What do you think?
Rate this book
Liberalism: A Counter-History
In this definitive historical investigation, Italian author and philosopher Domenico Losurdo argues that from the outset liberalism, as a philosophical position and ideology, has been bound up with the most illiberal of slavery, colonialism, genocide, racism and snobbery.
Narrating an intellectual history running from the eighteenth through to the twentieth centuries, Losurdo examines the thought of preeminent liberal writers such as Locke, Burke, Tocqueville, Constant, Bentham, and Sieyès, revealing the inner contradictions of an intellectual position that has exercised a formative influence on today’s politics. Among the dominant strains of liberalism, he discerns the counter-currents of more radical positions, lost in the constitution of the modern world order.
Narrating an intellectual history running from the eighteenth through to the twentieth centuries, Losurdo examines the thought of preeminent liberal writers such as Locke, Burke, Tocqueville, Constant, Bentham, and Sieyès, revealing the inner contradictions of an intellectual position that has exercised a formative influence on today’s politics. Among the dominant strains of liberalism, he discerns the counter-currents of more radical positions, lost in the constitution of the modern world order.
384 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2005
About the author
Domenico Losurdo
66 books287 followersDomenico Losurdo (14 November 1941 – 28 June 2018) was an Italian Marxist philosopher and historian better known for his critique of anti-communism, colonialism, imperialism, the European tradition of liberalism and the concept of totalitarianism.
He was director of the Institute of Philosophical and Pedagogical Sciences at the University of Urbino, where he taught history of philosophy as Dean at the Faculty of Educational Sciences. Since 1988, Losurdo was president of the Hegelian International Association Hegel-Marx for Dialectical Thought. He was also a member of the Leibniz Society of Sciences in Berlin (an association in the tradition of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's Prussian Academy of Sciences) as well as director of the Marx XXI political-cultural association.
From communist militancy to the condemnation of American imperialism and the study of the African-American and Native American question, Losurdo was also a participant in national and international politics.
He was director of the Institute of Philosophical and Pedagogical Sciences at the University of Urbino, where he taught history of philosophy as Dean at the Faculty of Educational Sciences. Since 1988, Losurdo was president of the Hegelian International Association Hegel-Marx for Dialectical Thought. He was also a member of the Leibniz Society of Sciences in Berlin (an association in the tradition of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's Prussian Academy of Sciences) as well as director of the Marx XXI political-cultural association.
From communist militancy to the condemnation of American imperialism and the study of the African-American and Native American question, Losurdo was also a participant in national and international politics.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 117 reviews
August 3, 2017
holy shit wow. this book took me about two months to finish and when i finally reached the last sentence i sighed a very heavy sigh of relief. this is a rather dense, difficult book so i will try to sum up my feelings as succinctly as possible:
fuck de toucquville
but in case you wanted something more in depth, heres the longer version:
liberalism is full of contradictions and it has historically been able to correct these contradictions, which is partly why it is such a difficult concept to define. in fact losurdo never defines it completely, which leaves me feeling very unsatisfied but i suppose i will just have to deal with it.
losurdo is one of those authors who repeats himself endlessly and you find yourself wondering why on earth he keeps going back to certain topics when he already covered them in an earlier chapter. it all pays off eventually, however; losurdo is extremely good at cementing a concept.
i had no idea liberalism had inspired so much hateful, loathesome, racist, genocidal practices. the book leads you through centuries of liberalism, ending with mussolini's blackshirts, apartheid in south africa, jim crow in the US, and finally, the holocaust. these events inherited liberalism's long, bloody history.
i did have a few minor issues with the book--particularly the translation. why is the word r*dskin used for native americans? was there any need for this? it is used throughout the entire book. im not sure if it's the translation or if losurdo himself used an equivalent term in the original italian, but it's really disturbing. also 'blacks' for black people--being a romance language speaker myself, i know that 'negros' is a respectful term for black people, but in english you should really just say 'black people'. again, when you compare it to the horrors losurdo describes in this book, it's very minor but it's still rather disturbing.
soething else i fucking hated was how he would just introduce some new liberal like he had been speaking about him the entire time. i found myself looking up names and what that person was known for more often than not. losurdo simply presents these people as if the reader is entirely comfortable with that particular author's entire body of work. i should add that even if you dont know the majority of the names in the book, you will still be able to follow and understand what losurdo is speaking about. i would even suggest that the names themselves arent that important since they are all presented in proper historical context. still, it's rather daunting seeing these names introduced--it feels like you've missed something.
anyway, i can't quite explain this book very well right now. im a little overwhelmed because i just finished it and there are quite a number of horrifying events described in detail. while this is a difficult, complex read, it is ultimately extremely rewarding. highly recommend.
fuck de toucquville
but in case you wanted something more in depth, heres the longer version:
liberalism is full of contradictions and it has historically been able to correct these contradictions, which is partly why it is such a difficult concept to define. in fact losurdo never defines it completely, which leaves me feeling very unsatisfied but i suppose i will just have to deal with it.
losurdo is one of those authors who repeats himself endlessly and you find yourself wondering why on earth he keeps going back to certain topics when he already covered them in an earlier chapter. it all pays off eventually, however; losurdo is extremely good at cementing a concept.
i had no idea liberalism had inspired so much hateful, loathesome, racist, genocidal practices. the book leads you through centuries of liberalism, ending with mussolini's blackshirts, apartheid in south africa, jim crow in the US, and finally, the holocaust. these events inherited liberalism's long, bloody history.
i did have a few minor issues with the book--particularly the translation. why is the word r*dskin used for native americans? was there any need for this? it is used throughout the entire book. im not sure if it's the translation or if losurdo himself used an equivalent term in the original italian, but it's really disturbing. also 'blacks' for black people--being a romance language speaker myself, i know that 'negros' is a respectful term for black people, but in english you should really just say 'black people'. again, when you compare it to the horrors losurdo describes in this book, it's very minor but it's still rather disturbing.
soething else i fucking hated was how he would just introduce some new liberal like he had been speaking about him the entire time. i found myself looking up names and what that person was known for more often than not. losurdo simply presents these people as if the reader is entirely comfortable with that particular author's entire body of work. i should add that even if you dont know the majority of the names in the book, you will still be able to follow and understand what losurdo is speaking about. i would even suggest that the names themselves arent that important since they are all presented in proper historical context. still, it's rather daunting seeing these names introduced--it feels like you've missed something.
anyway, i can't quite explain this book very well right now. im a little overwhelmed because i just finished it and there are quite a number of horrifying events described in detail. while this is a difficult, complex read, it is ultimately extremely rewarding. highly recommend.
August 5, 2015
Liberalism was arguably born when the Netherlands gained freedom from Philip II of Spain and its wealthy commercial class took political control. While the Dutch celebrated their liberation from the shackles and restraints of the ancien regime and its mediaeval values, what they prized in particular was their freedom to engage without restraint in the creation of wealth through their own colonies and their hold over the slave trade of that time. The liberty they idealized and proclaimed was thus both very restrictive in its application and very paradoxical, in that it prioritised the lack of governmental restraint in order to maximise the power of those in control over their family, servants and slaves. This curious blend of liberty and oppression was given philosophical expression by their own philosopher of Liberalism, Hugo Grotius http://www.themolinist.com/rights-wro...
By no coincidence, John Locke, the English philosopher of Liberalism, came from exile in Holland along with William Of Orange in the 1688 Glorious Revolution, by which the English peacefully replaced a Catholic Stuart regime with a Protestant one, while violently repressing religious dissenters and Catholics, lifting restraints on enclosure and the displacement of the poor from common land to permit private profit, and promoting a policy of mass murder towards the Irish, seeking to take their lands away from them to benefit English landlords and Protestant settlers. All of this had Locke’s complete approval and he extended this to the American colonies, where he offered a philosophical justification for the extermination of the native Americans and the large scale deployment of slave labour. When modern Americans appeal to Locke as a sympathetic philosopher of liberty that is not such an odd thing, since they were explicitly his target audience.
In the Seven Years War, American colonists were completely in accord with their English allies as they defended the cause of liberty against the French crown. However, the War of Independence saw American separatists depict England as the land of aristocratic tyranny and this transformation had everything to do with restrictions on their freedom to mistreat and dehumanise black slaves and to drive native Americans from their lands. The resulting constitution provided for the most complete expression of Liberal values, securing the dignity of the White elite as free men, elevating property rights to the highest level of importance, and carefully locating slavery under the heading of property rights. While slaves were classed as chattels, they were (uniquely) treated as people when determining the population of each state for voting purposes, No surprise then that in the early decades, a majority of presidents were slave owners and from slave states.
Britain of course retained a huge interest in slavery through its colonies but the language of Liberalism did lack clarity on the subject. For some time the logic of the system implied that slavery might be extended to the home country, and applied to vagrants, criminals and paupers as well as to servants and certain employees who could be bought and sold as assets alongside an enterprise such as a coal mine This was eventually decided against in a 1772 case, concerning an Englishman who brought his personal slave to England. Instead, it was ruled that slavery was only to feature in colonial lands and, in case this appeared to imply some prospect of liberty for slaves reaching England, those Black loyalists who fought for Britain in America’s War of Independence were not allowed to settle in Britain but deported to Sierra Leone.
For the home country, then, Liberalism found options short of slavery by which to assimilate people into the category of property and to elevate the importance of property beyond any concern for the rights of their subordinates. England devised such a range of property crimes for which the penalty was death, including the crime of poaching if a non landowner took a wild bird or beast for food, that it shocked the rest of Europe. The option often arose though to commute that sentence and substitute a life of forced labour in the colonies, notably in Australia. From 1834, paupers were offered the choice to starve or to enter a workhouse, atrocious institutions hardly to be preferred over the conditions of a slave, while the use of orphanages as a resource to supply (for sale) compliant young servants and apprentices could be considered (I suggest) as a variation on Jonathen Swift’s modest proposal for farming the babies of Irish paupers. http://art-bin.com/art/omodest.html
Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America” was published in 1835. This French politician and writer visited the USA (and later on England and Ireland) and reported in a very clear eyed manner on the conditions he observed for colonists, native Americans and black slaves. His writing had a direct bearing on his political aspirations, which included promoting a similar liberal democracy for France, and guiding the colonial exploitation of Algeria in particular, where the Arabs were to be assigned a status comparable to native Americans. The violence and racist nature of France’s colonial exploits were in line with the worst of European behaviour in Africa, but France itself was always an unreliable member of the Liberal club owing to its periodic distraction with notions about the rights of man. For Burke and his successors, the issue was one of moderation and common sense - to seize power and control from the Ancien Regime, ending the feudal order of things, without making the foolish error of extending the franchise too far and empowering those who lack property and are thus liable to use government as a means of stealing from those with property. Of course, only chaos could ensue when property was not sacred.
For Burke, as for Locke, there was a natural order to human affairs. The French Revolution threw this aside with its appeal to the Rights of Man and the result was terror and chaos. This had to be accounted for and several lines of enquiry emerged. Since Liberalism was associated with moderation and self discipline, revolution must arise through the lack of such qualities. This lack could be attributed to a disease or to a congenital defect.
For the disease model of egalitarianism, Burke traced the cause in a conspiracy theory that would have increasing significance in European politics. He blamed the Jews and set out a full account of the mechanics by which this conspiracy operated. The broad theme is that international finance, in the form of Jewish bankers, provided governments with the loans to fund all sorts of benefits for paupers and others at the expense of property and the class of people on whose shoulders fell the burden of generating wealth and paying taxes. This anti-Semitic ‘motif’ prospered in the coming decades and was brought to a high level of refinement by one of the greatest prophets of racism and colonial cynicism in that terrible century, none other than the Jewish politician, Disraeli. “The natural equality of man and the abrogation of property are proclaimed by the secret societies who form provisional governments, and men of Jewish race are found at the head of every one of them...” Thus “ the people of God co-operate with atheists; the most skillful accumulators of property ally themselves with communists; the peculiar and chosen race touch the hand of all the scum and low castes of Europe.” [p.276-7 has much more]
Burke also opened up the theme of racial determinism, appealing to “the chosen race of the sons of England,” a “nation in whose veins the blood of freedom circulates,” to contrast with the intrinsic servility, herd spirit and inability to enjoy a regular, orderly liberty, which he identified of course in the French. (The biblical strand of the chosen people, alongside the association of black skin with the biblical curse of Ham, was thematic since at least Locke.)
A number of sources identified racial degeneration through interbreeding with inferior peoples as the congenital source of the egalitarian disease, of whom Gobineau was important, introducing the novel and spurious concept of a superior Aryan race which embraced Germans but excluded the French and the Celtic peoples. In time, Herbert Spencer and his notion of “Social Darwinism” elaborated the theory by which humanity was to be rank ordered and he pointed to the alarming risks of inter breeding, or miscegenation, leading to degeneration of the human stock. Spencer was no scientist and Social Darwinism did not, as it pretended to do, have the support of Charles Darwin’s work. Darwin did not invent the well established idea of evolution - he investigated scientific explanations for evolution, whereas Spencer investigated ideological racism with a spurious scientific glaze. Similarly, Malthus published his Essay on the Principle of Population in 1834, long before the Origin of Species, but it found a ready audience in the Liberal objectors to any form of poverty relief and not least in the administrator, Trevelyan, put in place by the British Government to oversee the collapse of the Irish peasant population (from 4.5 million to 2.5 million) in the Great Potato Famine of 1845.
It was with reference to miscegenation that racists accounted for the congenital defects of the Mediterranean people, notably the Spanish, and the condition of Latin America was seen to be beyond recall as a result of extensive intermarriage with and between blacks and native Americans. One of the perceived horrors of black slavery was seen to be the sexual exploitation of black women, with a resulting tendency to degeneration of the master race, in addition of course to the concern of Christian fundamentalists at the immorality of such illicit couplings. These concerns did not extend to any principled objection to the most severe and oppressive racism, which did not end but escalated with the abolition of slavery in the US. The last law against miscegenation was abolished in the state of Alabama in the year 2000. While the story of racism in the USA is well rehearsed, what Losurdo points out is the infringement on the rights also of the white population, who could be subject to both legal and extra-legal (often very violent) sanctions for any deviation from accepted thinking and behaviour.
There were at least two Liberalisms. [p278] One equated ‘true liberty’ with untrammelled control by the master over his family, his servants and his goods. Another tried to come to terms with the refusal of their servants to be assimilated with the master’s belongings. In so far as the latter caused some unease in the consciences of some sections of “the community of the free,” this was alleviated by repressing slavery - at least restricting it to the colonies - and masking the aspects of social relations that most blatantly gave the lie to their professed attachment to liberty. The idea of self government by the dominant class and race persisted though; in the USA, while the abolition of slavery was imposed from above by a determined government, the principle was retained in the regime of terrorist white supremacy which soon followed.
Liberalism ultimately was the product of a social and political revolution which did not involve any emancipation, but rather the reverse, for those social and ethnic groups outside of the new elite. [p320] What emerged was "herrenvolk" democracy, democracy for the master race.
By no coincidence, John Locke, the English philosopher of Liberalism, came from exile in Holland along with William Of Orange in the 1688 Glorious Revolution, by which the English peacefully replaced a Catholic Stuart regime with a Protestant one, while violently repressing religious dissenters and Catholics, lifting restraints on enclosure and the displacement of the poor from common land to permit private profit, and promoting a policy of mass murder towards the Irish, seeking to take their lands away from them to benefit English landlords and Protestant settlers. All of this had Locke’s complete approval and he extended this to the American colonies, where he offered a philosophical justification for the extermination of the native Americans and the large scale deployment of slave labour. When modern Americans appeal to Locke as a sympathetic philosopher of liberty that is not such an odd thing, since they were explicitly his target audience.
In the Seven Years War, American colonists were completely in accord with their English allies as they defended the cause of liberty against the French crown. However, the War of Independence saw American separatists depict England as the land of aristocratic tyranny and this transformation had everything to do with restrictions on their freedom to mistreat and dehumanise black slaves and to drive native Americans from their lands. The resulting constitution provided for the most complete expression of Liberal values, securing the dignity of the White elite as free men, elevating property rights to the highest level of importance, and carefully locating slavery under the heading of property rights. While slaves were classed as chattels, they were (uniquely) treated as people when determining the population of each state for voting purposes, No surprise then that in the early decades, a majority of presidents were slave owners and from slave states.
Britain of course retained a huge interest in slavery through its colonies but the language of Liberalism did lack clarity on the subject. For some time the logic of the system implied that slavery might be extended to the home country, and applied to vagrants, criminals and paupers as well as to servants and certain employees who could be bought and sold as assets alongside an enterprise such as a coal mine This was eventually decided against in a 1772 case, concerning an Englishman who brought his personal slave to England. Instead, it was ruled that slavery was only to feature in colonial lands and, in case this appeared to imply some prospect of liberty for slaves reaching England, those Black loyalists who fought for Britain in America’s War of Independence were not allowed to settle in Britain but deported to Sierra Leone.
For the home country, then, Liberalism found options short of slavery by which to assimilate people into the category of property and to elevate the importance of property beyond any concern for the rights of their subordinates. England devised such a range of property crimes for which the penalty was death, including the crime of poaching if a non landowner took a wild bird or beast for food, that it shocked the rest of Europe. The option often arose though to commute that sentence and substitute a life of forced labour in the colonies, notably in Australia. From 1834, paupers were offered the choice to starve or to enter a workhouse, atrocious institutions hardly to be preferred over the conditions of a slave, while the use of orphanages as a resource to supply (for sale) compliant young servants and apprentices could be considered (I suggest) as a variation on Jonathen Swift’s modest proposal for farming the babies of Irish paupers. http://art-bin.com/art/omodest.html
Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America” was published in 1835. This French politician and writer visited the USA (and later on England and Ireland) and reported in a very clear eyed manner on the conditions he observed for colonists, native Americans and black slaves. His writing had a direct bearing on his political aspirations, which included promoting a similar liberal democracy for France, and guiding the colonial exploitation of Algeria in particular, where the Arabs were to be assigned a status comparable to native Americans. The violence and racist nature of France’s colonial exploits were in line with the worst of European behaviour in Africa, but France itself was always an unreliable member of the Liberal club owing to its periodic distraction with notions about the rights of man. For Burke and his successors, the issue was one of moderation and common sense - to seize power and control from the Ancien Regime, ending the feudal order of things, without making the foolish error of extending the franchise too far and empowering those who lack property and are thus liable to use government as a means of stealing from those with property. Of course, only chaos could ensue when property was not sacred.
For Burke, as for Locke, there was a natural order to human affairs. The French Revolution threw this aside with its appeal to the Rights of Man and the result was terror and chaos. This had to be accounted for and several lines of enquiry emerged. Since Liberalism was associated with moderation and self discipline, revolution must arise through the lack of such qualities. This lack could be attributed to a disease or to a congenital defect.
For the disease model of egalitarianism, Burke traced the cause in a conspiracy theory that would have increasing significance in European politics. He blamed the Jews and set out a full account of the mechanics by which this conspiracy operated. The broad theme is that international finance, in the form of Jewish bankers, provided governments with the loans to fund all sorts of benefits for paupers and others at the expense of property and the class of people on whose shoulders fell the burden of generating wealth and paying taxes. This anti-Semitic ‘motif’ prospered in the coming decades and was brought to a high level of refinement by one of the greatest prophets of racism and colonial cynicism in that terrible century, none other than the Jewish politician, Disraeli. “The natural equality of man and the abrogation of property are proclaimed by the secret societies who form provisional governments, and men of Jewish race are found at the head of every one of them...” Thus “ the people of God co-operate with atheists; the most skillful accumulators of property ally themselves with communists; the peculiar and chosen race touch the hand of all the scum and low castes of Europe.” [p.276-7 has much more]
Burke also opened up the theme of racial determinism, appealing to “the chosen race of the sons of England,” a “nation in whose veins the blood of freedom circulates,” to contrast with the intrinsic servility, herd spirit and inability to enjoy a regular, orderly liberty, which he identified of course in the French. (The biblical strand of the chosen people, alongside the association of black skin with the biblical curse of Ham, was thematic since at least Locke.)
A number of sources identified racial degeneration through interbreeding with inferior peoples as the congenital source of the egalitarian disease, of whom Gobineau was important, introducing the novel and spurious concept of a superior Aryan race which embraced Germans but excluded the French and the Celtic peoples. In time, Herbert Spencer and his notion of “Social Darwinism” elaborated the theory by which humanity was to be rank ordered and he pointed to the alarming risks of inter breeding, or miscegenation, leading to degeneration of the human stock. Spencer was no scientist and Social Darwinism did not, as it pretended to do, have the support of Charles Darwin’s work. Darwin did not invent the well established idea of evolution - he investigated scientific explanations for evolution, whereas Spencer investigated ideological racism with a spurious scientific glaze. Similarly, Malthus published his Essay on the Principle of Population in 1834, long before the Origin of Species, but it found a ready audience in the Liberal objectors to any form of poverty relief and not least in the administrator, Trevelyan, put in place by the British Government to oversee the collapse of the Irish peasant population (from 4.5 million to 2.5 million) in the Great Potato Famine of 1845.
It was with reference to miscegenation that racists accounted for the congenital defects of the Mediterranean people, notably the Spanish, and the condition of Latin America was seen to be beyond recall as a result of extensive intermarriage with and between blacks and native Americans. One of the perceived horrors of black slavery was seen to be the sexual exploitation of black women, with a resulting tendency to degeneration of the master race, in addition of course to the concern of Christian fundamentalists at the immorality of such illicit couplings. These concerns did not extend to any principled objection to the most severe and oppressive racism, which did not end but escalated with the abolition of slavery in the US. The last law against miscegenation was abolished in the state of Alabama in the year 2000. While the story of racism in the USA is well rehearsed, what Losurdo points out is the infringement on the rights also of the white population, who could be subject to both legal and extra-legal (often very violent) sanctions for any deviation from accepted thinking and behaviour.
There were at least two Liberalisms. [p278] One equated ‘true liberty’ with untrammelled control by the master over his family, his servants and his goods. Another tried to come to terms with the refusal of their servants to be assimilated with the master’s belongings. In so far as the latter caused some unease in the consciences of some sections of “the community of the free,” this was alleviated by repressing slavery - at least restricting it to the colonies - and masking the aspects of social relations that most blatantly gave the lie to their professed attachment to liberty. The idea of self government by the dominant class and race persisted though; in the USA, while the abolition of slavery was imposed from above by a determined government, the principle was retained in the regime of terrorist white supremacy which soon followed.
Liberalism ultimately was the product of a social and political revolution which did not involve any emancipation, but rather the reverse, for those social and ethnic groups outside of the new elite. [p320] What emerged was "herrenvolk" democracy, democracy for the master race.
August 25, 2021
One of the most important books I’ve ever read, hands down. The framework of “master race democracy” is probably the single most useful way to conceptualize the apparent paradox of the Anglosphere as both self-proclaimed champion of liberty and the most viscous, genocidal empire in history that I’ve yet to encounter, and I find myself referencing it all the time in conversation. Reframing the American Revolution, for instance, not as a battle of liberty vs despotism but as a struggle between two factions of white supremacists vying for control of the “community of the free,” has finally given me the language to explain the contradictions I’ve felt and observed for so long as a nonwhite person living in the US. I truly cannot recommend this book enough, it’s dense but 100% worth the effort.
October 30, 2015
Absolutely fantastic. I haven't enjoyed seeing classical liberals getting annihilated by a well-read Marxist this much since Capital Vol. 1.
July 22, 2017
i try to fish out immediate political lessons from philosophy books if i can. the precise position of one of the many dozens of thinkers losurdo mentions in the book doesn't interest me as much, and i can barely keep track of books like this unless i'm taking detailed notes. which i didn't in this case. i'm too busy and tired. just reading this goddamn book took me six months.
losurdo's chronicle of liberalism's contradictions (the 'racial/spatial delimitation of the community of the free') and its uneasy progress in the shadow of different instances of radicalism (the french and haitian revolutions, the paris commune, the bolshevik revolution) which consistently redefine what the terms 'liberty' or 'freedom' actually mean, indicates to me that debate or engagement with the liberal tradition isn't a good use of a radical's time. losurdo's conclusion points to the old marxist adage that the point of philosophy isn't just to understand the world, but to change it. liberalism is flexible enough to adapt itself to any material circumstance - the presence of chattel slavery, colonial brutality, workhouses and enclosures, or the welfare state, limited civil rights, and nominal democracy. our job is to change the world, and the liberalism of the future will catch up eventually.
losurdo's chronicle of liberalism's contradictions (the 'racial/spatial delimitation of the community of the free') and its uneasy progress in the shadow of different instances of radicalism (the french and haitian revolutions, the paris commune, the bolshevik revolution) which consistently redefine what the terms 'liberty' or 'freedom' actually mean, indicates to me that debate or engagement with the liberal tradition isn't a good use of a radical's time. losurdo's conclusion points to the old marxist adage that the point of philosophy isn't just to understand the world, but to change it. liberalism is flexible enough to adapt itself to any material circumstance - the presence of chattel slavery, colonial brutality, workhouses and enclosures, or the welfare state, limited civil rights, and nominal democracy. our job is to change the world, and the liberalism of the future will catch up eventually.
August 10, 2014
Great book. Not always a coherent narrative but goes through a lot of key points relating to liberalism' s consistent racism and authoritarianism outside the self declared freemen. Shows how the most murderous episodes in colonialism were justified and applauded by key liberal figures. Has problems defining liberalism exactly, but as he says this is down to its incredible flexibility and the conflict between the space of freemen where liberal ideals hold and the space outside where freemen are justified in any action up to genocide. points out many liberal advances were only done under pressure from outside and resisted - highlights the key role of the Haitian revolution and the implacable opposition from many liberals. Like i say it's not always a perfectly coherent narrative but the stuff it covers is so important and presented well so it deserves 5 stars imo.
Will put you off citing 17th/18th/19th century liberals for life. Reveals the ways liberalism's supposed commitment to freedom has been qualified to justify keeping a large portion of the population in slavery or servitude - with very few speaking out against slavery, seeing it as simply people disposing freely of their property. Shows how quite a few liberals at the time hated the French Revolution for going too far in empowering too many people, instead of following the example of England and restricting power to a privileged few.
Also notes how the defence of slavery required clearly "anti-liberal" policies - the maintenance of slavery was more important than, for example, white people's rights to distribute abolitionist pamphlets or even speak about it, and interesting also more important than slave owner's rights to give their slaves an education. This isn't meant as a "poor slaveowners!" thing, just showing that even the "liberty" defence of slavery was really just a fudge and maintenance of the economic order of slavery was the key priority above all else. It's a useful example to think about with other systems of domination that seemingly restrict the powerful's "freedom" but only in order to better dominate the oppressed.
I'll quote one astonishingly vile thing Losurdo mentions, I'm spoiler tagging it because it's one of the most racist things I've ever read
(halfway through) He seems to be suggesting a key difference between liberalism and radicalism, even when liberals seem to have some sort of radical view, is that radicalism completely legitimises the actions of the oppressed from below while liberalism can only ever see change coming from above.
I don't like that the translator regularly uses the term "redskins" even outside of quoted/paraphrased stuff - like it's a kind of offensive term and even if you're trying to show the horrifying white supremacist attitudes of the time it's not necessary outside of direct quotes... just seems a pretty big misstep imo, which is a shame.
Will put you off citing 17th/18th/19th century liberals for life. Reveals the ways liberalism's supposed commitment to freedom has been qualified to justify keeping a large portion of the population in slavery or servitude - with very few speaking out against slavery, seeing it as simply people disposing freely of their property. Shows how quite a few liberals at the time hated the French Revolution for going too far in empowering too many people, instead of following the example of England and restricting power to a privileged few.
Also notes how the defence of slavery required clearly "anti-liberal" policies - the maintenance of slavery was more important than, for example, white people's rights to distribute abolitionist pamphlets or even speak about it, and interesting also more important than slave owner's rights to give their slaves an education. This isn't meant as a "poor slaveowners!" thing, just showing that even the "liberty" defence of slavery was really just a fudge and maintenance of the economic order of slavery was the key priority above all else. It's a useful example to think about with other systems of domination that seemingly restrict the powerful's "freedom" but only in order to better dominate the oppressed.
I'll quote one astonishingly vile thing Losurdo mentions, I'm spoiler tagging it because it's one of the most racist things I've ever read
(halfway through) He seems to be suggesting a key difference between liberalism and radicalism, even when liberals seem to have some sort of radical view, is that radicalism completely legitimises the actions of the oppressed from below while liberalism can only ever see change coming from above.
I don't like that the translator regularly uses the term "redskins" even outside of quoted/paraphrased stuff - like it's a kind of offensive term and even if you're trying to show the horrifying white supremacist attitudes of the time it's not necessary outside of direct quotes... just seems a pretty big misstep imo, which is a shame.
April 20, 2017
Losurdo seeks to answer the question of why believers in Liberalism oversaw the racialization of slavery and the destruction of worker’s autonomy in industrialization. Liberalism therefore granted utter tyranny and began to dismantle protections granted to slaves, servants, and workers. Losurdo argues that it began in Holland as the Dutch wanted freedom of trade. It transferred to slaveowners believing themselves to be the natural holders of liberal ideals, since the wealth and leisure of people removed from any sort of labor meant they could develop philosophical enlightened views. This also worked in the creation of poor houses and anti-poor laws in England and the United States, as workers and slaves were meant to be engaged in labor in order to properly discipline them. Therefore, early liberals defined freedom as being able to have utter control over members outside the community of free men. This helps explain why so many enlightened English and Americans were also slave owners. Liberals in the 19th century therefore believed that hierarchal society was natural and good for those outside their community. Even as the British led anti-slavery crusades, it was more to discourage revolts within their own West Indies possessions. Liberalism was deeply suspicious of democratic hoards, arguing for anti-absolutism, which included democratic absolutism. Even after the French revolution, in which people were defined as citizens, those outside the enlightened community were considered passive citizens, and subject to the need for hard work. As empires grew and capitalism expanded, this led to the “Master-Race Democracy” being spread throughout the planet, in which the west ruled people who were genetically, or structurally inferior.
Note: In Losurdo’s overall argument, which he stresses whiteness was seen as a way to displace inferior races, he refers to Native Americans as “redskins”, which seems like a major translation error.
Key Themes and Concepts:
-The “Community of Free Men” meant that those who were enlightened were above those those were not enlightened, and entitled to be masters of those, by race and by class.
-The “Master-Race Democracy” held that the white race was inheritantly more rational and was entitled to rule those who were not white, even if it was unpleasant and barbaric at times.
Note: In Losurdo’s overall argument, which he stresses whiteness was seen as a way to displace inferior races, he refers to Native Americans as “redskins”, which seems like a major translation error.
Key Themes and Concepts:
-The “Community of Free Men” meant that those who were enlightened were above those those were not enlightened, and entitled to be masters of those, by race and by class.
-The “Master-Race Democracy” held that the white race was inheritantly more rational and was entitled to rule those who were not white, even if it was unpleasant and barbaric at times.
February 8, 2023
”At its inception, liberalism expressed the self-consciousness of a class of owners of slaves or servants that was being formed as the capitalist system began to emerge and establish itself, thanks in part to those ruthless practices of expropriation and oppression implemented in the metropolis, and especially the colonies, which Marx described as 'original capitalist accumulation' . Against monarchical despotism and central power, this class demanded self government and peaceful enjoyment of its property (including that in slaves and servants) , under the sign of the rule of law.”
The Community of the free
Liberalism can be accurately described as the self-conscious ideology of the bourgeoisie which they use to justify their exploitation and right to private property. The term ‘liberal’ was originally synonymous with aristocracy. Self-identifying liberals opposed both the all-powerful monarchy for being too despotic as well as the masses for being too unruly and incompetent. John Adams believed that the normal commoners should not be in power for they lacked knowledge in liberal arts and sciences, and therefore did not have the prerequisite intellect to defend liberty. He said that power should reside in those who “received a liberal education, an ordinary degree of erudition in liberal arts and sciences…(they must be) well-born and wealthy” (p. 249). Liberal philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville agreed, stating that commoners could not defend liberty (in his case against Louis Bonaparte) because they had an “incomplete education” unlike “property owners, the bourgeoisie , the men of culture…in a word, all those who have received a liberal education.” (p. 250). The term had an elitist and ethnic connotation which suggested only the bourgeoisie were educated enough or, in Edmund Burke’s words, were of a “chosen race… whose veins the blood of liberty circulates” (p. 251) to be worthy of having the privilege of being free. To those living outside of this ‘community of the free’, because according to the liberal they were not deserving or educated enough for the liberal’s freedoms, being in servitude or enslaved was not a contradiction but rather a given. Freedom for me but not for thee.
The community of the free saw those enslaved or in servitude to them as deserving of their lower rung on the hierarchy. The subjugation of these “barbarians” by the community of the free helped reinforce the liberal’s view that he inherently deserved his freedom, for if he did not then why had he been capable of subjugating these savages in the first place? Liberty really only meant liberty to those who were deserving of it, which is why the philosophical father of liberalism John Locke was able to both decry the political “slavery” of monarchism in Europe while at the same time write “[e]very free man of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over his Negro slaves,of what opinion or religion soever.” (p. 11) without feeling in contradiction with himself. Likewise, given the backwardness of supposed savages and barbarians, it should be no surprise that liberals like John Stewart Mill could justify “vigorous despotism” over them in order to for the community of the free to “civilize” these beasts (p. 255). Colonial conquests, therefore, were really attempts by liberals to civilize the entire globe by necessary force. So when Britain repressed millions in India, or conducted wars in China to force them into Opium addiction, or starved Irish peasants to death, or enriched itself off of cotton produced by the blood of American slaves, Mills and other liberals simply viewed these horrors as promoting liberty throughout the world. Any heinous act committed to ‘defend liberty’ was justified by the fact that it was enacted against those who opposed freedom.
It is by no accident that puritanical Christian thought could be linked with early formations of liberalism. The Dutch Boers, some of the earliest champions of liberalism, believed themselves to be “the Chosen people'' while Protestant England often saw itself as “the new Israel” whose people were “chosen by the Almighty for a special and universal mission.” (p. 315). These “chosen people '' saw themselves as inheritors of a “divine right” from God; the same God who allowed his chosen people to conquer Canan and massacre its inhabitants and turn gentiles into their slaves. Outside of these chosen people there was no difference between man and the natural world. A God who wiped entire populations off the face of the Earth had no problem raining down destruction on “both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass” (Joshua 6:21) “all the souls…all that breathed…all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground” (Genesis 19:24-26) because he saw all of these as the same degree of lesser than when compared to his chosen people; a human living outside the community of the free is no better than an ant. The fact that the countries with the deepest liberal traditions, who saw themselves as ‘community of the free’ which evolved out of ‘God’s chosen people’ would be the ones deepest enmeshed in colonization and slavery should come as no surprise. These liberals, having triumphed on a planetary scale, saw nothing wrong or unnatural with exercising a planet-wide dictatorship over those excluded from their so-called community of the free.
Fascism
Many seeds of 20th century fascism were present in liberalism from its earliest days. Revolutionary agitation from the subordinate classes was often seen as a disease. De Toqueville refers to lower-class revolution in all of the following terms: a “revolutionary disease”, a “virus of the unknown”, and “a new race… of a hitherto unknown breed” (p. 279). To de Toqueville and others, one must work towards the “eradication” of this “destable race” (p. 279) in order to keep society safe from its pathogens. It is not too hard to draw eugenicist conclusions from such an intertwinement of ‘race’ with ‘sickness’. The fact is that the eugenics movement started out in liberal Britain before being adopted by Germany and then continued by the United States for many years after Germany’s defeat. The anti-semetic tropes of Nazi’s too were expounded by Edmund Burke, who often linked revolutionaries with Jews as long ago as 1790.
Many have tried to paint Nazi Germany as an aberration, but it should be noted that at the time of the First World War Germany can even be seen as tame in comparison to liberal stalwarts Britain and America. All 3 nations were seen as quintessentially liberal at the time while also being imperialistic to their core, but Britain's imperialism was enacted on a fully global scale while at the same time denying universal male suffrage (which Germany’s elections were based off of). America was a nation embroiled deeply in racist apartheid that would be an influence on the coming Nazi regime. The American deportation of Indigenous peoples by Andrew Jackson’s regime is often linked to Nazi deportations. Likewise, the largest deportations in history were that of African slaves forced to America in chains. If they survived being shipped over the seas (2-4 million slaves did not) they were rewarded by being sent to plantations that were essentially the progenitors of the concentration camps and slave-labor-complex the Nazis enforced. When the slaves won their freedom America’s white supremacy did not simply dissipate. So deeply imbedded was the hatred of black people that lynchings became mass public spectacles often marketed in the local papers. These brutal killings which involved “castration, skinning, roasting, hanging, and shooting” as well as selling souvenirs of the victims’ “fingers, toes, teeth and bones, even genitals” and “picture postcards of the event” (p. 344) are extremely reminiscent of pogroms. The racist Ku Klux Klan which enforced this system of oppression also draws similarities to Italian ‘blackshirts’ or German ‘brownshirts’ in their violence and methods. If all this seems superficial it should be noted that Nazis were intimately aware of and openly influenced by American racism and race law. Not only did Hitler write about it fondly in Mein Kampf (examples include: “in North America the Teutonic element, which has kept its racial stock pure and did not mix it with any other racial stock, has come to dominate the American Continent and will remain master of it as long as that element does not fall a victim to the habit of adulterating its blood” (Mein Kampf, 238) and "At present there exists one State which manifests at least some modest attempts that show a better appreciation of how things ought to be done in this matter. It is not, however, in our model German Republic but in the U.S.A. that efforts are made to conform at least partly to the counsels of commonsense. By refusing immigrants to enter there if they are in a bad state of health, and by excluding certain races from the right to become naturalized as citizens, they have begun to introduce principles similar to those on which we wish to ground the People's State." (Mein Kampf, 361)) but the Nuremberg laws, which laid the legal groundwork for the persecution of Jews, explicitly took direction from American Jim Crow laws. In fact while debating these laws the Nazis came to realize that America’s “one-drop” rule was too stringent to be implemented to German Jews. Finally, the American project Native genocide in order to make “living space” for white settlers is undoubtedly a model for the Nazi’s lebensraum and subsequent murder of millions to make space for German settlers.
The myth of gradualism
Liberals today often claim that liberal democracy has led to gradual improvements in life, and that over time more and more people will naturally be let into the ‘community of the free’ and liberty will be spread to all through liberal capitalism. 5 points dispute this
1. The foundation of liberalism has an inherent disdain for democracy. Slavery, something quintessentially anti-democratic and in violation of the ideals of “liberty”, was the key piece towards building the liberal project. Slavery only reached its peak development following the success of the liberal revolutions: “The total slave population in the Americas reached around 330,000 in 1700, nearly three million by 1800, and finally peaked at over six million in the 1850s…In the mid-eighteenth century, it was Great Britain that possessed the largest number of slaves (878,000). Second position was held by Portugal, which possessed 700,000 slaves and was in fact a kind of semi-colony of Great Britain: much of the gold extracted by Brazilian slaves ended up in London” (p. 43). Democracy was also not extended to the working classes who, while having no voting rights, had to send children as young as 3 to work to survive. Vagrants and the unemployed certainly had no rights whatsoever and were sent to forced work camps which, in England, were “spread over the whole national territory, confining up to 500,000 detainees” who simply had to be “(any) persons, able-bodied or otherwise, having neither visible or assignable property, nor honest and sufficient means of livelihood” (p. 79)
2.The exclusion of people from the liberties and political rights exercised by ‘the community of the free’ was only overcome through mass violence and upheaval. Slavery was only ended in America after the most deadly war the country ever fought. Voting rights were most extensively spread after major wars like the first world war, and extremely violent revolutions like that of the Russian Revolution were needed to pave the way for expanded women’s rights
3. In addition to the pain and suffering needed to extend democracy and liberty, the process has certainly not been linear. It has been a series of gains followed by cutbacks. Emancipation of slaves was followed by Jim Crow. Universal male suffrage rights earned in France during the 1848 revolutions were abolished by the bourgeoisie 2 years later, only to be reintroduced under Louis Napoleon.
4. The process of emancipation was often spurred on by factors external to the liberal world. For example, abolition of slavery in Britain's colonies was only pushed thanks to the upheaval of the Haitian slave revolution. Welfarism in the capitalist world was pushed to new heights thanks to the existence of a competing model of development and governance in the Soviet Union.
5. These gains in liberty were often aided by containment and liquidation of ‘dangerous classes’. In America, after the civil war Black men saw their best chances at social mobility and hopes of emancipation realized by participating in either the further eradication of the American Indians or by partaking in the Spanish-American war in Cuba. The stealing of the Native’s ‘frontier land’ (and the genocide that went along with it) was the basis for white male suffrage in America in the first place. Liberalism’s liberty must inherently be built off the exploitation and extermination of other peoples
” it is precisely from such historical reconstruction, remote from any apologetic, edifying tones, that the genuine merits and real strong points of liberalism emerge. Demonstrating an extraordinary flexibility, it constantly sought to react and rise to the challenges of the time. It is true that, far from being spontaneous and painless, such transformation was largely imposed from without, by political and social movements with which liberalism has repeatedly and fiercely clashed. But precisely in this resides its flexibility. Liberalism has proved capable of learning from its antagonist (the tradition of thinking that, starting with 'radicalism' and passing through MarJ\f, issued in the revolutions which variously invoked him) to a far greater extent than its antagonist has proved capable of learning from it. Above all, the antagonist has proved incapable of learning what constitutes the second major strong point of liberalism. Certainly, liberalism's learning process was quite the reverse of smooth, at least for those who wanted to overcome the exclusion clauses that run deep in this intellectual tradition . None has been as committed as it to thinking through the decisive problem of the limitation of power. However, historically, this limitation of power went hand in hand with the delimitation of a restricted sacred space: nurturing a proud, exclusivist self-consciousness, the community of the freemen inhabiting it was led to regard enslavement, or more or less explicit subjection, imposed on the great mass dispersed throughout the profane space, as legitimate. Sometimes they even arrived at decimation or annihilation. Has this dialectic on the basis of which liberalism was transformed into an ideology of domination , and even an ideology of war, wholly disappeared?” (p. 349)
The Community of the free
Liberalism can be accurately described as the self-conscious ideology of the bourgeoisie which they use to justify their exploitation and right to private property. The term ‘liberal’ was originally synonymous with aristocracy. Self-identifying liberals opposed both the all-powerful monarchy for being too despotic as well as the masses for being too unruly and incompetent. John Adams believed that the normal commoners should not be in power for they lacked knowledge in liberal arts and sciences, and therefore did not have the prerequisite intellect to defend liberty. He said that power should reside in those who “received a liberal education, an ordinary degree of erudition in liberal arts and sciences…(they must be) well-born and wealthy” (p. 249). Liberal philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville agreed, stating that commoners could not defend liberty (in his case against Louis Bonaparte) because they had an “incomplete education” unlike “property owners, the bourgeoisie , the men of culture…in a word, all those who have received a liberal education.” (p. 250). The term had an elitist and ethnic connotation which suggested only the bourgeoisie were educated enough or, in Edmund Burke’s words, were of a “chosen race… whose veins the blood of liberty circulates” (p. 251) to be worthy of having the privilege of being free. To those living outside of this ‘community of the free’, because according to the liberal they were not deserving or educated enough for the liberal’s freedoms, being in servitude or enslaved was not a contradiction but rather a given. Freedom for me but not for thee.
The community of the free saw those enslaved or in servitude to them as deserving of their lower rung on the hierarchy. The subjugation of these “barbarians” by the community of the free helped reinforce the liberal’s view that he inherently deserved his freedom, for if he did not then why had he been capable of subjugating these savages in the first place? Liberty really only meant liberty to those who were deserving of it, which is why the philosophical father of liberalism John Locke was able to both decry the political “slavery” of monarchism in Europe while at the same time write “[e]very free man of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over his Negro slaves,of what opinion or religion soever.” (p. 11) without feeling in contradiction with himself. Likewise, given the backwardness of supposed savages and barbarians, it should be no surprise that liberals like John Stewart Mill could justify “vigorous despotism” over them in order to for the community of the free to “civilize” these beasts (p. 255). Colonial conquests, therefore, were really attempts by liberals to civilize the entire globe by necessary force. So when Britain repressed millions in India, or conducted wars in China to force them into Opium addiction, or starved Irish peasants to death, or enriched itself off of cotton produced by the blood of American slaves, Mills and other liberals simply viewed these horrors as promoting liberty throughout the world. Any heinous act committed to ‘defend liberty’ was justified by the fact that it was enacted against those who opposed freedom.
It is by no accident that puritanical Christian thought could be linked with early formations of liberalism. The Dutch Boers, some of the earliest champions of liberalism, believed themselves to be “the Chosen people'' while Protestant England often saw itself as “the new Israel” whose people were “chosen by the Almighty for a special and universal mission.” (p. 315). These “chosen people '' saw themselves as inheritors of a “divine right” from God; the same God who allowed his chosen people to conquer Canan and massacre its inhabitants and turn gentiles into their slaves. Outside of these chosen people there was no difference between man and the natural world. A God who wiped entire populations off the face of the Earth had no problem raining down destruction on “both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass” (Joshua 6:21) “all the souls…all that breathed…all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground” (Genesis 19:24-26) because he saw all of these as the same degree of lesser than when compared to his chosen people; a human living outside the community of the free is no better than an ant. The fact that the countries with the deepest liberal traditions, who saw themselves as ‘community of the free’ which evolved out of ‘God’s chosen people’ would be the ones deepest enmeshed in colonization and slavery should come as no surprise. These liberals, having triumphed on a planetary scale, saw nothing wrong or unnatural with exercising a planet-wide dictatorship over those excluded from their so-called community of the free.
Fascism
Many seeds of 20th century fascism were present in liberalism from its earliest days. Revolutionary agitation from the subordinate classes was often seen as a disease. De Toqueville refers to lower-class revolution in all of the following terms: a “revolutionary disease”, a “virus of the unknown”, and “a new race… of a hitherto unknown breed” (p. 279). To de Toqueville and others, one must work towards the “eradication” of this “destable race” (p. 279) in order to keep society safe from its pathogens. It is not too hard to draw eugenicist conclusions from such an intertwinement of ‘race’ with ‘sickness’. The fact is that the eugenics movement started out in liberal Britain before being adopted by Germany and then continued by the United States for many years after Germany’s defeat. The anti-semetic tropes of Nazi’s too were expounded by Edmund Burke, who often linked revolutionaries with Jews as long ago as 1790.
Many have tried to paint Nazi Germany as an aberration, but it should be noted that at the time of the First World War Germany can even be seen as tame in comparison to liberal stalwarts Britain and America. All 3 nations were seen as quintessentially liberal at the time while also being imperialistic to their core, but Britain's imperialism was enacted on a fully global scale while at the same time denying universal male suffrage (which Germany’s elections were based off of). America was a nation embroiled deeply in racist apartheid that would be an influence on the coming Nazi regime. The American deportation of Indigenous peoples by Andrew Jackson’s regime is often linked to Nazi deportations. Likewise, the largest deportations in history were that of African slaves forced to America in chains. If they survived being shipped over the seas (2-4 million slaves did not) they were rewarded by being sent to plantations that were essentially the progenitors of the concentration camps and slave-labor-complex the Nazis enforced. When the slaves won their freedom America’s white supremacy did not simply dissipate. So deeply imbedded was the hatred of black people that lynchings became mass public spectacles often marketed in the local papers. These brutal killings which involved “castration, skinning, roasting, hanging, and shooting” as well as selling souvenirs of the victims’ “fingers, toes, teeth and bones, even genitals” and “picture postcards of the event” (p. 344) are extremely reminiscent of pogroms. The racist Ku Klux Klan which enforced this system of oppression also draws similarities to Italian ‘blackshirts’ or German ‘brownshirts’ in their violence and methods. If all this seems superficial it should be noted that Nazis were intimately aware of and openly influenced by American racism and race law. Not only did Hitler write about it fondly in Mein Kampf (examples include: “in North America the Teutonic element, which has kept its racial stock pure and did not mix it with any other racial stock, has come to dominate the American Continent and will remain master of it as long as that element does not fall a victim to the habit of adulterating its blood” (Mein Kampf, 238) and "At present there exists one State which manifests at least some modest attempts that show a better appreciation of how things ought to be done in this matter. It is not, however, in our model German Republic but in the U.S.A. that efforts are made to conform at least partly to the counsels of commonsense. By refusing immigrants to enter there if they are in a bad state of health, and by excluding certain races from the right to become naturalized as citizens, they have begun to introduce principles similar to those on which we wish to ground the People's State." (Mein Kampf, 361)) but the Nuremberg laws, which laid the legal groundwork for the persecution of Jews, explicitly took direction from American Jim Crow laws. In fact while debating these laws the Nazis came to realize that America’s “one-drop” rule was too stringent to be implemented to German Jews. Finally, the American project Native genocide in order to make “living space” for white settlers is undoubtedly a model for the Nazi’s lebensraum and subsequent murder of millions to make space for German settlers.
The myth of gradualism
Liberals today often claim that liberal democracy has led to gradual improvements in life, and that over time more and more people will naturally be let into the ‘community of the free’ and liberty will be spread to all through liberal capitalism. 5 points dispute this
1. The foundation of liberalism has an inherent disdain for democracy. Slavery, something quintessentially anti-democratic and in violation of the ideals of “liberty”, was the key piece towards building the liberal project. Slavery only reached its peak development following the success of the liberal revolutions: “The total slave population in the Americas reached around 330,000 in 1700, nearly three million by 1800, and finally peaked at over six million in the 1850s…In the mid-eighteenth century, it was Great Britain that possessed the largest number of slaves (878,000). Second position was held by Portugal, which possessed 700,000 slaves and was in fact a kind of semi-colony of Great Britain: much of the gold extracted by Brazilian slaves ended up in London” (p. 43). Democracy was also not extended to the working classes who, while having no voting rights, had to send children as young as 3 to work to survive. Vagrants and the unemployed certainly had no rights whatsoever and were sent to forced work camps which, in England, were “spread over the whole national territory, confining up to 500,000 detainees” who simply had to be “(any) persons, able-bodied or otherwise, having neither visible or assignable property, nor honest and sufficient means of livelihood” (p. 79)
2.The exclusion of people from the liberties and political rights exercised by ‘the community of the free’ was only overcome through mass violence and upheaval. Slavery was only ended in America after the most deadly war the country ever fought. Voting rights were most extensively spread after major wars like the first world war, and extremely violent revolutions like that of the Russian Revolution were needed to pave the way for expanded women’s rights
3. In addition to the pain and suffering needed to extend democracy and liberty, the process has certainly not been linear. It has been a series of gains followed by cutbacks. Emancipation of slaves was followed by Jim Crow. Universal male suffrage rights earned in France during the 1848 revolutions were abolished by the bourgeoisie 2 years later, only to be reintroduced under Louis Napoleon.
4. The process of emancipation was often spurred on by factors external to the liberal world. For example, abolition of slavery in Britain's colonies was only pushed thanks to the upheaval of the Haitian slave revolution. Welfarism in the capitalist world was pushed to new heights thanks to the existence of a competing model of development and governance in the Soviet Union.
5. These gains in liberty were often aided by containment and liquidation of ‘dangerous classes’. In America, after the civil war Black men saw their best chances at social mobility and hopes of emancipation realized by participating in either the further eradication of the American Indians or by partaking in the Spanish-American war in Cuba. The stealing of the Native’s ‘frontier land’ (and the genocide that went along with it) was the basis for white male suffrage in America in the first place. Liberalism’s liberty must inherently be built off the exploitation and extermination of other peoples
” it is precisely from such historical reconstruction, remote from any apologetic, edifying tones, that the genuine merits and real strong points of liberalism emerge. Demonstrating an extraordinary flexibility, it constantly sought to react and rise to the challenges of the time. It is true that, far from being spontaneous and painless, such transformation was largely imposed from without, by political and social movements with which liberalism has repeatedly and fiercely clashed. But precisely in this resides its flexibility. Liberalism has proved capable of learning from its antagonist (the tradition of thinking that, starting with 'radicalism' and passing through MarJ\f, issued in the revolutions which variously invoked him) to a far greater extent than its antagonist has proved capable of learning from it. Above all, the antagonist has proved incapable of learning what constitutes the second major strong point of liberalism. Certainly, liberalism's learning process was quite the reverse of smooth, at least for those who wanted to overcome the exclusion clauses that run deep in this intellectual tradition . None has been as committed as it to thinking through the decisive problem of the limitation of power. However, historically, this limitation of power went hand in hand with the delimitation of a restricted sacred space: nurturing a proud, exclusivist self-consciousness, the community of the freemen inhabiting it was led to regard enslavement, or more or less explicit subjection, imposed on the great mass dispersed throughout the profane space, as legitimate. Sometimes they even arrived at decimation or annihilation. Has this dialectic on the basis of which liberalism was transformed into an ideology of domination , and even an ideology of war, wholly disappeared?” (p. 349)
January 17, 2015
I am very torn about giving this a 3 or a 4. I think 3.5 would have been ideal. In terms of importance and my desire to have lots of people read it(especially useless bien pensant types in America, Britain, France, and those wahhabi-humanist nations I like to jokingly conflate and call 'Nethersweden') I would rank it a 5.
The good:
Myth busting on an epic scope. Explodes most of a public school education in the anglosphere.
Denies from liberalism is sanctimonious privilege of claiming to have been pre-ordained in history and a self-evident march of progress whose victory will one day triumph.
Explores the extremely dark history of many traditionally liberal regimes, whose crimes were similar in scale and scope to that of the totalitarian abortions of the twentieth century-but often viewed as less terrible for the simple fact that far less written records from the victims still exist.
Shows the intrinsic ties to racism and terror in the defense of private property and how these are inseparable and fundamental bedrocks of the ideology.
Overall, philosophically speaking, this was a 5 star book. So then we have to go to the history and...
The bad:
I was really expecting this book to have a modern day section. And while its totally fine for its focus to be 18th-19th Century history, its silence beyond the interwar eugenics movement is somewhat galling. Surely, considering its publication date, the evangelical liberalism of neoconservatism could have been at least touched upon? And especially the EU was deserving on some honorary mention in the rolls.
Given the early case studies, more on the 19th century colonial experiences of Belgium and Netherlands would have been welcome too.
There was a bit of cheap conflation with historical figures views on one issue being taken to represent their entire effect. Franklin's and Roosevelt's views of Native Americans were alot more complicated than portrayed here. Particularly in the case of the American Revolution, where both sides upheld slavery, this was a bit bizarre. You would think, reading this book, that southern plantation owners were the driving force of 1776, when in fact they were (excepting Virginia) by far more likely to support the loyalist cause. It was New England after all, which started and fueled the war.
Concluding remarks:
While I loved the argument that only Toussant L'Overture and Simon Bolivar were the only truly successful liberals if we take the pop culture understanding of the word into the past, I feel like Alexander Hamilton should have gotten a mention even though he wasn't an executive leader. The ban on foreign born people running for president specifically exists to exclude him from American power beyond what he already had, and it is my opinion that he correctly saw the future and American history would have ended up alot better with more of him. As it was, outside of the deep south at least, the conclusion of the Civil War did in many ways create Hamilton's America, and botched as it could be (and still is) it was a vast improvement over what was evolving before that point.
Not relevant to reviewing the book, but I also have to say there was a bit of delicious irony for a Marxist to write a book about a utopian ideology which is actually dependent on forced labor, fundamentally oppressive towards minorities and legally proclaimed outsiders (anyone remember the USSR's classification of 'former persons'?). But still, it seems ever since 1991 (or hell, 1956) the critical marxists have really lost their euphoria and often become quite astute critics of our present system. The liberals have yet to do so, and they must be made to do so. This book is part of that process and despite my quibbles I recommend everyone to read it.
The good:
Myth busting on an epic scope. Explodes most of a public school education in the anglosphere.
Denies from liberalism is sanctimonious privilege of claiming to have been pre-ordained in history and a self-evident march of progress whose victory will one day triumph.
Explores the extremely dark history of many traditionally liberal regimes, whose crimes were similar in scale and scope to that of the totalitarian abortions of the twentieth century-but often viewed as less terrible for the simple fact that far less written records from the victims still exist.
Shows the intrinsic ties to racism and terror in the defense of private property and how these are inseparable and fundamental bedrocks of the ideology.
Overall, philosophically speaking, this was a 5 star book. So then we have to go to the history and...
The bad:
I was really expecting this book to have a modern day section. And while its totally fine for its focus to be 18th-19th Century history, its silence beyond the interwar eugenics movement is somewhat galling. Surely, considering its publication date, the evangelical liberalism of neoconservatism could have been at least touched upon? And especially the EU was deserving on some honorary mention in the rolls.
Given the early case studies, more on the 19th century colonial experiences of Belgium and Netherlands would have been welcome too.
There was a bit of cheap conflation with historical figures views on one issue being taken to represent their entire effect. Franklin's and Roosevelt's views of Native Americans were alot more complicated than portrayed here. Particularly in the case of the American Revolution, where both sides upheld slavery, this was a bit bizarre. You would think, reading this book, that southern plantation owners were the driving force of 1776, when in fact they were (excepting Virginia) by far more likely to support the loyalist cause. It was New England after all, which started and fueled the war.
Concluding remarks:
While I loved the argument that only Toussant L'Overture and Simon Bolivar were the only truly successful liberals if we take the pop culture understanding of the word into the past, I feel like Alexander Hamilton should have gotten a mention even though he wasn't an executive leader. The ban on foreign born people running for president specifically exists to exclude him from American power beyond what he already had, and it is my opinion that he correctly saw the future and American history would have ended up alot better with more of him. As it was, outside of the deep south at least, the conclusion of the Civil War did in many ways create Hamilton's America, and botched as it could be (and still is) it was a vast improvement over what was evolving before that point.
Not relevant to reviewing the book, but I also have to say there was a bit of delicious irony for a Marxist to write a book about a utopian ideology which is actually dependent on forced labor, fundamentally oppressive towards minorities and legally proclaimed outsiders (anyone remember the USSR's classification of 'former persons'?). But still, it seems ever since 1991 (or hell, 1956) the critical marxists have really lost their euphoria and often become quite astute critics of our present system. The liberals have yet to do so, and they must be made to do so. This book is part of that process and despite my quibbles I recommend everyone to read it.
January 16, 2015
Definitely interesting because it details how liberalism emerged and how the main liberal intellectuals for the most part supported slavery and colonialism. However it goes beyond this fact by showing how and why they did so and what kinds of intellectual assumptions were embedded in liberalism that allowed these contradictions to emerge (if they are even contradictions). I enjoyed it but for some reason it didn't flow very well and was a bit repetitive. But definitely worth reading.
June 22, 2022
Classical liberalism rests on a narrowly-proscribed definition of personhood which equates individuality with property ownership. Anything that interferes with property rights is an infringement on individual freedom. This could come from the top through despotic governmental structures; however the gravest threat to individual freedom come from the teeming, propertyless masses. In this way modern libertarians, drawing on Milton Friedman and von Hayek, are correct when they say they are the true inheritors of liberalism.
Any political rights that the proletariat have in bourgeois democracies were only gained by class struggle. The proletariat has often used the rhetoric of liberal philosophers to justify and motivate their struggles. That Liberalism was able to concede these political rights was due to feature peculiar to it; what Losurdo calls the dialectic of emancipation and disemancipation. However, we must recognize that this reappropriation is, in fact, a deformation of the original liberal project.
Fascism is often characterized as a complete rejection of liberal thought and the Enlightenment more broadly. This is false. Marxism, on the other hand, is described as the real fulfillment of the liberal project, especially its more radical elements. Perhaps this is true. However, fascism has an equal claim on the inheritance of liberal tradition.
Everywhere the liberal project is in shambles. For decades now, Western states have been dismantling the concessions wrung from them by workers movements in the mid-20th century. In the United States, this project is essentially complete. Now even the rhetoric of social liberalism is disappearing from the political sphere, left only to a few marginal or ephermal figures. The bourgeoisie, it seems, has taken its cue from Marie Kondo - it's tossing all the things that no longer spark joy; now it's returning to its classic, brutal form. We are perhaps now entering another dis-emancipatory phase in the history of liberalism, one which can only be halted, maybe forever, through renewed struggle from below.
Any political rights that the proletariat have in bourgeois democracies were only gained by class struggle. The proletariat has often used the rhetoric of liberal philosophers to justify and motivate their struggles. That Liberalism was able to concede these political rights was due to feature peculiar to it; what Losurdo calls the dialectic of emancipation and disemancipation. However, we must recognize that this reappropriation is, in fact, a deformation of the original liberal project.
Fascism is often characterized as a complete rejection of liberal thought and the Enlightenment more broadly. This is false. Marxism, on the other hand, is described as the real fulfillment of the liberal project, especially its more radical elements. Perhaps this is true. However, fascism has an equal claim on the inheritance of liberal tradition.
Everywhere the liberal project is in shambles. For decades now, Western states have been dismantling the concessions wrung from them by workers movements in the mid-20th century. In the United States, this project is essentially complete. Now even the rhetoric of social liberalism is disappearing from the political sphere, left only to a few marginal or ephermal figures. The bourgeoisie, it seems, has taken its cue from Marie Kondo - it's tossing all the things that no longer spark joy; now it's returning to its classic, brutal form. We are perhaps now entering another dis-emancipatory phase in the history of liberalism, one which can only be halted, maybe forever, through renewed struggle from below.
April 20, 2021
A fantastic riposte to the traditional hagiography of liberalism prevalent today. Losurdo masterfully traces the history of liberal thought and it's contradictions, exposing that the ideology of the "community of the free" has always been one based on freedom for a select group of exploiters living off the servitude of their "lessers".
August 5, 2021
Dense (but not in a good way) and repetitive.
August 27, 2018
I remember studying political theory as an undergraduate, struggling through a canon, unsure of the terms on which it could be criticised - citing George or Marx against Locke, reading Trotsky on Machiavelli. This is a book that would have been valuable at the time - indeed, it looks like the English translation was published about when I would have most benefited from it! Domenico Losurdo provides a comprehensive challenge to the philosophers of liberalism, demonstrating its grand hypocrisies and silences - the 'sacred space' to which the benefits of liberalism have been restricted, and the 'profane spaces' (colonial subjects and slaves abroad, the swinish multitude in the metropole) which were excluded. He carefully traces the connections between the still-applauded liberal canon and the worst horrors of the twentieth-century, demonstrating that Nazism was not a barbarous break with liberalism so much as a culmination of its logic. At the same time, Losurdo is keen to stress the conflicts within liberalism and the emergence of a challenge simultaneously from without and within - the challenge of a radicalism which verged on socialism, a discordant liberalism from below which demanded the expansion of its sacred space and an end to its exclusions. I think this is pretty critical - Losurdo reads liberalism against itself, but does not mean to imply that liberalism was just an empty, cynical gambit. There are liberal insights which he hopes to rescue, and thereby avoid falling into the alliance with reaction which can sometimes characterise socialist anti-liberalism.
But in reading liberalism against itself, there is a danger that Losurdo takes his subjects too much at their word. Towards the beginning of the book, he hues a little closely to the reactionary critics of liberalism - the defenders of British imperialism who denounced the American slavers - although he does ultimately come to defend the American 'revolution' in limited terms. This is quite a narrow intellectual history of liberalism, and at times the reliance on the great philosophers (and, I should add, some rather out-of-date historians) can begin to grate - there is little effort to interrogate the wider reception of these ideas by recourse to the writing of 'ordinary' liberals and their critics from below. Particularly absurd is Losurdo's acceptance of the word of legislation, where he sometimes overemphasises the restrictions placed even on the oppressor - although there is something useful in portraying slavery as systemic and outside the slaver's control, it's pretty grotesque to imply that the law was effective in preventing slavers from raping their slaves. Less seriously, it does not do much for Losurdo's argument that he seems to think the USA's sodomy laws (remaining in 14 states until 2003) were leading to heterosexual couples being arrested for anal sex - taking the word of legislation as given in this manner can serve to reduce everything to a liberal notion of freedom/unfreedom, obscuring specific relations of oppression (race, gender, sexuality) and especially the way these relations are reproduced outside the law. There were points where this narrative - Losurdo's argument about the dialectic of dis/emancipation - reminded me of Nancy Fraser's reworking of Karl Polanyi, with the same acceptance of a broadly liberal, idealist framework even as it is turned against liberalism's exclusions. As useful as Losurdo's arguments may have been to my undergraduate self, caught within a discipline hostile to socialism and materialism, there is the same frustration at not being able to go beyond it - at almost avoiding a socialist critique of liberalism on socialist terms.
But in reading liberalism against itself, there is a danger that Losurdo takes his subjects too much at their word. Towards the beginning of the book, he hues a little closely to the reactionary critics of liberalism - the defenders of British imperialism who denounced the American slavers - although he does ultimately come to defend the American 'revolution' in limited terms. This is quite a narrow intellectual history of liberalism, and at times the reliance on the great philosophers (and, I should add, some rather out-of-date historians) can begin to grate - there is little effort to interrogate the wider reception of these ideas by recourse to the writing of 'ordinary' liberals and their critics from below. Particularly absurd is Losurdo's acceptance of the word of legislation, where he sometimes overemphasises the restrictions placed even on the oppressor - although there is something useful in portraying slavery as systemic and outside the slaver's control, it's pretty grotesque to imply that the law was effective in preventing slavers from raping their slaves. Less seriously, it does not do much for Losurdo's argument that he seems to think the USA's sodomy laws (remaining in 14 states until 2003) were leading to heterosexual couples being arrested for anal sex - taking the word of legislation as given in this manner can serve to reduce everything to a liberal notion of freedom/unfreedom, obscuring specific relations of oppression (race, gender, sexuality) and especially the way these relations are reproduced outside the law. There were points where this narrative - Losurdo's argument about the dialectic of dis/emancipation - reminded me of Nancy Fraser's reworking of Karl Polanyi, with the same acceptance of a broadly liberal, idealist framework even as it is turned against liberalism's exclusions. As useful as Losurdo's arguments may have been to my undergraduate self, caught within a discipline hostile to socialism and materialism, there is the same frustration at not being able to go beyond it - at almost avoiding a socialist critique of liberalism on socialist terms.
February 7, 2023
Una imprescindible re-lectura de la historia del liberalismo, sobre todo enfocada sobre Estados Unidos, imprescindible para combatir la "leyenda rosa" que rodea a esta ideología.
August 11, 2021
"Bidding farewell to hagiography is the precondition for landing on the firm ground of history."
Losurdo has constructed here a masterpiece. Incredibly well-sourced and thorough, he goes through the last 4 centuries of the rise of liberalism, from the rebellion against Spain's Phillip II, to the Glorious Revolution in England, to the American Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, the French Revolution, the War of 1812, the US Civil War, and the onset of the First World War.
Admittedly, the book is long, and in some sections it reads a little dry from excessive quoting and hopping around to different prominent liberals. But the last three chapters really bring it all home and circle back to the questions raised in the first few chapters, like What is Liberalism? and Were the U.S. and England liberal countries? His analysis is sharp, unsparing, and provides a much-needed guide to understanding events of the twentieth century (which he alludes to in the last chapter). He also introduces really great concepts and dialectical relationships, like emancipation/dis-emancipation and sacred space/profane space.
It reminds me a lot of Gerald Horne's writing in The Dawning of the Apocalypse, The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism, and The Counter Revolution of 1776. I think they'd be really great companion texts to this.
This was my first Losurdo book, and I will definitely be reading more!
Losurdo has constructed here a masterpiece. Incredibly well-sourced and thorough, he goes through the last 4 centuries of the rise of liberalism, from the rebellion against Spain's Phillip II, to the Glorious Revolution in England, to the American Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, the French Revolution, the War of 1812, the US Civil War, and the onset of the First World War.
Admittedly, the book is long, and in some sections it reads a little dry from excessive quoting and hopping around to different prominent liberals. But the last three chapters really bring it all home and circle back to the questions raised in the first few chapters, like What is Liberalism? and Were the U.S. and England liberal countries? His analysis is sharp, unsparing, and provides a much-needed guide to understanding events of the twentieth century (which he alludes to in the last chapter). He also introduces really great concepts and dialectical relationships, like emancipation/dis-emancipation and sacred space/profane space.
It reminds me a lot of Gerald Horne's writing in The Dawning of the Apocalypse, The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism, and The Counter Revolution of 1776. I think they'd be really great companion texts to this.
This was my first Losurdo book, and I will definitely be reading more!
April 24, 2016
This was disappointing. The author's critique of liberalism as founded in racial and class exclusion is thoroughly documented in the writings of Locke, de Tocqueville, Mill, and many other exponents of liberalism. That said, I feel that this critique has been made elsewhere already, and the organization of this text does not so much present a history - a detailed explication of liberalism over time - as it does a litany, a rehashing and restating of the same exclusionary biases of liberalism found in multiple authors and schools.
The problem with this approach is, first, that it does little to show change over time - the last two chapters purport to document these flaws of liberalism into the twentieth century, but mostly rehash the nineteenth. Secondly, the most interesting angle on this subject that the author argues, the spatial segregation of the world into the sacred and profane by liberalism, is only half developed and confined to a short chapter.
In sum, this book is solidly documented, but not well structured and lacking an incisive original thesis. I think this would be most useful for someone who is already familiar with the critique of liberalism (from, say, a Marxist perspective) and wants pointers to critical problems with liberalism in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries.
The problem with this approach is, first, that it does little to show change over time - the last two chapters purport to document these flaws of liberalism into the twentieth century, but mostly rehash the nineteenth. Secondly, the most interesting angle on this subject that the author argues, the spatial segregation of the world into the sacred and profane by liberalism, is only half developed and confined to a short chapter.
In sum, this book is solidly documented, but not well structured and lacking an incisive original thesis. I think this would be most useful for someone who is already familiar with the critique of liberalism (from, say, a Marxist perspective) and wants pointers to critical problems with liberalism in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries.
November 1, 2021
This book is a counter-history of liberalism - it seeks to expose its hypocrisy, its paradoxes, but it does not actually critique liberalism as such, only its history. This is unfortunate - the book is, especially at the beginning, a listing of racist attitudes of well-known liberal authors. Which gets tiring - but has educational value. Later on he analyses liberalism's justification of exploitation (where he writes a lot about the exploitation of white servants in the u.s., seemingly unwilling to engage with settler-colonialism as framework here), response of liberalism to events like the Haitian Revolution, the evolution of liberalism's attitude to proletariat, etc. These are interesting - but insufficient, as he is e.g. unwilling to properly critique the French Revolution.
This is my main issue with the book: it does not critique liberalism, it simply seeks to expose its hypocrisy. This is clear when he states that "to take up the legacy of this intellectual tradition is an absolutely unavoidable task." (p. 344) However, the account of the transformation of how the community of the free was first delineated racially and how that transformed racially I think is quite good - which is covered in chapter 2, and I liked the most.
This is my main issue with the book: it does not critique liberalism, it simply seeks to expose its hypocrisy. This is clear when he states that "to take up the legacy of this intellectual tradition is an absolutely unavoidable task." (p. 344) However, the account of the transformation of how the community of the free was first delineated racially and how that transformed racially I think is quite good - which is covered in chapter 2, and I liked the most.
January 5, 2020
Really stellar. A phenomenal account of the relationship between white supermacy/colonialism, capital accumulation and the development of the Liberal tradition. The only I found frustrating was that this is almost exclusively an intellectual history, confined to the written works of several authors, and although they were no doubt very influential both in terms of the development of the Liberal tradition in all of its destructive twists and turns, as I finished it I felt like I was missing a more direct connection to how the ideas presented by the authors under investigation were connected to the process of governance. This is, however, beyond the scope of the argument this book was set to make and a much more complex and less directly tractable question, so its hard for me to get that disappointed about it.
February 2, 2022
One of the most powerful consciousness-shifting books I’ve ever read
March 14, 2016
Liberalism: A Counter History, by Domenico Losurdo is a fascinating look at the beginnings of Liberalism and its relation to slavery. Losurdo spares no detail on each of histories most well known political philosophers, including Burke, Locke, Mill and more, and how each of these individuals thought about slavery. It would seem that slavery and Liberalism would be opposing ideals, one promoting the complete loss of personal freedom and the other supporting greater political and social freedoms. However, Losurdo shows this is not the case.
Many Liberal philosophers did not believe slavery was counter to Liberal thought, because they believed other races and social classes were beneath them. A house of peers refers to white upper class men, and not anything else, at least according to many early American philosophers and politicians. Losurdo makes interesting claims that assert the early USA was a "master race democracy" where freedom was allowed, but only for a certain race of people. Freedom should never trickle down to other races, at least according to many early Americans. The buck doesn't stop there however. Many British and French politicians and thinkers believed similar things about other colours or creeds, including those of the lower class. Losudro indeed does an excellent job bringing to light just how ironic early Liberalism really was.
This book does not necessarily get to political, rather it examines the racial bigotry that much of the world suffered from in the 18th and 19th centuries. How chattel slavery could ever exist in a democratic nation is mind boggling, but Losurdo does a wonderful job outlining the mentality and political thought that existed to justify and defend the institution of slavery. Many of these justifications are steeped in Liberal ideology, such as the freedom to own and control ones own property, even if said property is a human being.
Losurdo's book is a simple but intensely fascinating read that will bring the darker side of Liberal thought to life. It wasn't all freedom and liberty, Liberalism often justified the most brutal and despicable trade. I would definitely recommend this book to those interested in political history, or those looking for a deeper understanding of Liberalism and its uses, especially relating to slavery.
Many Liberal philosophers did not believe slavery was counter to Liberal thought, because they believed other races and social classes were beneath them. A house of peers refers to white upper class men, and not anything else, at least according to many early American philosophers and politicians. Losurdo makes interesting claims that assert the early USA was a "master race democracy" where freedom was allowed, but only for a certain race of people. Freedom should never trickle down to other races, at least according to many early Americans. The buck doesn't stop there however. Many British and French politicians and thinkers believed similar things about other colours or creeds, including those of the lower class. Losudro indeed does an excellent job bringing to light just how ironic early Liberalism really was.
This book does not necessarily get to political, rather it examines the racial bigotry that much of the world suffered from in the 18th and 19th centuries. How chattel slavery could ever exist in a democratic nation is mind boggling, but Losurdo does a wonderful job outlining the mentality and political thought that existed to justify and defend the institution of slavery. Many of these justifications are steeped in Liberal ideology, such as the freedom to own and control ones own property, even if said property is a human being.
Losurdo's book is a simple but intensely fascinating read that will bring the darker side of Liberal thought to life. It wasn't all freedom and liberty, Liberalism often justified the most brutal and despicable trade. I would definitely recommend this book to those interested in political history, or those looking for a deeper understanding of Liberalism and its uses, especially relating to slavery.
June 20, 2015
An exhaustive study of the really obvious, though clearly not obvious enough to a lot of people. And when I say exhaustive I really mean it, incredibly impressive amounts of research and just appalling quotations from the kinds of people (Locke, Adam Smith, Bentham, all of the Founding Fathers) who get name dropped on a constant basis are stacked against the inhumane shit they pulled. Would highly recommend to anyone who still has faith in the "principles" that continue to dominate western thought, and it should definitely be required reading for anyone who's ever used the phrase "what the founding fathers intended." Some of the mental acrobatics involved in justifying slavery and genocide that these people engaged in are absolutely breathtaking and the pissy "no u!" fights between Benjamin Franklin and the liberal elites in England got into over whether or not it was okay to, you know, own human beings are just mind boggling.
The translator seemed to make some odd word choices here and there and the tone seems to shift fairly often but I'm not gonna hold that against the author.
The translator seemed to make some odd word choices here and there and the tone seems to shift fairly often but I'm not gonna hold that against the author.
December 8, 2021
Alternate subtitle: Why de Tocqueville Sucks and You Should Never Lend Credence to Anything He Said Ever Again.
Caveat: I dislike liberals because I am a communist. If any conservatives read this and somehow think I'm on their side because I'm insulting liberals, just know that I despise you at least as much as I do the libs.
This is not a breezy read. It is dense, weighty, at times tedious, and suboptimally translated and/or written. Yet it is very important and I think our world would be far better off if more people were familiar with Losurdo's argument. Indeed even since only a quarter of the way through the book, I have been doing my part to educate people about the thesis here. It is so simple and explains so much.
Once you understand that liberalism has always been solely about protecting the liberty of the privileged class at the expense of everyone else, and that "liberty" was always for liberals a synonym for "property," well then everything about modern liberalism makes sense.
What falls most into place is how modern liberals relish the expression of lofty ideals, and love to proclaim their righteousness about any moral question; yet when a moral imperative involves violence, chaos, or otherwise upending the status quo, a liberal suddenly develops an allergy to doing anything meaningful.
This maddening hypocrisy and blatant lack of sincerity in one's stated ideals becomes far more comprehensible when you realize that this is the political ideology whose trajectory -- from birth to rise and plateau -- coincided precisely with the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and mass genocide in the Americas. Liberty and freedom were always staunchly reserved for certain classes of people, and for liberalism always meant the most savage exploitation of everyone else. Losurdo illustrates this amazingly well, even if he gets quite repetitive by the end.
Despite the lack of a neat and tight definition, Losurdo indisputably shows how liberalism goes hand-in-hand with mass exploitation of the (usually racial) undercaste.
Once you understand all this, it becomes frankly astonishing that so many millions of people proudly identify as "liberal." It makes me chomp at the bit to explain to everyone what liberalism has always meant. Washington and Jefferson, both slaveowners, were liberals. So was Calhoun, the rabid Civil War secessionist, and notorious Indian-slaughterer Andrew Jackson. When you meet someone and they tell you they're a liberal, you should absolutely ask them, "Oh I see, the ideology that vociferously excused slavery and genocide? Interesting choice!"
Also astonishing is how liberalism in modern-times ever became synonymous with a "bleeding heart" or with, y'know, even minimally caring about people. That's certainly a modern innovation on liberalism, and one that ultimately is not backed up by any meaningful action. I suspect a lot of this modern, warm & fuzzy connotation to liberalism is just a result of the Overton window shifting. Ascendant fascists were always going to caricature the more "civil" liberals as way too soft -- even when they're clearly not.
So come for the important political history, and stay for the hilarious skewering of de Tocqueville, who really comes off as basically the worst. I'm happy to say that I recognized de Tocqueville sucked when I first read Democracy in America, I just didn't have the political analysis to understand exactly how awful he was.
Not Bad Reviews
@pointblaek
Caveat: I dislike liberals because I am a communist. If any conservatives read this and somehow think I'm on their side because I'm insulting liberals, just know that I despise you at least as much as I do the libs.
This is not a breezy read. It is dense, weighty, at times tedious, and suboptimally translated and/or written. Yet it is very important and I think our world would be far better off if more people were familiar with Losurdo's argument. Indeed even since only a quarter of the way through the book, I have been doing my part to educate people about the thesis here. It is so simple and explains so much.
Once you understand that liberalism has always been solely about protecting the liberty of the privileged class at the expense of everyone else, and that "liberty" was always for liberals a synonym for "property," well then everything about modern liberalism makes sense.
What falls most into place is how modern liberals relish the expression of lofty ideals, and love to proclaim their righteousness about any moral question; yet when a moral imperative involves violence, chaos, or otherwise upending the status quo, a liberal suddenly develops an allergy to doing anything meaningful.
This maddening hypocrisy and blatant lack of sincerity in one's stated ideals becomes far more comprehensible when you realize that this is the political ideology whose trajectory -- from birth to rise and plateau -- coincided precisely with the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and mass genocide in the Americas. Liberty and freedom were always staunchly reserved for certain classes of people, and for liberalism always meant the most savage exploitation of everyone else. Losurdo illustrates this amazingly well, even if he gets quite repetitive by the end.
Despite the lack of a neat and tight definition, Losurdo indisputably shows how liberalism goes hand-in-hand with mass exploitation of the (usually racial) undercaste.
Once you understand all this, it becomes frankly astonishing that so many millions of people proudly identify as "liberal." It makes me chomp at the bit to explain to everyone what liberalism has always meant. Washington and Jefferson, both slaveowners, were liberals. So was Calhoun, the rabid Civil War secessionist, and notorious Indian-slaughterer Andrew Jackson. When you meet someone and they tell you they're a liberal, you should absolutely ask them, "Oh I see, the ideology that vociferously excused slavery and genocide? Interesting choice!"
Also astonishing is how liberalism in modern-times ever became synonymous with a "bleeding heart" or with, y'know, even minimally caring about people. That's certainly a modern innovation on liberalism, and one that ultimately is not backed up by any meaningful action. I suspect a lot of this modern, warm & fuzzy connotation to liberalism is just a result of the Overton window shifting. Ascendant fascists were always going to caricature the more "civil" liberals as way too soft -- even when they're clearly not.
So come for the important political history, and stay for the hilarious skewering of de Tocqueville, who really comes off as basically the worst. I'm happy to say that I recognized de Tocqueville sucked when I first read Democracy in America, I just didn't have the political analysis to understand exactly how awful he was.
Not Bad Reviews
@pointblaek
May 9, 2018
This book isn't some eye opener for me, because I knew a lot of the things authors wrote.
Because of that, it wasn't that interesting to me, but somebody that isn't a historian or is really interested in the subject will find this book a really good read.
One thing I can say I didn't like was title liberalism.
The author was writing about liberalism mostly from 1760 - 1860 in the USA, GB, and France - several problems, liberalism changed a lot during that period and author (at least in my opinion) grouped all of it together.
One more problem liberalism is much broader subject that those 3 countries, for example, liberalism in Hungary is very different from liberalism in the USA or Russian liberalism from that of South American countries, long story short, it is kinda hard to group subject that broad into one mold, but be that as it may, author did really good job of trying.
Because of that, it wasn't that interesting to me, but somebody that isn't a historian or is really interested in the subject will find this book a really good read.
One thing I can say I didn't like was title liberalism.
The author was writing about liberalism mostly from 1760 - 1860 in the USA, GB, and France - several problems, liberalism changed a lot during that period and author (at least in my opinion) grouped all of it together.
One more problem liberalism is much broader subject that those 3 countries, for example, liberalism in Hungary is very different from liberalism in the USA or Russian liberalism from that of South American countries, long story short, it is kinda hard to group subject that broad into one mold, but be that as it may, author did really good job of trying.
November 5, 2016
A comprehensive and convincing argument against conventional perspectives on liberalism and particularly its relationship with slavery, colonialism, and imperialism. It shows how these things had a 'twin birth' in the early modern period and were entangled with it right up to the modern era, and even presaged the horrors of fascism which Losurdo links to parts of the liberal tradition (similarly to Ishay Landa's argument in The Apprentice's Sorceror). Losurdo's primary method of showing all this is to let countless prominent liberal theorists and philosophers and writers and statesmen hoist themselves with their own petards, quoting them at length and highlighting hypocrisies, inconsistencies, and often outright bigotry and racism (justified by the very liberal ideals they claim make them more civilized).
It's a very dense book (sometimes it feels like Losurdo is making his argument three times over in slightly different variations just to make sure you're convinced) but full of interesting snippets. The translation into English is functional though not the most exciting. The book took me about a year to get through (mostly reading it in very brief spurts while commuting, admittedly, but even so) but I'm glad I did.
It's a very dense book (sometimes it feels like Losurdo is making his argument three times over in slightly different variations just to make sure you're convinced) but full of interesting snippets. The translation into English is functional though not the most exciting. The book took me about a year to get through (mostly reading it in very brief spurts while commuting, admittedly, but even so) but I'm glad I did.
January 31, 2015
really good debunking of liberal pretensions, although its focused on race relations, which is definitely an area that needs to be examined but takes away from the broader scope this book could have otherwise i think
February 2, 2023
Nota: 2.5
Como se ha comentado en varias reseñas el titulo da a confusión. No es una Contrahistoria del liberalismo; a lo más una revisión de las perspectivas de algunos autores liberales... quizás por ello el libro merecería 2 estrellas y no 3. La repetición de ciertos temas una y otra vez tampoco le hace bien...
Un título mucho mejor hubiese sido algo así como: "Ambigüedades y contradicciones acerca de la esclavitud, las razas y la servidumbre de los oprimidos en la teoría liberal de los siglos XVIII y XIX". Si aceptamos esta premisa, lo que también es relativo (no sólo trata a autores liberales) el libro tiene una valiosa faceta íntimamente entrelazada a otra bastante oscura.
Por un lado, escruta y analiza pormenorizadamente las posturas sobre los temas del título propuesto. Aquí la investigación resulta llamativa, desvelando aspectos no bien conocidos acerca de las diatribas sobre esclavos, razas, nativos, etcétera. Se observa, según el autor, que autores como Las Casas, Montaigne o Jean Bodin (y las leyes absolutistas, en general) eran menos propensos al esclavismo y al racismo (estaban claramente en contra) que autores protoliberales como Locke o Groccio.
Es más, Losurdo señala como los intereses económicos y coloniales fomentaron el esclavismo y el racismo durante el siglo XIX, superando con creces el de los siglos anteriores. El asunto se completa con el papel de los fundamentalistas cristianos en este embrollo, pues fueron más antiesclavistas que algunos pretendidos liberales como Franklyn o Disraeli.
El problema es que Losurdo parte de un sesgo muy grande. Su finalidad, explícita en el malhadado título, se basa más en prejuicios que en realidades. Cherry picking e interpretaciones algo malintencionadas (a la hora de tratar a Smith, Tocqueville o Stuart Mill, por ejemplo) malogran un análisis minado por doquier. Muchos liberales no aparecen, quizás porque harían caer por tierra las tesis de Losurdo. Otros aparecen a costa de forzar posiciones que ellos matizaron continuamente.
Esto no quita, empero, que el liberalismo no tuviera grandes agujeros (este libro lo muestra, aunque sea imperfectamente) o que algunos autores clásicos no tuvieran dobles varas de medir.
En conclusión, un libro interesante (para especialistas) para profundizar en las revoluciones liberales y en la historiografía antiliberal, así como en los asuntos relativos al esclavismo de los siglos XVIII y XIX. Pero -y es un pero grande- atiborrado de interpretaciones salvajes y de teorizaciones muy controvertidas.
Como se ha comentado en varias reseñas el titulo da a confusión. No es una Contrahistoria del liberalismo; a lo más una revisión de las perspectivas de algunos autores liberales... quizás por ello el libro merecería 2 estrellas y no 3. La repetición de ciertos temas una y otra vez tampoco le hace bien...
Un título mucho mejor hubiese sido algo así como: "Ambigüedades y contradicciones acerca de la esclavitud, las razas y la servidumbre de los oprimidos en la teoría liberal de los siglos XVIII y XIX". Si aceptamos esta premisa, lo que también es relativo (no sólo trata a autores liberales) el libro tiene una valiosa faceta íntimamente entrelazada a otra bastante oscura.
Por un lado, escruta y analiza pormenorizadamente las posturas sobre los temas del título propuesto. Aquí la investigación resulta llamativa, desvelando aspectos no bien conocidos acerca de las diatribas sobre esclavos, razas, nativos, etcétera. Se observa, según el autor, que autores como Las Casas, Montaigne o Jean Bodin (y las leyes absolutistas, en general) eran menos propensos al esclavismo y al racismo (estaban claramente en contra) que autores protoliberales como Locke o Groccio.
Es más, Losurdo señala como los intereses económicos y coloniales fomentaron el esclavismo y el racismo durante el siglo XIX, superando con creces el de los siglos anteriores. El asunto se completa con el papel de los fundamentalistas cristianos en este embrollo, pues fueron más antiesclavistas que algunos pretendidos liberales como Franklyn o Disraeli.
El problema es que Losurdo parte de un sesgo muy grande. Su finalidad, explícita en el malhadado título, se basa más en prejuicios que en realidades. Cherry picking e interpretaciones algo malintencionadas (a la hora de tratar a Smith, Tocqueville o Stuart Mill, por ejemplo) malogran un análisis minado por doquier. Muchos liberales no aparecen, quizás porque harían caer por tierra las tesis de Losurdo. Otros aparecen a costa de forzar posiciones que ellos matizaron continuamente.
Esto no quita, empero, que el liberalismo no tuviera grandes agujeros (este libro lo muestra, aunque sea imperfectamente) o que algunos autores clásicos no tuvieran dobles varas de medir.
En conclusión, un libro interesante (para especialistas) para profundizar en las revoluciones liberales y en la historiografía antiliberal, así como en los asuntos relativos al esclavismo de los siglos XVIII y XIX. Pero -y es un pero grande- atiborrado de interpretaciones salvajes y de teorizaciones muy controvertidas.
Read
February 21, 2019A wide-ranging, detailed, and highly critical examination of the history of liberalism. It both engages with the ideas of liberal thinkers across various eras and examines the material context in which those ideas and thinkers existed. It centres slavery and colonialism, as well as oppression/repression of poor and working people within the metropole, and not surprisingly arrives at a very different understanding of the last few centuries than liberals themselves generally do. There are a few things I'd quibble with. Not sure it always hits quite the right note in talking about how the unfreedom of enslaved Africans in the New World and of folks subjected to forced labour in Europe were different in some ways but similar in others, for instance – not that it is awful on this question, at least as far as my non-expert white-lefty-guy reading can tell, but I think I've seen things from Black North American scholars that capture the nuances more effectively. Also, it probably could have done more to show the diversity within liberal thought at different moments and on different topics, though I suspect that would have just complicated the writing without necessitating any fundamental change in argument. And the writing feels a little odd in places – it's translated from Italian, so I suspect that's an artefact of translation – but not so much I minded, and it is quite readable. Those are relatively limited concerns, though, with what is overall a useful, interesting, and important book.
April 30, 2022
Losurdo takes the philosophical premises of liberalism and shows how they contradict with the crimes commited or legitimized by liberalism's pioneers such as Locke, De Tocqueville and Calhoun. He shows how North American slavery and the English Poor Laws didn't blossom despite liberalism, but because of liberalism and how many of the critics of slavery where anti-liberal christians.
He spends a great deal of time counterposing the historical facts next to the liberal theory to show liberal hypocrisy. The amount of source material presented by Losurdo is impressive and leaves little doubt about how reactionary a lot of liberals where in reality.
Far less attention is spent however on explaining on how liberalism as an ideology should then be understood. He mentions it though: moderate liberals don't view themselves as liberators of all of mankind, but as a racially and socio-economically privileged elites who want to rid themselve of the joke of any moral, legal and social restrictions invading their 'negative liberty'. Losurdo shows how liberalism in practice led to a "master race democracy" with free, well-of people excluding other people on the basis of race or socio-economic position.
It's very interesting to read how the radical enlightenment thinkers who sided with the poor French sans-culottes and Dominican slaves where criticized by the classical liberals such as De Tocqueville for wanting to reinstate "absolutism" by demanding social regulatory laws defending the poor and checking thee "freedom" of the rich and powerfull.
He spends a great deal of time counterposing the historical facts next to the liberal theory to show liberal hypocrisy. The amount of source material presented by Losurdo is impressive and leaves little doubt about how reactionary a lot of liberals where in reality.
Far less attention is spent however on explaining on how liberalism as an ideology should then be understood. He mentions it though: moderate liberals don't view themselves as liberators of all of mankind, but as a racially and socio-economically privileged elites who want to rid themselve of the joke of any moral, legal and social restrictions invading their 'negative liberty'. Losurdo shows how liberalism in practice led to a "master race democracy" with free, well-of people excluding other people on the basis of race or socio-economic position.
It's very interesting to read how the radical enlightenment thinkers who sided with the poor French sans-culottes and Dominican slaves where criticized by the classical liberals such as De Tocqueville for wanting to reinstate "absolutism" by demanding social regulatory laws defending the poor and checking thee "freedom" of the rich and powerfull.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 117 reviews