Liberalism: history of an ideology

This post combines my reviews of two books that are really linked together. The argument presented is a contentious one and can be subject to intense debate but I find it stands up when I look into alternative sources.

Liberalism: A Counter-History
by Domenico Losurdo 

Liberalism was arguably born when the Netherlands gained freedom from Philip II of Spain and its wealthy commercial class took political control. While the Dutch celebrated their liberation from the shackles and restraints of the ancien regime and its mediaeval values, what they prized in particular was their freedom to engage without restraint in the creation of wealth through their own colonies and their hold over the slave trade of that time.  The liberty they idealized and proclaimed was thus both very restrictive in its application and very paradoxical, in that it prioritised the lack of governmental restraint in order to maximise the power of those in control over their family, servants and slaves.  This curious blend of liberty and oppression was given philosophical expression by their own philosopher of  Liberalism, Hugo Grotius http://www.themolinist.com/rights-wrongs-ptiii-grotius-and-the-racialisation-of-slavery/

By no coincidence, John Locke, the English philosopher of Liberalism, came from exile in Holland along with William Of Orange in the 1688 Glorious Revolution, by which the English peacefully replaced a Catholic Stuart regime with a Protestant one, while violently repressing religious dissenters and Catholics,  lifting restraints on enclosure and the displacement of the poor from common land to permit private profit, and promoting a policy of mass murder towards the Irish, seeking to take their lands away from them to benefit English landlords and Protestant settlers. All of this had Locke’s complete approval and he extended this to the American colonies, where he offered a philosophical justification for the extermination of the native Americans and the large scale deployment of slave labour. When modern Americans appeal to Locke as a sympathetic philosopher of liberty that is not such an odd thing, since they were explicitly his target audience.

In the Seven Years War, American colonists were completely in accord with their English allies as they  defended the cause of liberty against the French crown. However, the War of Independence saw American separatists depict England as the land of aristocratic tyranny and this transformation had everything to do with restrictions on their freedom to mistreat and dehumanise black slaves and to drive native Americans from their lands. The resulting constitution provided for the most complete expression of Liberal values, securing the dignity of the White elite as free men, elevating property rights to the highest level of importance, and carefully locating slavery under the heading of property rights.  While slaves were classed as chattels, they were (uniquely) treated as people when determining the population of each state for voting purposes, No surprise then that in the early decades, a majority of presidents were slave owners and from slave states.

Britain of course retained a huge interest in slavery through its colonies but the language of Liberalism did lack clarity on the subject.  For some time the logic of the system implied that slavery might be extended to the home country, and applied to vagrants, criminals and paupers as well as to servants and certain employees who could be bought and sold as assets alongside an enterprise such as a coal mine  This was eventually decided against in a 1772 case, concerning an Englishman who brought his personal slave to England. Instead, it was ruled that slavery was only to feature in colonial lands and, in case this appeared to imply some prospect of liberty for slaves reaching England, those Black loyalists who fought for Britain in America’s War of Independence were not allowed to settle in Britain but deported to Sierra Leone.

For the home country, then, Liberalism found options short of slavery by which to assimilate people into the category of property and to elevate the importance of property beyond any concern for the rights of their subordinates.  England devised such a range of property crimes for which the penalty was death, including the crime of poaching if a non landowner took a wild bird or beast for food, that it shocked the rest of Europe. The option often arose though to commute that sentence and substitute a life of forced labour in the colonies, notably in Australia.  From 1834, paupers were offered the choice to starve or to enter a workhouse, atrocious institutions hardly to be preferred over the conditions of a slave, while the use of orphanages as a resource to supply (for sale) compliant young servants and apprentices could be considered (I suggest) as a variation on Jonathen Swift’s modest proposal for farming the babies of Irish paupers.  http://art-bin.com/art/omodest.html

Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America” was published in 1835. This French politician and writer visited the USA (and later on England and Ireland) and reported in a very clear eyed manner on the conditions he observed for colonists, native Americans and black  slaves. His writing had a direct bearing on his political aspirations, which included promoting a similar liberal democracy for France, and guiding the colonial exploitation of Algeria in particular, where the Arabs were to be assigned a status comparable to native Americans. The violence and racist nature of France’s colonial exploits were in line with the worst of European behaviour in Africa, but France itself was always an unreliable member of the Liberal club owing to its periodic distraction with notions about the rights of man. For Burke and his successors, the issue was one of moderation and common sense - to seize power and control from the Ancien Regime, ending the feudal order of things, without making the foolish error of extending the franchise too far and empowering those who lack property and are thus liable to use government as a means of stealing from those with property. Of course, only chaos could ensue when property was not sacred.

For Burke, as for Locke, there was a natural order to human affairs. The French Revolution threw this aside with its appeal to the Rights of Man and the result was terror and chaos. This had to be accounted for and several lines of enquiry emerged. Since Liberalism was associated with moderation and self discipline, revolution must arise through the lack of such qualities.  This lack could be attributed to a disease or to a congenital defect.

For the disease model of egalitarianism, Burke  traced the cause in a conspiracy theory that would have increasing significance in European politics.  He blamed the Jews and set out a full account of the mechanics by which this conspiracy operated. The broad theme is that international finance, in the form of Jewish bankers, provided governments with the loans to fund all sorts of benefits for paupers and others at the expense of property and the class of people on whose shoulders fell the burden of generating wealth and paying taxes. This anti-Semitic ‘motif’ prospered in the coming decades and was brought to a high level of refinement by one the greatest prophets of racism and colonial cynicism in that terrible century, none other than the Jewish politician, Disraeli.  “The natural equality of man and the abrogation of property are proclaimed by the secret societies who form provisional governments, and men of  Jewish race are found at the head of every one of them...” Thus “ the people of God co-operate with atheists; the most skillful accumulators of property ally themselves with communists; the  peculiar and chosen race touch the hand of all the scum and low castes of Europe.” [p.276-7 has much more]

Burke also opened up the theme of racial determinism, appealing to “the chosen race of the sons of England,” a “nation in whose veins the blood of freedom circulates,” to contrast with the intrinsic servility, herd spirit and inability to enjoy a regular, orderly liberty,  which he identified of course in the French.  (The biblical strand of the chosen people, alongside the association of black skin with the biblical curse of Ham, was thematic since at least Locke.)

A number of sources identified racial degeneration through interbreeding with inferior peoples as the congenital source of the egalitarian disease, of whom Gobineau was important, introducing the novel and spurious concept of a superior Aryan race which embraced Germans but excluded the French and the Celtic peoples.  In time, Herbert Spencer and his notion of “Social Darwinism” elaborated the theory by which humanity was to be rank ordered and he pointed to the alarming risks of inter breeding, or miscegenation, leading to degeneration of the human stock.  Spencer was no scientist and Social Darwinism did not, as it pretended to do, have the support of Charles Darwin’s work.  Darwin did not  invent the well established idea of evolution - he investigated scientific explanations for evolution, whereas Spencer investigated ideological racism with a spurious scientific glaze.  Similarly, Malthus published his Essay on the Principle of Population in 1834, long before the Origin of Species, but it found a ready audience in the Liberal objectors  to any  form of poverty relief and not least in the administrator, Trevelyan, put in place by the British Government to oversee the collapse of the Irish peasant population (from 4.5 million to 2.5 million) in the Great Potato Famine of 1845.  

It was with reference to miscegenation that racists accounted for the congenital defects of the Mediterranean people, notably the Spanish, and the condition of Latin America was seen to be beyond recall as a result of extensive intermarriage with and between blacks and native Americans. One of the perceived horrors of black slavery was seen to be the sexual exploitation of black women, with a resulting tendency to degeneration of the master race, in addition of course to the concern of Christian fundamentalists at the immorality of such illicit couplings.  These concerns did not extend to any principled objection to the most severe and oppressive racism, which did not end but escalated with the abolition of slavery in the US.  The last law against miscegenation was abolished in the state of Alabama in the year 2000. While the story of racism in the USA is well rehearsed, what Losurdo points out is the infringement on the rights also of the white population, who could be subject to both legal and extra-legal (often very violent) sanctions for any deviation from accepted thinking and behaviour.

There were at least two Liberalisms. [p278] One equated ‘true liberty’ with untrammelled control by the master over his family, his servants and his goods.  Another tried to come to terms with the refusal of their servants to be assimilated with the master’s belongings. In so far as the latter caused some unease in the consciences of some sections of “the community of the free,” this was alleviated by repressing slavery - at least restricting it to the colonies - and masking the aspects of social relations that most blatantly gave the lie to their professed attachment to liberty. The idea of self government by the dominant class and race persisted though; in the USA, while the abolition of slavery was imposed from above by a determined government, the principle was retained in the regime of terrorist white supremacy which soon followed.

Liberalism ultimately was the product of a social and political revolution which did not involve any emancipation, but rather the reverse, for those social and ethnic groups outside of the new elite.  [p320] What emerged was "herrenvolk" democracy, democracy for the master race.

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War and Revolution: Rethinking the Twentieth Century  
by Domenico Losurdo 

“If we do not appreciate its compound of horror and emancipation, we are ill placed to understand anything of the twentieth century,...” [p306]

This amazing book starts out at full speed and never slows down. It continues an argument already introduced in "Liberalism - A Counter History", by the same author, and anticipates no doubt its continuation in a further volume.  The material is copious and that has a logic to it. Those who appeal for brevity and a simple, clear argument, must be reminded that in a debate about ideology, one's opponent will not allow any point to pass without challenge and it is not hard to employ rhetorical tricks to swat aside almost any claim, however well stated. This is an argument against ideology and as such it requires and deploys overwhelming evidence.  By summarising some key points here, I will unfortunately risk presenting weak arguments that fail to do justice to their source. The mountain of detail really is essential to overcome the barrier of misinformation which it confronts.

The Neo-Liberal theme against which Losurdo argues here is that gradual, incremental social change is preferable to revolutionary change, because in the chaos which revolution unleashes there is an inevitable resort to terror.  In other words, radical criticisms from the Left of the current state of affairs are ill advised and harmful. Burke and his many successors argue that terror is the inevitable result of people becoming enthralled by ideological fantasies about an ideal world, because concrete individual freedoms can be sacrificed to an abstract common good. The claim is that while the French and Russian Revolutions were marked by terror and totalitarianism, the English and American Revolutions were relatively peaceful transitions leading to the liberal, market economies of our most advanced nations.  Fascism and Nazism are presented as variations on the same ideological thinking as communism, each relying on totalitarian government to maintain their grip. Both in traditional Liberalism and its modern incarnation, appeal is made to Western civilization as the highest achievement of mankind and colonialism or neocolonialism as the ultimately benign means by which the less favoured remainder of humanity is nurtured and educated to share the benefits of modernity.

These Liberal claims rely on an absurd misrepresentation of the historical record and Losurdo devotes much of this book to a review of the evidence.  Consequently, the text can at times take on the appearance of a competition to demonstrate how extreme and extensive the violence and bestiality has been in different situations. His point is that claims must be based on evidence and comparisons must be meaningful and fair. Hence it is not legitimate to discuss the “peaceful” English Revolution of 1688 without acknowledging the English Civil War of 1642-1651,  William of Orange’s incredibly violent campaigns in Ireland, the treatment of Jacobin rebels in Scotland, and the general mistreatment of Catholics and also Protestant Dissenters.  Similarly, it is a mistake to describe the French Revolution as an isolated event, rather than the start of a process culminating in the establishment of the Third Republic in 1870. Social change does not happen overnight and it is foolish to try to compare social change in different countries and different conditions and even different centuries, by selecting untypical moments out of a longer process and ignoring their context.

So when Liberals refer to The West, they are not pointing to a reality but to an ideal, and it is nonsensical to contrast the ideal of freedom aspired to in Liberal ideology with the practical reality of, let us say, Stalin’s USSR.  It would be no less idiotic to compare the ideal of Marx’s utopian vision of communism to the hunger and poverty of the Great Depression or of the Weimar Republic. Nor is it ever transparent where the boundaries of The West are to be located in order to include only its bright side and exclude, for example, Fascism in Spain. Italy and Germany, or starvation in Ireland, or mass slavery in the USA and the genocide of native Americans, or the Western response to the Opium Wars and Boxer Rebellion in China, or the virtual depopulation of the Congo.

Losurdo rages that the USA was built on the genocide of the native Americans in order to seize full control of land and resources and the transportation of millions of more pliable black slaves from Africa. He points out that the abolition of slavery in the USA was followed by the emergence of white supremacy, expressed in apartheid legislation and widespread lynching.  He notes that some 18 states still had laws to criminalise mixed race marriage (miscegenation) as recently as 1967. Losurdo also explores in detail the extent to which Germany's Nazi ideology was explicitly modelled on the American pattern, and not least the influence of Henry Ford's infamous book The International Jew, 1920. "According to Himmler, along with the Protocols, Ford's book played a decisive .. role in the Fuhrer's formation, as well as his own.  What is certain is that The International Jew continued to be published with great fanfare in the Third Reich,..." [p179] Losurdo agrees that there are valid and useful comparisons to be made between Nazism and Stalin’s USSR, and lists many, but he argues (with a huge amount of detailed evidence) that it is impossible to make sense of fascism or Nazism without placing it squarely in the context of Western colonialism and the most important comparison has to be between Hitler’s Germany and the USA.  The idea initially seems absurd because it is unfamiliar, but the evidence presented is overwhelming.

I will concentrate from here on just one theme of the book, with long quotations.  Losurdo refers to Hannah Arendt http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Arendt and her discussion of totalitarianism very early in his book (page 9) and again towards the conclusion (p304).

[p9ff] “On the one hand, Arendt subsumes Stalin’s USSR together with Hitler’s regime under the category of ‘totalitarianism’. On the other, she reconstructs the parabola leading to Auschwitz, starting like Lukacs with reactionary critics of Enlightenment and the French Revolution - Boulainvilliers, Burke and Gobineau. Her harsh assessment of the British Whig is especially significant: his view of liberty as a hereditarily transmitted privilege, and his rejection of the rights of man, were imbued with a sentiment of inequality that would later inspire the imperial metropolis in its relationship with the colonies. In this sense, the first great indictment of the French Revolution already contained the ‘seeds of racist ideology’. A direct line runs from Burke to Disraeli and the most virulent forms of imperialism, inherited by the Third Reich. Like Lukacs in the case of Social Darwinism, Arendt pointed the finger at ‘naturalistic conceptions’ which, starting with the liquidation of the idea of equality, were above all diffused in Britain and Germany. The country that experienced the ominous triumph of the Third Reich was one where Burke had enjoyed ‘considerable influence’. The ‘affinities between German and British racist ideologies’ were apparent. The country at the head of the anti-French coalitions [Britain] was obsessed by ‘theories of heredity and their modern equivalent, eugenics’. It was no accident if the hopes of the anti-democratic and racist Gobineau were initially focused on Britain and then, after 1871, on Germany.”

[For Gobineau, who invented the myth of Aryan supremacy, it is worth a visit to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_de_Gobineau ]

”...it was precisely in the colonies that the univers concentrationnaire made its first appearance (Arendt takes the example of Egypt under British domination), and large scale massacres and genocides were perpetrated (with the collapse of ‘the peaceful Congo population from 20 to 40 million in 1890 to 8 million in 1911’), anticipating the horrors of the twentieth century…”[p9, 10]

[p.304]  “Nineteen fourteen was the beginning of what many historians characterise as the Second Thirty Years War…. During this crisis, independently of the Bolshevik Revolution and often prior to it, we witness the emergence of all those constitutive features of the totalitarian and concentration camp universe that historical revisionism … seek to deduce from the fateful October 1918. 

“A merciless struggle required iron discipline on both sides; the regimentation of society reached unprecedented levels.  … and this applies to countries with the oldest liberal traditions. In the USA, although safe on the other side of the Atlantic and sheltered from any danger of invasion, people could be sentenced to as much as twenty years in prison for having expressed an opinion liable to disturb the climate of sacred patriotic duty.  Such patriotic duty was configured as a kind of single party: political, trade union or cultural organisations that challenged it were ruthlessly suppressed.  A feature of the totalitarian phenomenon is the imposition of a strict state monopoly on information. This monopoly first appeared and proved brilliantly effective, in the North American Republic. Seven days after declaring war, Wilson established a Committee on Public Information that even regimented high culture. Another characteristic of the totalitarian regime is an admixture of control and violence by the state with control and violence from below, perpetrated by political organisations or militarized sections of civil society. During the First World War, a very prominent role was played by vigilante groups unearthing, attacking and terrorizing possible or potential ‘’traitors.’ Finally, according to Arendt, totalitarianism is not content to impose a passive consensus, but demands an active consensus and active participation in a unanimous national effort. ..The same slogans prevailed: ‘total mobilization’, ‘total war’, and even ‘total politics.’ 

“The iron fist targeted entire ethnic groups, suspected of maintaining links with the enemy...Hence resort to deportation.  Among its victims were the Armenians, whom the Turkish government blamed for favouring collaboration with Christian and Czarist Russia, which in its turn deported Jews, who were suspected of looking to Wilhelmine and social democratic Germany as a possible liberator from the yoke of anti-semitism….

“Along with the practice of deportation, concentration camps emerged...in countries with the most stable liberal traditions. .. The univers concentrationnaire became a reality during the Second World War, when Roosevelt had American citizens of Japanese origin (including women and children) deported to concentration camps, even rounding them up from Latin America. In 1950, the McCarran Act was passed, setting up six concentration camps around the country to hold political prisoners.’ …

“The diffusion in the most diverse countries of institutions and features typical of totalitarianism clarifies a crucial point: rather than a particular ideology, its genesis is to be sought in war. We may venture a definition: totalitarianism is the political regime corresponding to total war…  It goes without saying that this new political regime assumes very different forms depending on the respective geopolitical situations, political traditions and ideologies.” [pp 302-304]

This final phrase is all important to understanding Losurdo’s argument. He never seeks to evade or understate the moral failures and inhuman behaviours of any government or people identified in his account. For example, he is not an apologist for communist mass murders, for Japanese atrocities, for the inhumanity of the Jacobin Terror.  Nor is he some type of moral relativist, in the sense that, by understanding context we may learn to forgive atrocious behaviours.  He explicitly rules out such thinking. What he demands, though, is a fair and balanced assessment in every case:

”Comprehension of massive conflicts presupposes analysis of the interacting behaviour of the antagonists. The presumption on the part of one of the interested parties - the one that emerged victorious - to erect itself into judge of the other, condemning it on the basis of criteria to which it declines to submit, is ridiculous.” [p316]

With this in mind, he refers to comments of Hannah Arendt (in her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism) regarding both the French and the Russian Revolutions.

“By contrast, the ideas of the theoretician of natural racial inequality met with little response in post-Revolutionary France, which was in the vanguard in achieving ‘political equality’ (it was ‘the only country’ not to discriminate against blacks).  A positive judgement of the French revolution also  seems to apply to Robespierre, who is approvingly cited several times for standing firm on the unity of the human race and for his hostility to colonial conquests…

“As opposed to the Anglo-German conservative and reactionary traditions, the positive term of the antithesis comprises the American and French revolutionary tradition. At this point in time, the two declarations of rights were equated and analysed conjointly.  Hence condemnation of the totalitarian USSR did not as yet involve denunciation of 1789 and 1793.  In fact, strictly speaking, it did not even involve condemnation of October 1917, given that, at this stage of her development, Arendt was concerned to distinguish between Lenin’s revolutionary dictatorship and Stalin’s totalitarianism. Immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution, Soviet Russia presented itself as a society which, albeit within limits imposed by a dramatic state of emergency, had a richly articulated internal life. Whereas Czarism had harshly oppressed the various nationalities, Lenin, by contrast, strove to accommodate them to the maximum. There was broad support from ethnic groups, which were able to express themselves as autonomous cultural and national entities for the first time. They represented an antidote to the totalitarian regime, between the amorphous mass and the charismatic head stood a whole series of organisms that impeded and frustrated the latter’s immediate volition.  In addition to various nationalities, this also applied to other forms of expression of social and political reality.  For example, trade unions achieved an organisational autonomy unknown in Czarist Russia.  The rich articulation of the society born of the revolution was completely dismantled by Stalin, who, in order to impose the totalitarian regime, had to artificially create an atomized, amorphous mass, which then became the object or base of the charismatic, unchallenged power of the infallible leader. Moreover, according to the Arendt of the early 1950s, the transition from one phase of soviet history to the next was punctuated not by the inexorable logic of Bolshevik ideology, but by the ‘outbreak of the civil war’. “[p10]

In that final phrase, again, lies the crux.  For what has emerged since has been a wave of revisionist history seeking to call that insight into question and this reflects a line of descent from Burke.  He points first to Robert Palmer, The Age of Democratic Revolutions, which offers a contrast between Western revolutions, which occurred in the Eighteenth Century in advanced countries, and from which emerged “Western” and “Atlantic” civilization, with non Western revolutions, which occurred in the twentieth century in more backward countries. Palmer acknowledged that there were differences of scale and intensity between the revolutions of France and America, but they were not a priori deducible from ideology, and instead arose from the concrete situation in each case. [p12]

This left major difficulties which Hannah Arendt sought to remedy in her 1963 book on Revolutions. She thought an Atlantic civilization did indeed exist in the Eighteenth Century, but now proposed that this was ruined by the ‘disastrous course’ of the French Revolution - that is, the emergence of Jacobinism.  ‘One is tempted to hope that the rift which occurred at the end of the eighteenth century is about to heal in the middle of the twentieth century, when it has become rather obvious that Western civilization has its last chance of survival in an Atlantic community.’ …..  On Revolution claimed that ‘freedom has been better preserved in countries where no revolution ever broke out’ (in the wake of the French Revolution) or where it had been defeated.

”We have attended at some length to Arendt. An anti-fascist Jew exiled to the USA, she had looked with respect and sympathy on the USSR, which in 1942 she credited with having ‘patently eliminated anti-Semitism’ in the context of a just and very modern solution of the national question.’ Only via subsequent, laborious stages did she arrive at wholesale condemnation of the October Revolution and the French Revolution. Her's is an evolution that illuminates with especial clarity the radical mutation in the Zeitgeist, with the transition from the anti-fascist grand alliance to the outbreak of the Cold War and the consequent development of a ‘Western’ ideology commensurate with the new situation.” [pp 13 -15]

I have tried to capture a flavour of the arguments in this book.  As I said earlier, the risk is that I have actually given a false impression.  I realise that for many people the messages of this book are unwelcome and they will avoid reading it. For others, the book may seem too academic and dense. My own reaction was that the book is completely relevant and necessary to what is happening around me and if anything it is understated, not overstated. Apart from its major themes, the book gave me many fascinating insights into random topics. It pulled me short on some of my established opinions. For example, in a very brief comment on the history of China under Mao Zedong, it raised some quite unexpected ways to reinterpret his otherwise inexcusable regime. On the other hand, I was unwilling to accept a few of his typically frank assertions, not least some very negative remarks about Nietzsche which suggest that he encountered Nietzsche through Nazi writings and had not taken time out to correct his misunderstandings.

Altogether, the book was thought provoking, lively and absolutely essential reading to make sense of the ideological minefield that is history today.