Finished #reading Liberalism: A Counter-History, by Domenico Losurdo.
A thorough, scholarly debunking of hagiographical accounts of liberalism, particularly the “classical liberalism” of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: the liberalism of figures such as de Tocqueville, Locke, Burke, Bentham, Adam Smith and Lord Acton, none of whom come out well.
As Losurdo explains in his introduction, this is a history, not of liberal ideals and values as such – “liberal thought in its abstract purity” – but of the “concrete reality” of liberalism as a movement and as a basis for society, especially in England and America. It is a “counter-history,” Losurdo adds, only because he “intends to draw attention to aspects that he believes have hitherto been largely and unjustly ignored.”
The essence of Losurdo’s argument is that, while liberalism claims to advocate the liberty of all people equally, its roots lay in promoting the liberty only of a “community of the free”: typically defined as the (white, male) owners of property. These “liberals” opposed calls for universal liberty and equality as a threat to the freedom enjoyed by the community of the free. Similarly, liberals (such as those behind the American Revolution) opposed despotism precisely so that they could maintain their rights of property and their rights of self-government: in particular, their rights of property in their slaves, and their right as a self-governing community of the free to drive out and exterminate the native Americans as they expanded across the continent that “Providence” had bequeathed to them.
At the heart of Losurdo’s argument is the seeming paradox that liberalism grew, not in opposition to slavery, but in the same soil:
Slavery is not something that persisted despite the success of the three liberal revolutions [the Netherlands, Great Britain, America]. On the contrary, it experienced its maximum development following that success. […] Correctly stated, in all its radicalism, the paradox we face consists in this: the rise of liberalism and the spread of racial chattel slavery are the product of a twin birth which, as we shall see, has rather unique characteristics. (chapter 1)
We can’t even use the (“naively historicist”) argument that liberal slaveholders were just the product of their time: the cruelty of slavery, and the hypocrisy of the owners, were both heavily criticised at the time; Losurdo quotes Johnson’s rhetorical questioning of why “we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of negroes?”
Losurdo describes how a tension developed within liberalism, often even within the same author, between champions of the “true liberty” of property, including the property owners absolute control over his family, servants and slaves, and the more radical liberty pursued originally by the slaves and servants who “who refused to let themselves be assimilated to the master’s belongings and pursued emancipation.”
What the first type of liberalism was pursuing was not “anti-statism” or “individualism”, he argues, but the construction and protection of a “sacred space” for the community of the free. This was originally defined in spacial terms – Englishmen could keep slaves in the colonies, but there was to be no slavery in England itself – but came to be defined in racial terms, especially (though not solely) in the United States. Furthermore, all the elements of the 20th century “catastrophe” – the racial delineation of the “community of the free”, an exterminationist policy towards many of those outside that community, “the concentration-camp universe as a whole” – can be seen to have their origins in supposedly liberal 18th and 19th century traditions:
But one point seems to me to be settled: it is banally ideological to characterize the catastrophe of the twentieth century as a kind of new barbarian invasion that unexpectedly attacked and overwhelmed a healthy, happy society. […] The horror of the twentieth century was not something that burst into a world of peaceful coexistence suddenly and from without. (chapter 10)
All that said, Losurdo is not wholly negative about “liberal thought” as such. As he writes in his conclusion:
None has been as committed as [liberalism] to thinking through the decisive problem of the limitation of power.
What he is asking his readers to do, however, is to recognise that:
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.
What is needed is not to abandon liberal thought, but to abandon the hagiography of liberalism, a hagiography that turns a blind eye to “the tragedy of peoples subjected to slavery or semi-slavery, or deported, decimated and destroyed” – often by excluding from the history of liberalism figures who were seen as liberals both at the time and for generations afterwards. “Liberalism’s merits are too significant and too evident for it to be necessary to credit it with other, completely imaginary ones,” he concludes.
The challenge all this leaves for the reader is this: to what injustices today are we turning a blind eye, or regretfully but realistically accepting, or seeing as needing only a long and gradual solution, or even actively celebrating, in order to maintain the rights – especially the property rights and rights of self-government – of a (now less overtly identified) “community of the free”?
