Why did I get this book?
I’m doing a lot of thinking about liberalism right now across several writing projects. I came across a number of reviews of the book while looking for important recent critiques of liberalism and picked this up based on those.
Is it what I thought it was?
Yes. It was originally published in 2005 in Italian. I don’t know much about Losurdo as a philosopher, but the book does a good job of articulating a critique that I substantially agree with. (I do recall a controversy about an apologetic for Stalin, so that’s concerning.)
What continuing uses might I have for it?
I am already citing it quite a bit in what I’m working on.
Quotes
“We face a dilemma. If we answer the question formulated above (Is Calhoun a liberal?) in the affirmative, we can no longer maintain the traditional (and edifying) image of liberalism as the thought and volition of liberty. If, on the other hand, we answer in the negative, we find ourselves confronting a new problem and new question, which is no less embarrassing than the first: Why should we continue to dignify John Locke with the title of father of liberalism?”
“The paradox must first be expounded in all its radicalism. Slavery is not something that persisted despite the success of the three liberal revolutions. On the contrary, it experienced its maximum development following that success.”
“Slavery in its most radical form triumphed in the golden age of liberalism and at the heart of the liberal world.”
“The contours of liberal freedom are beginning to become clear. Authors like Burgh and Fletcher could still be regarded as champions of the cause of liberty by Jefferson, who lived in a situation where black slavery and widespread ownership of land (taken from the Indians) made the project of enslaving white vagrants purely academic. In Europe things were different…Those who did not subscribe to the principle of the inadmissability and ‘uselessness of slavery among ourselves’ began to be regarded as foreign to the emerging liberal party.”
“Franklin, discomfited by his English interlocutors mocking the flag of liberty waved by colonists who were often slave-owners, replied by highlighting, among other things, the persistence in England of slave-like relations even within the armed forces.”
“The British liberal called upon magistrates not to be inhibited either by misplaced ‘compassion’ or by undue doubts and scruples. Certainly, thieves might have committed theft under the spur of necessity: ‘what they can get Honestly is not sufficient to keep them’. Yet ‘the Peace of the Society’ required that the guilty be hanged.”
“We have seen Mandeville call on judges to be summary in condemning to death those guilty or suspected of theft and pilferage, even at the cost of striking down some innocents. The priority was the need to safeguard ‘the peace of the society’ or ‘advantage to a nation’. Blackstone acknowledge that press-ganging men into the havy seemed dubious and detrimental to liberty. It was ‘only defensible for public necessity, to which all private considerations must give way’. In his turn, Locked repeatedly called on people not to lose sight of ‘the public good’, ‘the good of the nation’, ‘the public weal’, or ‘the preservation of the whole’, ‘the whole commonwealth’. What is so passionately invoked here is a Whole demanding the sacrifice, permanent not temporary, of the overwhelming majority of the population, whose condition was all the more tragic because any prospect of improvement seemed pretty remote. In fact, even to entertain projects tending towards such improvement was synonymous not only with abstract utopianism, but also and above all with dangerous subversion.”
Commentary, asides, loose thoughts, unfair complaints
You get a pretty clear idea of where this is going right as Losurdo charges out the gates of his first chapter, when he asks why John C. Calhoun doesn’t figure more prominently in the history of American liberalism. He’s doing that not to elevate Calhoun but to note how much the 20th Century ideological celebration of Anglo-American liberalism edits out many individuals of note whose beliefs or politics were substantially liberal in the 19th Century sense and who were taken as liberals by 19th Century thinkers who we do put inside the central lineage of liberalism. (So, for example, Lord Acton regarded Calhoun as a fellow liberal.) The book repeatedly comes back to the thought that liberalism from its beginnings into the 20th Century was profoundly and programmatically intertwined with racism, slavery, imperialism, despotism, fascism and violence, and that intellectual histories which prune that involvement away to leave a shining pure core of liberal thought untainted by those involvements are missing something fundamental to its history and its contemporaneous practice in the last thirty years. I agree very strongly with this proposition and I think Losurdo is thoughtful and measured in how he develops his analysis, even given how strongly driven it is by a particular kind of Marxist critique.
One of the strengths of his intellectual history is to very thoroughly give the lie to the idea that liberals from Locke onward were merely or only creatures of their time, and that the illiberalism woven into their thinking was broadly shared among their peers. Time and time again, Losurdo takes note of the degree to which the contemporaries of key liberal thinkers and political leaders complained of the contradictory or hypocritical aspects of their thought—asking why late 18th Century and early 19th Century American political thinkers who operated within a liberal framework could defend slavery, asking why British liberals could endorse the brutal repression of Ireland or the undertaking of new imperial conquests elsewhere in the world, etc. Nor does Losurdo allow any absolution of these past liberals on the grounds that they didn’t really understand the brutality or despotism of what they were supporting: time and time again he quotes them advocating just that in their own words, usually justified either by what they took to be the lesser humanity of some group or on the grounds that their own prerogatives and power required such repression. The assertion that human beings should be free in this history is always accompanied by a re-specification of who counts as human that generally puts the white male liberal at the center and many other human beings utterly outside the category. Losurdo doesn’t reduce this move to pure self-interest, but some aspect of that is certainly there—that liberalism functioned (and perhaps still functions) as a kind of sharp-elbowed maneuver designed to clear political space for a particular social group that emerged as a result of Europe’s rise to political and economic hegemony within the world and in dynamic relation to slavery and imperialism.
Losurdo does probe at the range of liberal thought on these connections—so, for example, he finds in Locke a thinker who is fully committed to slavery but in Montesquieu he sees someone more discomforted by the actual practice of slavery who nevertheless only sought to “temper” it. He uses some of these internal tensions to explain in part how liberals and liberal thought frequently ended up (often reluctantly) supporting efforts to reform, undo or even abolish oppressive institutions and regimes that they had previously tolerated or endorsed. In his reading, these moves were often not altruistic or idealistic, but instead about protecting the prerogatives that liberals had claimed for themselves within their own societies or polities. So, for example, the Somersett case, which established that slavery could not exist in England itself, was in Losurdo’s reading not an extension of the idea of liberal rights to Black subjects who happened to be brought as slaves to England, but a defense of liberal rights for white Englishmen against any attempt to inscribe subordination in new ways within the metropolis. It’s a familiar argument in a lot of scholarship (you can see Robin Blackburn’s influence all over this chapter) but it’s made here in relentlessly effective ways: much as resistance to enslavement by slaves and their allies within the Atlantic world defined freedom in ways that we now embrace, the liberal vision of freedom was frequently defined through distinguishing free men from the permanently unfree. E.g., the most effective philosophical and practical extensions of liberalism’s putative ideals were achieved not by liberal thinkers and politicians but by the unfree fighting for their own humanity with little concern for or interest in the abstractions of liberalism as a body of thought.
Losurdo does a great job returning to how often, all the way into the 20th Century, liberals are willing to endorse situational illiberalism with someone else as the involuntary sacrifice. The motto is almost “I regret I have so many lives of other people to give for my country”: liberal thinkers rarely volunteer their own freedom or define themselves as the sacrifice such that others might be free, nor do they ever take stock of themselves as the obstacle to someone else’s liberty. That seems a continuous issue all the way into the present. Inconvenience a mainstream liberal by telling him that there’s one thing he really shouldn’t say or there’s one prerogative that maybe he should surrender and the howling about the slippery-slope dangers to liberty will be instant and continuous. If the police shoot unarmed black and poor people, on the other hand, well, that’s a difficult problem and we’ll have to study it and you know sometimes to keep people safe from crime some bad things have to happen now and again. Maybe if we make a database or something things will change.
The counter-history here did make me think a bit about who the opponents of liberalism were over time, and what the basis of their opposition was. There are times where Losurdo is working the same turf as Eugene Genovese did in some sense (that the slaveholder was in some sense more clear-headed in their perception of the nature of modernity than the industrial capitalist). There’s one interesting observation early in the book where Losurdo notes that some 18th Century opponents of slavery believed that a more authoritarian or monarchical state could more readily abolish slavery than a democratic one where the only voting citizens where propertied white men, because propertied white men would never vote against their own interests. I suspect too in this sense that liberalism is a bit more heterogenous than Losurdo credits it with being, at least by the mid-19th Century—historians who have wrestled with the entanglement of liberalism and the ‘new imperialism’ have noted before that there were liberals on both sides as anti-imperialists and as ardent imperialists. This is maybe where Losurdo’s liberalism being primarily a body of philosophy and less a body of practice shows the most. His history also skips around a lot in a way that’s a bit cherry-picked for the same reason—he doesn’t really dig in on the unfolding of any particular system or historical phenomenon in a dedicated way.
I also think he doesn’t fully grapple with the problem a “counter-history” of this kind really faces about why and how liberals have had to accept, often with great reluctance, the revision of their attempts to exclude entire classes or groups from the humanity entitled to liberty and rights. The conventional answer in leftist historiography would be “because the people so excluded fought to claim their liberty and rights” and also “because the dangers posed by the excluded multitudes required placation via ‘tempering’ their oppression and exclusion”, which I think are right as far as it goes. But people devoted to liberalism might also observe with some justice that the core propositions of liberalism had universal implications and scope beyond what liberals themselves have historically envisioned. No slave owner handed the Old Testament to slaves thinking they were providing an argument for revolt, escape and freedom, but slaves quickly (and accurately) saw exactly that in the narrative of Exodus. 18th and 19th Century liberals may not have meant it when they talked about universal rights and liberties, but their words were available to be interpreted as such nonetheless. If we’re going to insist that liberalism be held accountable for its frequent endorsement of illiberal political projects and its contradictions, the opposite also probably holds, which is to take note of the moments where liberal thinkers articulated ideas and political visions that were genuinely universal in scope or implication. Chapter Eight in the book does do some work in this direction that’s interesting.
It’s a very Anglo-American study on the whole, and the “counter-history” he offers I think might change some if he had to more fully think about the French Revolution and Jacobin thought, about liberalism in the rest of Europe from 1848 onward, about liberalism in Latin America after independence, and so on.