Liberalism and Its History

Extract

The task of sketching the history of liberalism, though modest, is for methodological reasons difficult. For we stand before the question of whether there is even such a thing as liberalism as a clearly definable subject and whether this subject, should it not be clearly definable, can have a history. We touch here upon a general methodological problem. Toynbee, for example, opens his great work with the question whether England has a history; he concludes that the English nation as a society is so closely related to the society of Western civilization that one cannot write an English history without going into the entire history of Western civilization. It is in this sense that there arise the questions of how liberalism is to be delimited and whether it has a history. And they arise more acutely because the case of liberalism is much more complicated than that of England. For even if some phases of English history, for example the Reformation, can be dealt with only in relation to the general European history of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, still there are long periods of isolated, specifically English history. In the case of liberalism, a narrowing of the subject to national societies — German, French, English or American — is hardly justifiable. For all the regional phases of liberalism are only parts of a common Western movement; and furthermore, this movement can only with difficulty be isolated from other movements which run parallel with it in time.