Anyone who wants to connect liberalism as a set of cultural and political ambitions with liberal education as a commitment to a humanist and historical understanding of human culture hopes that the second will sustain the first and that the first will provide a proper shelter for the second, he writes. Ryan is a most conservative sort of liberal, who believes in the value of the past, in national standards for pre-collegiate education, in not catering to students beliefs, and in challenging the young with difficult materials. He is at ease with the inevitability of dead white males prominence in a respectable liberal arts curriculum, for there were simply not that many female achievers in previous centuries in fields the curriculum embraces, and to uncover an additional few and inflate their legacy beyond its true worth would be patronizing and dishonest. At the same time, he defends affirmative action and multicultural education, tools of social engineering that are normally characterized as liberal. There is only one culture, and all of it is our culture.
Anxieties consists of an introduction and three chapters.
The first chapter, Culture and Anxiety, worries that a society operating with classical liberal values favorable to individual choice, self-assertion, economic ambition, the meritocratic route to social mobility, a plurality of tastes and allegiances may not be well disposed to the values embodied in traditional liberal education, which requires humility, for example, if one is to become immersed in another writer or another culture. Readers will not be surprised to learn that Ryan, who makes his living in higher education, answers no to the question. The introduction, itself almost as long as one of the individual chapters, contains pages that are in some ways the most interesting in the book, perhaps because they are the pages in which Ryan is most passionate and most convincingly anxious. He is outraged by the hopelessness that social and economic conditions visit on inner-city students. At an early age, they are lost for life.