Liberalism: A Counter-History
Domenico Losurdo
Language: English
Pages: 384
ISBN: 178168166X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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 policies: 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.
100. 130 George M. Trevelyan, British History in the Nineteenth Century and After, London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1937, p. 369. 131 Friedrich von Hayek, New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics and the History of Ideas, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978, p. 128. 132 Ibid., p. 146; Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982, p. 142. 133 Allan Nevins and Henry S. Commager, America: Story of a Free People, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1943, p.
contrast continued to survive in the colonies of liberal France (and democratic America).36 The balance-sheet drawn up by Mill on the morrow of the American Civil War was significant. In the United States a ‘[h]opeless slavery’ that ‘brutifies the intellect’, and where ‘it was a highly penal offence to teach a slave to read’, had only just been abolished. Even worse, added the English liberal, was the situation at the time of the slave trade in ‘our slave colonies’, where slaves were in practice
construction of a new political regime deemed more advanced reinforced the self-consciousness of the individual protagonists. This was soil wherein was rooted the celebration, dear to Burke, of the ‘nation in whose veins the blood of freedom circulates’. The most lucid exponents of liberalism were perfectly well aware of this. While it also made itself felt in the works of authors such as Constant and, above all, Spencer, in this intellectual tradition the illusion that the collapse of the ancien
liberty among slave-owners; or of an author like Calhoun, who in the nineteenth century still hymned the ‘positive good’ that was slavery. And so both of them are officially included in the conservative party. However, such an operation immediately reveals its groundlessness. The category of conservatism is characterized by formalism, in the sense that it can subsume significantly different contents: it is a question of identifying what it is intended to conserve or guard. And there is no doubt
the Diet), and paid homage to ‘republican liberty’ (see below, Chapter 5, §2). Also expressing himself in flattering terms about Poland, as well as the ‘southern colonies’ of America, was Burke, who not by chance became the tutelary deity of the slaveholding South. Admiration for a regime of republican liberty founded on the slavery or servitude of a considerable proportion of the population, for a ‘master-race democracy’, was well represented in English liberalism. The authors expressing such