Is Liberalism Bookless?

Steve Hayward takes note of a recent Slate column that notes that modern liberalism has become bookless.  Beverly Gage's essay on Slate.com explores the reasons why this is so in light of Paul Ryan's recent public appeals to the economics of Ayn Rand and Hayek to name a few.  She notes that liberals do not have anything resembling the conservative canon.  Hayward surmises the reasons behind this trend:

A few years ago Martin Peretz wrote in The New Republic that “It is liberalism that is now bookless and dying. . .  Ask yourself: Who is a truly influential liberal mind [on par with Niebuhr] in our culture?  Whose ideas challenge and whose ideals inspire?  Whose books and articles are read and passed around?  There’s no one, really.”  Michael Tomasky echoed this point in The American Prospect: “I’ve long had the sense, and it’s only grown since I’ve moved to Washington, that conservatives talk more about philosophy, while liberals talk more about strategy; also, that liberals generally, and young liberals in particular, are somewhat less conversant in their creed’s history and urtexts than their conservative counterparts are.”

While there is something to this lament, it seems slightly overstated.  Even leaving aside the popularity of fevered figures such as Noam Chomsky, one can point to a number of serious thinkers on the Left such as Michael Walzer, or John Rawls and his acolytes, or Rawls’ thoughtful critics on the Left such as Michael Sandel.  However, the high degree of abstraction of these thinkers—their palpable distance from the real political and cultural debates of our time—is a reflection of the attenuation of contemporary liberalism.

I agree with Hayward that Gage does delve into hyperbole because there have been plenty of liberal intellectuals in the twentieth century -- Rawls, Dewey, Woodrow Wilson -- who have have had major influence and have published widely-read essays and books.  Virtually all of the historians of the early twentieth century were from the liberal persuasion and thought the New Deal the highest form of statesmanship.  I think there is definitely something to what Gage is arguing. (It has to do with the emergence of conservatism as an intellectual force against liberalism, which has basically enjoyed a dominant reign since the early twentieth century.  But -- and I think Gage had this in mind as well --, in the past ten years, what liberal intellectual giant or otherwise has written a major, influential work?)  Modern conservatism is now reaping the benefits of seeds planted long ago while modern liberalism has now been caught flat-footed.