Abstract
Here is a way to summarise the history of liberalism. John Locke’s writing of the late seventeenth century was a main inspiration for the eighteenth century’s natural rights liberalism and so for the American and French revolutions. Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations of the late eighteenth century inspired the laissez-faire or economic liberalism dominant in the nineteenth. John Stuart Mill’s and especially T.H. Green’s writing in the second half of the nineteenth century led to the interventionist and welfare liberalism of the twentieth. The rights-focused work of John Rawls and others in the late twentieth century inspired the egalitarian, neutralist liberalism of the twenty-first.
That may be too neat, but it will be familiar to many. Some histories go back further than Locke, finding liberalism’s main source in Thomas Hobbes (Leo Strauss, John Milbank) even though Hobbes’s political prescription was the opposite of liberal. Some go still further. Oliver O’Donovan, pointing to ways in which the Christian gospel impacted on Western thought and practice over many centuries, describes ‘a constellation of social and political ideas which came together in a decisively influential way in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’ that we may call ‘early modern liberalism’ (The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology, Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 226).
Helena Rosenblatt’s Lost History of Liberalism argues that there are at least three things wrong with such narratives. First, they are anachronistic: no set of ideas that may reasonably be labelled ‘liberalism’ existed until close to when this political term was coined in the early nineteenth century. (Its first use was probably in Spain around 1811; pp. 42, 63.)
Secondly, such histories are badly skewed in an Anglophone direction, especially those that start with Hobbes or Locke: they tend to see liberalism as formed and developed in Britain and later in the USA, and even as native to these contexts only. Rosenblatt argues, in contrast, for ‘the centrality of France … and its successive revolutions’ to liberalism’s history. Much of the book is a fairly detailed history of France from 1789 to 1906, the revolutionary dates marking the chapter divides. If there are a hero and a heroine of her story, they are Benjamin Constant and Madame de Staël. ‘Reacting to the pressing circumstances brought about by the revolution, they formulated the cluster of ideas that … came to be known as “liberalism”’ (p. 50). Inevitably, Rosenblatt narrates the blunt clash between liberalism and Catholicism that was provoked first by the (deeply illiberal) Civil Constitution of the Clergy of 1790 and continued for a century. It is diplomatic to refer to both sides in this as tin-eared and to their rhetoric as unhelpful and at times ridiculous (cf. pp. 139, 153). (Are there not multiple lessons here for today?)
Rosenblatt gives attention also to Germany, where liberalism was ‘reconfigured’ after 1850 (p. 3). It was German ‘ethical economists’ who ‘[a]t mid-century … launched a full-scale attack on the doctrine of laissez-faire’ (p. 222). They directly inspired not only Green and the emergence of ‘new liberalism’ in Britain but similar developments in France and the USA. It may be an aside in the longer story, but Rosenblatt pulls no punches in describing the way in which, from about 1880, both interventionist and laissez-faire liberals were among the main advocates of eugenics (pp. 235–38).
Rosenblatt’s third challenge to standard (Anglo-American) narratives is that, despite their anachronism, these generally miss the earlier history of the word ‘liberal’, one that stretches back at least to Cicero. In ancient Rome ‘being free … meant being a citizen and not a slave’ (p. 9), and this was a matter not only of having libertas but of practising the virtue of liberalitas, liberality. ‘Cicero described liberalitas in a way that would resonate over the centuries’; it was the very ‘bond of human society’ (pp. 9–10, quoting Cicero, On Duties). Hence free men had the moral duty to be liberal: generous, ‘“giving and receiving” in a way that contributed to the common good’ (p. 10, quoting Cicero, ibid.). Later, Seneca’s brilliant allegory for liberality was ‘the circular dance of the Three Graces, giving, receiving and returning benefits’ (p. 10). Here is the (temporal) common good in the sense that the Christian tradition could embrace, such as we find in Aquinas.
Rosenblatt outlines the long history of this use of ‘liberal’ and ‘liberality’—in St Ambrose, the medieval period, the Renaissance and the early Reformation—to show that these terms were inseparable from a politics of the common good. She indicates (very cursorily, it must be said) some ways in which the concepts were ‘Christianized’. Liberality was ‘overlaid with Christian values such as … compassion, and especially charity’; these were ‘necessary not only in republics, but in monarchies as well’ (p. 12). She points towards Christianity’s universalising of the possibility and responsibility to be free. In the medieval period, ‘[e]very Christian, rich or poor, was urged to be liberal, but liberality continued to be regarded as especially important in persons “of a superior social station”’ (p. 12). Only the latter required, and had the leisure for, a ‘liberal arts’ education. After the Reformation, John Donne reminded ‘his congregation that “Christ is a liberal God”’ and insisted that all should be liberal, showing ‘their liberality by divesting themselves of all ill feelings towards others’ (p. 17). John Winthrop exhorted the Puritan colonists to an ‘extraordinary liberality’ (cit. p. 18); this was ‘their only recipe for survival’ so ‘was demanded of the whole community’ (p. 18, emphasis original).
For Rosenblatt the break from that premodern ‘liberal tradition’ came with Hobbes who rejected it ‘root and branch’; liberality ‘played no discernible role’ in his narrative (p. 19). Multiple writers on both sides of the Catholic/Protestant divide ‘reacted in horror’, reaffirming ‘the reality and central importance to society of liberality, often calling on the authority of Cicero’ (p. 20). In contrast with Hobbes, in Locke the premodern understanding finds renewed expression: ‘it was precisely because men were capable of liberality that they could live under a limited, constitutional monarchy characterised by a significant amount of self-government’ (p. 22).
Rosenblatt insists, however, that we do not find ‘liberalism’ before or in Locke, or among the American revolutionaries. One main thing she means by this is that ‘liberal’ and ‘liberality’ referred to personal qualities and later to moral principles but not to a political doctrine. As ‘liberalism’ began to be used some time after the French Revolution, it did denote that: a theory of constitutional order and the role of government. When Constant and de Staël arrived in Paris in 1795, ‘liberal principles’ meant defending the Revolution’s republican cause and, more specifically, ‘supporting the rule of law and civil equality, constitutional and representative government, and a number of rights, primary among which were freedom of the press and freedom of religion’ (p. 52). In the following decades there emerged in various Continental European countries a ‘liberal party’ or ‘the liberal side’, or just ‘the liberals’. Soon afterwards ‘liberalism’ came into use, first as a term of vilification and then as one of political self-description.
While Rosenblatt insists on such discontinuity between the premodern and modern liberal traditions, one of the main reasons for her canter from Cicero to Locke is to insist on real continuity too. At least two aspects of pre-modern liberality were sustained. In the first place, modern liberals were committed to ‘an ethical project’ in which the common good was central (p. 128). ‘Claiming the high ground, liberals repeatedly reminded people of the Latin origins of the word and its principled, moral and communitarian meaning’ (p. 69). One defence in 1815 of les idées libérales held that these were ‘directed to the advantage of all, toward the public good and not toward the particular good of an individual or a class’ (cit. p. 69). Liberals emphasised duties, generosity and self-sacrifice. Hence Rosenblatt contends that they were not individualistic, not defenders of mere self-interest or selfish desire, not amoral hedonists; Hobbes represented the opposite of the liberal cause.
In the second place, central to this project was the moral formation of persons. Rosenblatt has a chapter on the aftermath of 1848 entitled ‘The Question of Character’. The soul-searching among liberals that was provoked by the debacle of 1848 led them to conclude that this ‘was the result of a catastrophic breakdown of public morality’ (p. 142). The influence of Tocqueville was great: ‘The revolution was proof of what Tocqueville had said in Democracy in America: the French lacked the ideas and mores needed to sustain a liberal regime … [T]he underlying problem was moral’ (p. 142). Here was common ground with the conservative Christians, but the liberals saw the answer as lying, not in a return to traditional churches, but in moral education: ‘the populations needed to acquire character. Indeed … the problem of character became a virtual obsession for liberals’ (p. 142, emphasis original). Here is continuity with pre-modern emphasis on the liberal arts, on formation in the virtues that freedom requires, although now it has to be for all the people.
Noting these two continuities can point us towards Rosenblatt’s polemical purpose. She is challenging a certain historiography and also a main way of thinking of liberalism; her Lost History directs attention to a lost vision. The final chapter, on ‘Liberalism and the American Creed’, and the Epilogue bring this out. She regards the dominant focus in recent Anglophone liberalism on individuals’ interests, choices and rights as both historically anomalous and politically inadequate. Emphasis on duty, generosity and the common good ‘are conspicuous by their absence in the contemporary liberal lexicon’; liberals ‘have conceded the high ground to their adversaries’ (p. 266). She proposes that ‘an “Anglo-American liberal tradition” based so centrally on individual rights was a construction of the middle of the twentieth century, if not even later’ (p. 267). She offers a tentative explanation for this: liberals’ sensitivity to critique by Maritain, Reinhold Niebuhr and Arendt (among others) that liberal societies tend to decline into illiberalism and even totalitarianism provoked a defensive ‘turn to rights’. In emphasising ‘commitment to defend the rights of individuals’ against totalitarianisms of right and left, ‘liberalism lost much of its moral core and its centuries-long dedication to the public good … Liberals lowered their sights’ (p. 271). While Rosenblatt’s aim has been ‘not to attack or defend liberalism’ (p. 2), we are told on the last page that she identifies with those who hold that liberalism needs ‘to articulate a conception of the good and liberal theory of virtue’. ‘Liberals should reconnect with the resources of their … tradition’ (p. 309).
Rosenblatt’s book is carefully evidenced, in the main circumspect, and concisely written. What should we make of her ‘lost history’? I suggest just three points of critique.
In the first place, how lost is this history? While much of the detail here may not be very well known—of nineteenth-century French liberalism and especially of the German contributors—is the thesis that all the main modern ‘isms’ were forged in response to the French Revolution not a staple of the teaching of political thought?
Secondly, and in tension with that point, Rosenblatt does not quite say enough to establish her case that nothing that came before 1789 may properly be called ‘liberalism’. It is odd that she both holds that this political doctrine did not exist until close to when the term was coined and notes that Constant and de Staël themselves never employed the label (p. 51). That they did not, provokes the question of whether it might reasonably be used of articulations before theirs. Rosenblatt’s own outline, for instance, of the American revolutionary politics of Lafayette and Jefferson presses this (pp. 41–43). If it might, what are the specific reasons for not using it for the politics of Locke? These are easy objections that she might have addressed head on.
The third point digs more deeply. The relation of liberalism and Christianity is a prominent theme in the book, with a focus not only on the conflict with Catholicism but also on the significance of liberal Protestantism and Unitarianism for the development of liberalism overall. What is missing, though, is consideration of the much more refractory possibility that, in the long term, doctrinally orthodox Christianity (Catholic and Protestant)—its contrast of ecclesial and political authorities and its theological anthropology, inter alia—was decisive in generating liberal society. (That is the possibility towards which O’Donovan’s ‘early modern liberalism’ points.) Rosenblatt’s very first reference is to Larry Siedentop’s Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism (Harvard University Press, 2014), but she does not mention it again. More pertinently to her specific thesis, the book’s comprehensive bibliography includes Emile Perreau-Saussine, Catholicism and Democracy: An Essay in the History of Political Thought (Princeton University Press, 2012). Yet she does not discuss this, even though Perreau-Saussine tells a detailed story of France from the Revolution onward. His argument is a striking one about Gallicanism: this orthodox but dissenting French theological-political tradition, which predated 1789 in monarchist form and continued after it in popular form, was a major source of modern liberalism and democracy, and, finally, of Vatican II’s rapprochement with these. In this is grist to Rosenblatt’s mill.
To some extent Rosenblatt narrates a lost history of liberalism, but there is a great deal more that needs to be said, with the historiographical caution and care that is evident in this book.