★★★★★ 5
The Dark Roots of Liberalism
Format: Hardcover
Italian philosopher/intellectual history Domenico Losurdo's study of the origins of liberalism is a tour de force of thorough scholarship and rigorous critique. Losurdo seems to have read all of the collected works of all of the significant thinkers in the liberal tradition, from Locke to de Tocqueville and beyond, and has created a coherent and compelling narrative of their themes and variations, as well as their rhetorical tropes and myriad contradictions.
Classical liberalism, as here presented, is an attempt to translate the world, in all its richness and mystery, into property, and to transform property into the fullest expression of both nature and nature's God. It involves fetishizing "liberty" and disdaining equality, which is seen -- correctly -- as potentially compromising the God-given prerogatives of property holders.
Losurdo's liberals divide the world into the "community of the free" -- always a minority -- and the servile majority. These masses do not deserve liberty or political participation because they perceive government as a way to address human suffering, and not simply as a bulwark protecting the divine rights of capital, i.e. the "private" realm. The classical liberal sees government as good to the extent that it has no social function at all -- because poverty and radical inequity are understood not as the outcome of human social and political arrangements, but as a reflection of immutable natural law and simple human frailty. Social Darwinist and eugenic motifs float through the Liberal symphony almost from the beginning, supplanting without really changing the earlier Protestant notion of predestination, but shifting the location of eternal reward or damnation to the marketplace and workplace.
Thus liberalism sides against social emancipation, whether of slaves or peasants or factory laborers. The job of workers within a liberal commonwealth, as depicted by most of these thinkers, is to embrace their freedom to starve and cherish the institutions that oppress them in the sweet and holy name of Liberty. Slavery makes many of these thinkers uneasy, but it is not as profoundly disturbing to them as the prospect of central government tampering with the sacred rights of property holders by abolishing an institution that makes a mockery of any concept of human liberty.
It is the radical thinkers of the French Revolution, and those influenced by them, who come out favorably here -- the ones who believe that the community must be seen as one body, and that freedom and dignity belong to all, without exception. Losurdo reminds us that it was not classical liberals who abolished slavery -- it was the Black Jacobins who brought the Rights of Man to the subjugated Africans of Haiti in history's only successful slave rebellion (at least since Moses). They were supported by the religiously inspired abolitionists, who saw slavery in moral rather than capitalist terms.
Losurdo shows that liberalism took on the despotism of Church and Crown, only to create a harsher and colder absolutism of Money and Market, wrapped up in the rhetoric of Reason and tied with the ribbon of Freedom. And though classical liberalism has mutated over time and allowed the community of the free to expand somewhat, its fundamental biases remain in place, as witnessed in every ding-dong attack against "big government" or the "nanny state." Losurdo's "counter-history" of liberalism places these tediously reflexive political gambits in historical context, showing that they are rooted in a vision of the state as a kind of gated community, serving those within the threshold of privilege, suppressing those on the outside.
At a time when political discourse centers on the percentages of the included and excluded, the worthy and the unworthy -- Occupy Wall Street's 1 percent and 99 percent, Mitt Romney's 47 percent (which was also his percentage of the vote) -- Losurdo's study is highly relevant and enlightening. It underscores the deep tensions between classical liberalism -- with its governance by and for the elite, and passive citizenship for the rest -- and the ideals of participatory and inclusive democracy, i.e., social democracy. It is an important book, and I recommend it to everyone with an interest in the history of political theory, and a desire to understand why our own political processes seem to take place in an abstract realm so cosmically distant from the reality of everyday life.
WAS THIS REVIEW HELPFUL?YesReportShare
Reviewed in the United States on November 24, 2012
