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Review Essay: The Lost Historiography of Liberalism

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HelenaRosenblatt: The Lost History of Liberalism from Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018. Pp. 368.)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 September 2019

Jeffrey R. Collins
Jeffrey R. Collins*
Affiliation:
Queens University
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Extract

Near the start of her fascinating new book The Lost History of Liberalism, Helena Rosenblatt dryly observes that “available histories of liberalism are seldom helpful” (2). The point is well taken: the historiography of liberalism—largely written as intellectual history—is not particularly coherent, and has only sporadically adopted sound historical methodology. The genre emerged relatively late. The proliferation of the language of liberalism in the nineteenth century, not least in party politics, did not produce theoretically informed historical accounts of particular note. A historiography of liberalism really only developed in response to the perceived “crisis of liberalism” of the early twentieth century. Guido de Ruggiero's 1925 The History of European Liberalism was written in a Hegelian idealist tradition, according to which liberalism was an “organic development of freedom coinciding with the organization of human society and its progressively higher and more spiritual forms.” Coming from a different direction was Harold Laski's The Rise of European Liberalism: An Essay in Interpretation, published in 1936. Laski's liberalism was as much a “habit of mind” as a set of doctrines, with a complex history making both “clarity difficult” and “precision unattainable.” An essentialized understanding of liberalism was nevertheless still at work. Laski's liberalism was that the individualist, utilitarian mode of thought necessary to an emerging capitalist society. “The liberal creed, in a word,” he wrote, “is a doctrine woven from the texture of bourgeois need.”

Type
Review Essay
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 81 , Issue 4 , Fall 2019 , pp. 673 - 688
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2019 

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References

1 de Ruggiero, Guido, The History of European Liberalism, trans. Collingwood, R. G. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1927), 350–60Google Scholar.

2 Laski, Harold, The Rise of European Liberalism: An Essay in Interpretation (London: Allen & Unwin, 1936), 134Google Scholar.

3 Neill, Thomas P., The Rise and Decline of Liberalism (Milwaukee: Bruce, 1953), 3–6Google Scholar.

4 Robert Bendiner, “What Is a Liberal?,” Nation, March 26, 1949, 348–50.

5 The socialist perspective also informed Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (1955).

6 Pocock, J. G. A., “The Myth of John Locke and the Obsession with Liberalism,’ in John Locke: Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar, 10 December 1977, by Pocock, J. G. A and Ashcraft, Richard (Los Angeles: University of California, 1980), 1–24Google Scholar.

7 Leo Strauss's reading first appeared in The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Its Genesis (Oxford: Clarendon, 1936) and in Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953). Schmitt's liberalization of Hobbes was most fully presented in his grossly anti-Semitic 1938 work, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol, trans. George Schwab and Erna Hilfstein (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

8 Koselleck, Reinhart, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988)Google Scholar, chap. 2, esp. 37–40, 198.

9 Among other texts, see Rawls, John, Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008)Google Scholar.

10 Pettit, Philip, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Skinner, Quentin, Hobbes and Republican Liberty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008)Google Scholar.

11 Classically J. G. A. Pocock's The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975) and Bernard Bailyn's Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1967); recent historians have coined the term “liberal-republicanism” to characterize the ideological hybridity of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. See, for instance, Sullivan, Vickie, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and the Formation of a Liberal Republicanism in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jainchill, Andrew, Reimagining Politics after the Terror: The Republican Origins of French Liberalism (Ithica, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008)Google Scholar. Jainchill is particularly relevant to Rosenblatt's concerns.

12 From his “Civilization: Evolution of a Word and a Group of Ideas” (1929).

13 See Richter, Melvin, The History of Political and Social Concepts: A Critical Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

14 Clark, J. C. D., Revolution and Rebellion: State and Society in England in the Seventeen and Eighteenth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 102CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Bell, Duncan, “What Is Liberalism?,” Political Theory 42 (2014): 690CrossRefGoogle Scholar; a similar chronology is followed in Fawcett, Edmund, Liberalism: The Life of an Idea (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014)Google Scholar, where Humbolt and Constant are the first “liberal” personae.

16 Alan Sell, John Locke and the Eighteenth Century Divines (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1997), 167.

17 The Prisoners’ Defence Supported: Or an Answer to the Charges and Allegations of George Markham, Vicar of Carlton (1798), 76.

18 Andrew Kippis, A Vindication of the Protestant Dissenting Ministers (1773), 23–26, 36, 40, 43.

19 John Edwards, A Brief Vindication of the Fundamental Articles of the Christian Faith (1697), 67–68.

20 Bell, “What Is Liberalism?,” 693.

21 Daniel B. Klein, “The Origin of ‘Liberalism,’” The Atlantic, Feb. 13, 2014.

22 Robertson, William, The History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V. With a View of the Progress of Society in Europe, vol. 1 (Dublin, 1762)Google Scholar, 59, 123, 183, 212, 265, 272.

23 Roberston, William, History of America, vol. 2 (Dublin, 1777), 46, 417–19Google Scholar, 424.

24 Burke, Edmund, The History of American Taxation…  (Dublin, 1775), 42Google Scholar; Langhorne, John, The Correspondence of Theodosius and Constantia…  (Dublin, 1765), 36Google Scholar; The Right of Protestant Dissenters to a Complete Toleration (London, 1787), 186; Debate of the Commons of Great-Britain on the Articles of Peace. Monday, Feb. 17, 1783 (London, 1783), 5; on trade see also Moderation Unmasked; or, The Conduct of the Majority Impartially Considered (Dublin, 1780), 79.

25 Themes developed in Rosenblatt, Helena, Liberal Values: Benjamin Constant and the Politics of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, The Philosophy of History, trans. Sibree, J. (Revised edition, NY: Willey Books, 1944), 452Google Scholar.

27 The book at times reads as an inversion of Maurice Cowling's opposite reaction to the perfectionist tendencies of “higher Liberalism.” See his “devious” Mill and Liberalism, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

28 Lilla, Mark, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West (New York: Vintage Books, 2008)Google Scholar.

29 Bentham to Toribio Núñez Sessé, May 9, 1821, in The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham, ed. S. Conway, vol. 10 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 329–33.

30 This passage, many uses of the phrase “liberal,” and constant tributes to Smith, Ricardo, and Bentham can be found in The Political Writings of James Mill: Essays and Reviews on Politics and Society, 1815–1836, ed. David Hart (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2013).

31 Ricardo, David, Proposals for an Economic and Secure Currency (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, sec. 4; see also Ricardo to Trower, July 4, 1821, in The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo, ed. Piero Sraffa and Maurice Dobb, 11 vols. (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2005), 9:1–4; Ricardo to Trower, Mar. 13, 1820, in Works, 8:162–64; Ricardo to Say, May 8, 1821, in Works, 8:379–81.

32 Ricardo to Trower, June 27, 1818, in Works, 7:272–75.

33 See also Rosenblatt, Liberal Values, 8–13; Winegarten, Renee, Germaine de Staël & Benjamin Constant: A Dual Biography (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 48Google Scholar.

34 For a brief account that integrates Scottish political economy and the thought of Constant and de Staël, see Kalyvas, Andreas and Katznelson, Ira, Liberal Beginnings: Making a Republic for the Moderns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 See also Bell, “What Is Liberalism?,” 698–706.

36 Moyn, Samuel, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and elsewhere; Chappel, James, Catholic Modern: The Challenge of Totalitarianism and the Remaking of the Church (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.