonor Saunders, “What Have Intellectuals Ever Done for the World?,” The Observer, November 28, 2004.

²Le salaud lumineux (Paris: M. Lafon, 1990).

³ Aurel Kolnai, The War Against the West (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1938).

(Photo by Kronos)