Liberalism: A Counter-History [Hardcover]

Domenico Losurdo's "Liberalism: A Counter-History" is a brilliant and engaging exposé of the real history of liberalism as an ideology, in contradistinction to the hagiographical and justificatory self-descriptions that liberals usually give to it. Almost all systematic histories of liberalism and liberal thought have been written by liberals or its sympathizers, and therefore Losurdo's critical narrative is a welcome antidote to this in every sense Whiggish approach. Losurdo proceeds largely chronologically, but there is a clear thematic structure to the book. Using the writings of impeccably liberal sources and many of the most famous founders of liberal thought, from Burke and Locke to Jefferson and De Tocqueville, he shows how liberalism's self-perception and self-presentation as the politics of freedom was undermined time and again by its reliance on the suppression of 'inferiors'. In order to realize the freedom of the liberals, black slaves, women, the working class, and so forth all had to give way; the freedom of the liberal classes was always founded on the exploitation of others. Only when the gentry and the merchant classes were freed of the need to do manual labor and were guaranteed their position as rulers of society could they defend the liberty liberalism promised against the absolute and arbitrary power of monarchs, clergy, and other traditional opponents. In fact, as Losurdo shows by analyzing the writings of US Vice President and ideologue of the Confederacy John C. Calhoun, the stronger the oppression by the liberal class of their 'inferiors', the more they saw themselves as the ultimate defenders of human liberty and the more jealously they guarded their privileges against the dangers of oppressive government. In this sense, liberalism appears more than anything as the ideology of the middle layer, precisely as it was in historical reality: its purpose is to shield from the powers above it, and to keep down the people below it.

Of course, Losurdo is well aware that liberalism took on various forms, and he carefully if not always very explicitly shows the different strands of liberal ideology throughout time. He essentially identifies three main currents in liberal thought before 1848: a conservative strand, represented by the likes of Burke and Locke, which intended to maintain the traditional structure of society but opposed the absolutism of the monarchy on behalf of the merchant class, and which had no sympathy even for bourgeois revolution along the lines of the American and the French. The second strand was the 'moderate' one, which perhaps is better called the reforming one, represented by many abolitionist thinkers as well as people like Adam Smith, Benjamin Constant and Immanuel Kant. This group sought to abolish the feudal privileges previously inhering in society and wishes to extend the liberal conception of freedom to all. However, it was consistently unable to rhyme its desire for the extension of liberty in any meaningful sense to humanity without being confronted with the problem of inequality of property, most completely expressed in the oppression of colonial peoples, the working classes in the metropole, and servants. It could not resolve this problem without breaking the boundaries of liberal thought and turning against the class it represented, and this the liberal reformers, even J.S. Mill, were unwilling to do. Each time they came up against this barrier, they fell back and retreated to the safer terrain of the conservative position - as exemplified by Constant's opposition to abolishing the property requirement for suffrage, Mill's enthusiasm for colonialism, and so forth. The racism and hypocrisy required of the reformers to maintain their position in society while preaching the gospel of freedom was not, as Losurdo shows, much different to that of the 'liberal' defenders of slavery and the Confederacy in kind; perhaps only in degree.

The third trend, a very small one, is the trend of what Losurdo calls the radicals. These were the ones that did seek to make such a break with established society and having recognized the limitations of liberal thought as a social phenomenon were willing to criticize the order of society as such, not just call for liberty within it. Before 1848, these could not easily be called socialists, and instead we find them in the ranks of radical Enlightenment thinkers such as Denis Diderot and Thomas Paine. But Losurdo traces the development of socialism as a competitor of liberalism to its origins in this wing of liberalism, what used to be called 'Bourgeois Radicalism', and he is probably correct in doing so. Only this group was willing to question the received order of society fundamentally, not just from the interest of the middle class against the aristocracy and monarchical power. Only this group was willing to re-imagine society afresh and to criticize oppression wherever they saw it. But even this group did not yet reach the understanding of socialism: they did not see oppression in many cases where it existed, not just the oppression of other races and of women, but also the genocidal policies implemented in colonization and settlerism in the name of the spread of freedom and civilisation. Challenging and uprooting the causes of these phenomena was to be the task of socialism, as was the development of a historical understanding which in the first place allows ideologies such as liberalism to be traced to their political-economic interests and vantage point within a given society. But without liberalism paving the way, this could not have been done.

It is important therefore to keep in mind that this excellent work is first and foremost a work in the history of ideas, not a political critique. It is precisely as the title says a counter-history: a real history of liberalism and its great thinkers and the way in which liberalism has always relied on the exploitation and exclusion of groups outside its great realm of liberty to prosper. Importantly, it also does away with the mythology of liberalism as a self-repairing phenomenon. Most current-day liberal philosophers would gladly admit to the errors of the past, but these are always reinterpreted as being inherently part of liberalism's supposed amazing ability to overcome its own flaws and move forward; ironically, an almost dialectical self-analysis. But Domenico Losurdo tells the story more realistically: for most of the great liberal thinkers, the exclusionary aspects of their thought were not just flaws or personal prejudices, but were in fact inherent and essential parts of their worldview, and they knew full well that such exclusion was absolutely necessary to maintain the order that liberalism was invented to defend in the first place. The racist and genocidal aspects of liberalism are no mere mistake or an idiosyncrasy of a particular time and place, as a sort of liberal counterpart to the Moscow Trials. They were 'working as intended', and that is precisely what socialism originated to critique. As Losurdo reminds us, in a time when liberalism has once again become the ruling ideology and looks on its past with increasingly warm feelings (viz. Niall Ferguson), that critique is more needed than ever.

Domenico Losurdo is an Italian historian of political philosophy. History of political thought is probably the single most fascinating non-fiction subject for me personally, and Mr. Krul's review suggested that this would be relevant to the field I'll hopefully be entering next year. However, this book challenged my preconceived notions of liberalism in ways that I didn't expect it to. Losurdo, in this study of the dark side of the liberal legacy, refutes many of the myths liberals tell themselves about their history and their accomplishments. I already considered myself to be a critic of liberalism before going into this book, but Losurdo presents many objections to the liberal legacy that I hadn't even considered before.

In order to explain this book, it's important to understand what Losurdo is criticizing in this text. Liberalism, in political rhetoric and scholarly writings, presents itself as an unambiguously positive force in world history. It started with the French and American revolutions, and has spread universal values by way of a dialectical process where it overcame the irrational, violent prejudices that had previously plagued humanity. Liberal societies may have played host to slavery, white supremacy, class chauvinism, and mass disenfranchisement, but these evils were simply phases in the process of the unfolding of universal freedoms, and were contradictions that stemmed from the historically contingent circumstances of the 17th, 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. It's difficult to exaggerate how widespread this interpretation has become. It's a vision of liberalism that liberals and conservatives, critics on the left and the right share. The philosophers Richard Rorty and Cornel West, just to name a couple academic examples, frequently justify the liberal projects on these grounds, and it's an assumption that pervades Western culture.

The problem with the dialectical-progressive story of liberal history, as Losurdo argues, is that it simply isn't true. Losurdo begins his critique with the founding figures of liberalism on both sides of the Atlantic. Burke, Locke, Montesquieu, Franklin, Jefferson, and others feature prominently in these early sections. These are writers who in one sentence could praise the timeless values of liberty, and in the next discuss the need for the dominance of the Anglo-Saxon race, or the strict control of the working masses. Losurdo argues that there is an inherent connection between the early liberals' love for freedom and appetite for controlling others. He amasses mountains of evidence that for most of liberalism's history, liberalism was not an ideology meant to unite humanity in freedom. Rather, "universal" rights and freedoms were collectively understood by the rich Northern European elite to be applicable only to a minority of the human race. Worthiness of participation of what Losurdo dubs "The Community of the Free" was understood to be self-evident in one's social position and ethnic/cultural purity.

When the American Founding Fathers declared all men to be created equal, the fact that the U.S. went on to slaughter and dispossess the Native Americans, or that Euro-Americans generally advocated white supremacy, was not a contradiction in their worldview. Northern European and North American elites simply shared the understanding that only they alone were "men," and that the masses of humanity were unworthy of this distinction. Thus, liberals conceived of a world where the Community of the Free were nature's ordained practitioners of liberty, and that the poor and non-white masses were destined to toil in misery in order to support this freedom-loving class of people. Throughout liberalism's subsequent history, this dual-classed worldview continued to dominate the liberal intellectual world and the life of liberal governance itself. It took on secular-utilitarian guises with Bentham and Mill, social Darwinist tendencies with Spencer and the Eugenics movement, and cultural guises with de Toqueville and Disraeli.

Losurdo emphasizes that also contrary to liberal mythology, there were many oppositional figures who understood the brutal nature of liberalism's racial-class worldview. The Jacobins, often condemned in retrospect for the violence of the French Revolution, were the only European political force in their time to actually affirm true universality as we understand it today and condemn the structural violence committed against colonial peoples and the working class. Simon Bolivar of South America and Toussaint L'Ouverture of Haiti both initiated radically egalitarian revolutions, but were perceived as dangerous threats to the Community of the Free. Losurdo actually argues that liberals were correct to claim that Jacobins, socialists, abolitionists, Evangelical egalitarians, Bolivar, and L'Ouverture represented a political tendency that went far beyond liberalism, and was fundamentally different in its essence. He terms this tradition as "radicalism."

The examples I have cited here constitute only a paltry sample of the mass of evidence Losurdo complies to support his thesis. Overall, there are several main implications of this study that Losurdo frequently returns to throughout:

1. Liberalism does not expand the boundaries of freedom in an organic dialectical process. Liberalism has undergone profound changes in its history, but not because of any sort of internal tendency towards progress. The expanders of liberty have been rebellious slaves, socialists, organized workers, anti-colonial nationalists, and other forces outside of the Community of the Free. Generally, the Community of the Free only grants accessions when faced with powerful opposition from outside its walls.

2. Ideologies such as white supremacy, social Darwinism, and colonialism were created by liberals as a means of defending the liberty of the Community of the Free. When the American Founding Fathers rebelled against Britain, one of their most commonly stated reasons for doing so was that the British government didn't respect the freedom Americans had imbibed through their Northern European blood. The Framers saw themselves as the preservers of the freedoms of the Glorious Revolution, a revolution based on the right of freedom-worthy peoples to dominate the supposedly insipid masses. They were explicit in this respect, and the later history of liberalism continued to attest to this tendency.

3. Liberalism contains within itself the semi-hidden corollary that human behavior must be strictly regulated in order for freedom to be maintained. In liberalism, individuals have the freedom to compete with one another and rise to the top based on merit. Liberal elites have often interpreted this as proof that those at the top of the social ladder deserve their place. The other conclusion that stems from this is that criminals, the uneducated, the poor, and non-Western cultures fully deserve their servile status. If nature wanted them to be part of the Community of the Free, so goes the logic, then it would allow them to participate in liberty. Therefore, the dominated peoples of the world must hold their position due to their own internal defects. For Losurdo, this belief is what defines liberalism and separates it from radicalism.

4. In liberalism, liberty has historically been seen as a trait that people possess, one granted by nature. Thus, liberalism easily justifies its tendencies towards inequality by devising various ways of explaining why nature simply doesn't grant some people the liberty it grants others. Meanwhile, radicalism sees the establishment of liberty as an active process. Interestingly, this indicates that negative liberty possesses a magnetism towards authoritarianism. Losrudo points out that during the early days of Fascism, many liberals in the U.S. and Western Europe such as von Mises, Croce, and the Italian liberal establishment saw Mussolini's regime as a possible defender of classical liberalism and liberty as it was understood by the Anglo-Saxon theorists of liberalism.

This book is as disturbing as it is insightful. I personally see it as self-evident that many of the authoritarian tendencies that Losurdo identifies have made a comeback with a vengeance in the neo-liberal era, and have strengthened since the start of the Great Financial Crisis. Modern liberals, especially in American academia, often assure themselves that liberalism will not tolerate any serious regresses into authoritarianism, because of the myth of the dialectical process I described at the beginning of this review. I even believed in this to some extent, and if I remember correctly, I recall Slavoj Zizek of all people praising liberalism for this reason. Fortunately, Losurdo has seriously damaged my faith in this tendency in liberalism. Again, I don't even consider myself to be a liberal, I identify as a Leftist (one of the radicals Losurdo describes). Perhaps it speaks to the pervasiveness of the comforting nature of liberalism's self image that even its critics unknowingly take refuge in it. I think any left-leaning person will walk away from this book feeling a bit shaken. It's history at its best: Rigorous, objective, yet passionate.