James Kloppenberg described liberalism as an expression of pragmatism, while Judith Shklar explained how liberals direct pragmatism against cruelty and tyranny. Their overlapping insights help us to understand an obvious but not always noticed fact of contemporary American life, which is that liberals have generated a great many angry books in fields like race relations, family life, consumerism, food politics, mass communications, gender status, environmental studies, government secrecy, money in elections, welfare, globalization, public transportation, unemployment, education, corporate power, and Wall Street manipulations. These books are, from one realm to another, powerful expressions of what liberals and other Americans are “experiencing,” as future Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. might have remarked. Kloppenberg's thesis predicts that such books, each angry about something in its own way, will usually call for pragmatic repair of current practices. On this score, Kloppenberg is correct, because liberals tend to write that there is a problem, this is what it costs us, and here is how we can fix it. But, angry liberal books also confirm what Shklar postulates because, in a way, their common aim is to expose indecency – including, of course, various forms of tyranny.

So Shklar is also correct. Books in the Shklarian vein are written by – among others – journalists, activists, think-tankers, and academics. Wherever they come from, these writers share a powerful sense of dissatisfaction – even outrage – arising from situations that they see as generating inequality, violence, blight, oppression, and waste, and that they therefore view as patently worthy of reform. In this state, while they are unable to derive assurance or equanimity from conservative alpha stories – such as those about benevolent traditions and a benign marketplace – which frame the great complexities of life, liberals are annoyed and sometimes even infuriated by a wide range of situations, one after another and side by side, that seem to them simply intolerable.