Review: The Lost History of Liberalism

[Helena Rosenblatt. The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018.]

This is an academic history of liberalism, in the form of what it calls a "conceptual history" – that is, it explores what its proponents (and to a certain extent opponents) have said over the years about the positions, ideas, and politics associated with "liberal" and its cognates. This is presented with some political history of parts of western Europe and the United States. It is not a polemic pro or con, admitting both the virtues and blemishes in liberal thought, and it is written with the sort of measured, readable clarity I associate with a particular kind of scholarship.

I appreciated its debunking of a number of common myths we have about liberalism's earlier years. Rosenblatt argues, for instance, that there was never really anything like what commentators today call "classical liberalism," with its uniform and doctrinaire advocacy of laissez-faire economics – rather, rigidly laissez-faire liberals were always in the minority, and state intervention of various sorts was always a contested issue within liberal thought. She also pushes back against the notion of liberalism as being largely concerned with individual rights, narrowly conceived. For most of its history, liberal thinkers paid a great deal of attention to moral questions, duties, and the common good, and it was really only as liberalism became Americanized and then had to navigate the political battles of the Cold War that a strand focused solely on rights and on the individual pursuit of them began to fluorish.

There are limits to what this kind of history can achieve, of course. The book doesn't shy away from identifying positions taken by liberals of the past that today we see as odious – most opposed democracy in the first half of the 19th century, positions on things like slavery and colonialism were divided, and many opposed basic rights for women up until the early 20th century. But the fact that the book sticks mainly with a history of ideas and of mainstream politics and does not integrate a detailed, materialist exploration of the violences of colonial capitalism and how they related to liberal ideas means, I think, that we get an incomplete picture. Just as an example, take the absence of explicit advocacy for anyting resembling atomized individualism in the work of most 19th century liberals. I think it's a good thing to really grapple with this truth and to get past the caricature that we on the left sometimes have of liberals of that era, so I'm glad that the book discusses it. At the same time, it seems clear to me even from what this book describes (but does not identify in this way) that the overwhelming emphasis on producing particular kinds of individuals with particular capacities and particular moral concerns – and this goes right from the promotion of "liberality" that pre-dates the use of "liberal" or "liberalism" by millenia, on through self-identified liberals in the 19th century – still fostered a way of relating to the social world that put individuals and their choices at the centre. Yes, these were moral choices and they generally were expected to attend to the common good, rather than being the kind of cartoonish self-interested rationalism that neoliberal economists and libertarians embrace and their opponents on the left decry today. But it was still a way of understanding the world that centred individuals, and individuals of a sort that most human beings could never be, and this was happening in the context of the capitalist reorganization of society that melted all that was previously solid into air and imposed its own kinds of individualizing logics on people. So while I think it's useful that this book pushes us to get past our distorted sense of the explicit content of the earlier years of the liberal project, it doesn't necessarily help us grapple with its actual impact.

Anyway, read it with that kind of limitation in mind, but I would say – at least if the topic interests you – it is well worth reading. I enjoyed it, I learned a lot, and I think what it does is useful.

Also, check out this post, not directly about but inspired by my reading of this book.

This was also posted on Scott's Goodreads page.