Daily Inspiration Quote by Morris Raphael Cohen

Liberalism gets framed, lazily, as optimism with a policy agenda. Cohen won’t let it off that easily. He casts it instead as a temperament: a willingness to live with contingency. The key move is his refusal of guarantees. In “new situation,” he hears the siren song of modernity - technological change, mass politics, new sciences, new wars - and insists that novelty is morally neutral. The new can be “good or the true,” but it can also be seductive, efficient, and wrong. That’s a direct shot at ideologies that treat history as a conveyor belt toward salvation.

The rhetoric works because it makes risk a civic virtue without romanticizing it. “Adventure” flatters the reader’s courage, then immediately withdraws the comfort of a happy ending. It’s liberalism as disciplined nerve: experiment, revise, and accept that sometimes the experiment fails. Cohen’s “precarious achievement” is doing double duty. It acknowledges how fragile reforms are (rights can be revoked, institutions can rot), while also warning liberals against their own comforting myth of inevitability. Progress isn’t a law of nature; it’s a maintenance project.

Context matters: Cohen is writing in a first half of the 20th century that demolished Victorian confidence - world war, totalitarianism, economic collapse. Against both reactionary nostalgia and revolutionary certainty, he defines liberalism as an ethics of fallibilism: the courage to act without metaphysical insurance, and the humility to admit that history doesn’t owe us anything.