He offers passionate critiques against literary ideas of reality as material and physical, such as those he ascribes to V. L. Parrington, Theodore Dreiser, and the writers of the Kinsey Reports.
[2] The Liberal Imagination enjoyed a relatively large commercial success, selling 100,000 hardcover and 70,000 paperback copies, and was later to be understood as an essential book for a group of influential literary, political, and cultural thinkers of the era, called “The New York Intellectuals."
"[3] In later years, scholars turned to The Liberal Imagination as a work representative of the post-war politics and culture of the United States, which was entering the early stages of the Cold War with the Soviet Union.
Trilling describes Anderson's "standing quarrel with respectable society" as one that once bred a truth related to the "precious secret essence" of individuals, but then led to a negation of the life of his characters through an excess of intellection, feeling, and a "love made wholly abstract."
Trilling ends the essay reflecting on Freud's later work, in which the "death instinct" was introduced to complement the "pleasure principle," forming a state of man as "a kind of hell from within him from which rise everlastingly the impulses which threaten his civilization," where "compromise and the compounding with defeat constitute his best way of getting through the world."
"[10] Trilling offers a reading of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn to explain why he believes it to be "one of the greatest books and one of the central documents of American culture."
Trilling argues that the book tells the truth "of moral passion" between the protagonist Huck and the benign and dangerous "river-God", symbolized by the Mississippi River.
Trilling describes Huck's moral crisis as being between his "genuinely good will" and his distrust of others, based on a "profound and bitter knowledge of human depravity."
In this way, the poem represents Wordsworth's maturity into adulthood, and an awareness of mortality, that makes the world even more “significant and precious.”[13] Trilling confronts the notion that an artist's imagination and genius comes from a neurotic illness.
Fitzgerald's tragic love, Trilling suggests, is "destructive by reason of its very tenderness," because it was a "delicate tension" between an idea of human free-will along with a belief in the force of circumstance.
Trilling concludes that Fitzgerald's known lack of prudence is in fact his "heroic fault," in that it allowed him to deal, with tenderness, "a true firmness of moral judgment.
Trilling wants novelists to realize their ability "to maintain ambivalence toward their society," and wants a general understanding of the "fortuitous and gratuitous nature of art" that makes an intellectual atmosphere where novels are possible.
Trilling concludes by advocating that we think of ideas as "living things, inescapably connected with our wills and desires," in order to facilitate a more active literature.
[23] Literary critic and democratic-socialist advocate Irving Howe, in his review of the book in The Nation, finds troubling Trilling's criticism of moral passions that do not account for "an active moral passion against social injustice," and contends that the definition Trilling relies on does not match liberalism’s history as a "code of intellectual tolerance and freedom," as the bringer of the Enlightenment, and as the political doctrine that supports capitalism.
The true subject Trilling addresses, Blackmur suggests, is the "politics of human power," and the place literature has in creating "turbulence" in ordering principles of societal living.
The Liberal Imagination can be seen as Trilling's response to the simplifying force of the Marxism and disillusionment prevalent in the orthodoxy of the American political left in 1930s life, best exemplified by the Soviet Union's Popular Front, by presenting himself through the essays as the "Intellectuals’ Representative Man."
Indeed, The Liberal Imagination can be read as a pivotal point in the New York Intellectuals' turn from a Soviet communism to a strong anti-Stalinist cultural front.
[28][29] The anti-Stalinist implications in The Liberal Imagination exist in the ways Trilling articulates a critical stance against reductive, simplifying, and systematized ideological thinking.
As a representative of complexity, Trilling, in place of an applicable theory of reading, offers a “certain temper” to serve as the basis of a critical analysis of politics, culture, and literature.
[31] But, in his expressed ambivalence to exactly what kind of politic or society he envisions, he leaves open the possible results of the critical mindset he proposes; this is perhaps because Trilling was already aware that the logical conclusion of his temper is a profound conservativism.