T IS OVER twenty years, now, since the appearance of an important collection of critical essays by Lionel Trilling under the general title The Liberal Imagination. In calling my present essay "The Illiberal Imagination" I have sought deliberately to draw attention to the relationship between the things that I am going to say and the things Mr. Trilling was saying in the late 1940s. I have not done this lightly. Nor do I wish to suggest that Trilling's work has "dated" in any simple or obvious sense. On the contrary, it has proved exceptionally vital and is quite as relevant today as it was a quarter-century ago-so vital, in fact, that I wish to return to it and confront it as closely as possible on its own ground. And the first thing that must be acknowledged is the difficulty of the confrontation itself. This difficulty appears in my very title. The words "liberal" and "imagination" go so very well together that the notion of an "illiberal imagination" seems to contradict itself. Can we even conceive of an imagination that is not liberal, that is not generous and free? It is almost unimaginable. In linking liberalism and imagination Trilling seemed to do no more than acknowledge the inevitable connection between the most enlightened mode of politics and the most enlightening mode of thought. The liberal imagination, as he defined it in his Preface, has two parts: first, a "primal" or "essential" part which envisions "a general enlarge-