Abstract
How might we imagine a leftism appropriate to the 21st century? Since the 1940s, one powerful way of grappling with this question has been to pose it in terms of the relationship between ‘liberals’ and ‘Marxists,’ often interpreted as rival inheritors of the Enlightenment project. Domenico Losurdo’s Liberalism: A Counter-History, which came out in Italy in 2005 and in English translation in 2011, appears at a particularly auspicious moment. Losurdo (b. 1941) is a prolific Italian philosopher whose writings include major studies of Hegel, Heidegger and Nietzsche (Losurdo 2001, 2004; see Thomas 2005) as well as controversial writings on communism (Losurdo 1999, 2006a, 2006b, 2007; see also Wolfe 2012.) He notes that he is writing a ‘counter-history’ – examining not ‘liberal thought in its abstract purity’, but actually existing liberalism with its triple paradox of ‘liberal slavery, liberal empire and liberal authoritarianism’ (Rooksby 2012: 3). He disdains three conventional escape-hatches liberals use when pondering their own history: a ‘vulgar historicist’ recourse to a vaguely described ‘spirit of the times’ (p. 79); the treatment of such enormities as coerced labour as mere holdovers from pre-liberal eras; and strategic minimisations of one period’s contradictions through invocations of their painless resolution in the next. Instead, looking at liberalism over a long run of about 250 years – there is little here post-1914, and almost nothing post-1945 – Losurdo exposes what he believes to be the tradition’s leading theme: its exclusivity. For Losurdo, liberalism can be defined in terms of its structuring ‘exclusion clauses’, whereby people of colour, labourers, and women were all shut out from full membership, each exclusion operating with its ‘peculiar characteristics’, but all of them working to restrict liberal freedom to a minority (p. 181). Liberal intellectuals often ‘spatialised’ the ideals they revered, defending liberty at the core of empire, yet justifying oppression and slavery in the colonies. 1
Losurdo thinks such liberal boundary-drawing raises a point of philosophical significance. It was an ‘integral part’ of the ‘self-celebration of the community of the free’ that it should consider many of the excluded (especially colonised peoples without or racialised minorities within, as well as workers and democrats) particularly susceptible to ‘despotism’ (p. 256). Such ‘ordered liberty’ meant that the subjects and citizens of such privileged realms regarded themselves as chosen peoples. They could implicitly acquit themselves of any responsibility for the slave systems they helped create by seeing them as somehow ‘external’ to the countries in which they exercised hegemony. It was only gradually that the world of liberal opinion came to a conviction that the abolition of slavery in the English-speaking world testified to the moral excellence of its governing ideology. Outside this ‘sacred sphere’ of the liberty-loving ‘Anglosphere’ (Vucetic 2011), one found a profane world of the unsaved from which little could be learned – and much could be earned. Plus ça change, a 21st-century leftist might well remark.
The French Revolution, on his reading, was a pivotal moment in the rise of a distinct radicalism defying liberalism’s exclusion clauses, with the Jacobins and Toussaint L’Ouverture clearly departing from the tradition. 2 In liberalism and radicalism, says Losurdo, were ‘two different phenomenologies of power’. Only with the consolidation of radicalism in the socialist movement do we find a genuine universalism – one that recognised ‘every individual, independently of wealth, sex or race, as a subject endowed at a moral level with equal human dignity and possessor, politically, of inalienable rights’ (p. 203).
Losurdo is retracing steps covered by two earlier critical students of the liberal tradition: Anthony Arblaster (1986), mentioned in the bibliography but not discussed; and C.B. Macpherson (1962), dismissed in a misleading discussion. 3 Still, his book is making waves, challenging as it does the common sense of the time. Merely to read his discussion of Locke alongside the Cambridge Companion to Locke — whose index lists 57 references to ‘God’, but none to ‘slavery,’ ‘capitalism’ or ‘enclosure’ (Chappell 2006) — provides a startling revelation of the contemporary hegemony of liberal political theory. There is a shrewd Italian fox inside the cosy Anglo-American coop of true liberal belief, and all that will be left of many naïve and earnest ideologues will be their feathers.
Yet there are weaknesses. Perhaps the most important is Losurdo’s lack of clarity about liberalism’s key characteristics. 4 That liberals stood for individual freedom against the claims of Church and State is a radically underexplored theme. 5 Reading Losurdo alongside more sympathetic treatments suggests that at times his historical sweep and polemical vigour have been purchased at the cost of a certain one-dimensionality. 6 His ‘Jacobins’ are those of Gramsci and Soboul, not those of modern scholarship (Gross 2007). The ‘excluded’ of liberalism included many who themselves advanced liberal arguments (Equiano 1999). Many 19th- and 20th-century liberals were not disciples of Locke but of Shelley, Voltaire, Humboldt or Garibaldi: and what they distilled from such figures was an adamant insistence on individual freedom and rounded self-development. Some of Losurdo’s figures, e.g. Locke and Mill, variously interpreted, seem by convention and good sense to be rightly considered exponents of a continuing liberal discourse. Some of his other ‘liberals’ are more doubtful candidates. Losurdo’s is a method that tends to iron out the complexities and contradictions of the liberals themselves, leaving us no room for a Burke sensitive to the wrongs suffered by disempowered Catholics, or an Adam Smith who wanted wage regulations that functioned in the workers’ interest and at least some measure of workers’ education (albeit only in ‘prudently homeopathic doses,’ as Marx noted sarcastically [1977: 484]), or an anti-imperialist Herbert Spencer.
Conversely, radicalism in Losurdo is given what amounts to an immaculate conception. Here, Losurdo is departing significantly from Marx, who in his appraisal of Abraham Lincoln, for instance, appreciated the emancipatory logic that might be unleashed, even if through history’s ‘cunning of reason’, by this most liberal of politicians (for a discussion, see Blackburn 2011). And, of course, Marx himself could be put forward more generally as evidence (Berman 1999): beginning as a fervent liberal journalist at the Rheinische Zeitung, Marx would become one of the most dramatic of liberalism’s unintended consequences. When in the fourteenth chapter of Capital, Vol. I, Marx analyses the consequences for the worker of the division of labour, one which in manufacture ‘attacks the individual at the very roots of his life’ (1977: 484), he is patently influenced by German romanticism. When he then goes on to diagnose ‘anarchy in the social division of labour and despotism in the manufacturing division of labour’, he is pointing out to liberals, in anticipation of C.B. Macpherson, that the despotism they decry in politics can be found flourishing in the very economic system they exalt (Marx 1977: 477).
Does not the French Revolution suggest a pattern whereby liberal ideas, once they were generally taken up and transformed by the excluded, themselves became material forces – as masses of working people, inspired by ideas of equality and freedom, start to apply them to their own lives (Rooksby 2012: 2)? Losurdo, in interviews, concedes the point; his book is less forthcoming. 7 And Losurdo, presenting an often otiose critique of Macpherson, 8 might have profited from a more sustained engagement with his predecessor’s work, particularly with regard to property. Once again, his interviews about the book – wherein he gives a central role in the ‘bourgeois-liberal revolution’ to the ‘class of property-owners’ (Losurdo 2012a: 6) – are clearer about his underlying historical narrative than is the book itself. 10 Because so much of Losurdo’s liberalism takes place on the level of abstractions, the reader comes away with only an approximate indication of why the liberal tradition underwent the transformations the author so ably demonstrates. 11 Losurdo’s ‘partial’ book (Pitts 2011: 8) will be well-loved by many young radicals looking for the most damaging ‘killer quotes’ from the liberal tradition. Some reviewers have quipped that the book might have been aptly titled The Black Book of Liberalism (Azzarà 2011: 93).
The ultimate political difficulty posed by this counter-history is that Losurdo, the ‘Marxist’, ultimately proves far more forgiving of liberalism than C.B. Macpherson, the ‘liberal’. Losurdo claims for liberalism the ‘great … merit’ of ‘having taught the limitation of power …. On this score, I counterpose liberalism to Marxism, and rule in favor of liberalism’ (Losurdo 2012a: 12). A ‘further, major historical merit’ in liberalism lies in its acceptance of contradiction and conflict, exemplified in its emphasis on ‘the need for competition between individuals in the market, in order to develop social wealth and the productive forces’ (p. 343). After more than 340 pages largely devoted to wrenching representations of liberalism’s lapses, suddenly we find a stalwart defence of liberal politics and liberal economics – even of a liberal culture of competitiveness. C.B. Macpherson saw more clearly than Losurdo that despotism in property relations and freedom in the political order are in stark opposition to each other, an inescapable fact under conditions of neoliberalism. In the contradictions – moral, political, cultural – emerging from this underlying conflict within the master ideology of the age are found many of the central questions of our time.