I’m fascinated by the question of where people get their values, particularly in our secular age. If you have a religion, the question is easy to answer: just point to your church or faith. For the unchurched like me, however, it’s tricky. We feel there’s something we should be able to point to, but what? As a professor of politics and philosophy, I’ve been exploring this question for more than a decade. My latest book argues that liberalism has become a comprehensive worldview and may be the key to who you and I are deep down.
Today, we tend to think of liberalism as a political ideology concerned with politics, law, free markets, and the like.
Rosenblatt’s wonderful book shows us how far—and how poor and anemic—that vision of liberalism is compared to that of its founders in the 19th century. Old-school liberals, including Alexis de Tocqueville, J.S. Mill, Germaine de Staël, and Benjamin Constant, pursued high-minded ethical ideals of what it means to live freely and generously in our modern world. We would do well to remember them.
The changing face of the liberal creed from the ancient world to today
The Lost History of Liberalism challenges our most basic assumptions about a political creed that has become a rallying cry-and a term of derision-in today's increasingly divided public square. Taking readers from ancient Rome to today, Helena Rosenblatt traces the evolution of the words "liberal" and "liberalism," revealing the heated debates that have taken place over their meaning. She debunks the popular myth of liberalism as a uniquely Anglo-American tradition, and shows how it was only during the Cold War that it was refashioned into an American…
Dillon Stone Tatum is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Francis Marion University. His research interests are on the history, development, and politics of liberal internationalism, international political theory, and critical security studies.
Italian philosopher and historian Domenico Losurdo’s book Liberalism: A Counter-History represents one of the most ambitious attempts to conceptually and historically tie the liberal tradition to the politics of slavery, empire, and genocide. What I find to be most evocative about Losurdo’s “counter-history” is both his sweeping narrative of the liberal tradition balanced against a close reading of key figures in that tradition. Losurdo provides an important critique of liberalism, and provides us with the analytic and methodological tools to interrogate its legacy, its past, its future.
In this definitive historical investigation, Italian author and philosopher Domenico Losurdo argues that from the outset liberalism, as a philosophical position and ideology, has been bound up with the most illiberal of policies: slavery, colonialism, genocide, racism and snobbery.
I’m fascinated by the question of where people get their values, particularly in our secular age. If you have a religion, the question is easy to answer: just point to your church or faith. For the unchurched like me, however, it’s tricky. We feel there’s something we should be able to point to, but what? As a professor of politics and philosophy, I’ve been exploring this question for more than a decade. My latest book argues that liberalism has become a comprehensive worldview and may be the key to who you and I are deep down.
Moyn’s book picks up where Rosenblatt left off, asking, in effect, “What the hell happened to liberalism?”
He, too, recognizes that the early liberals of the 19th century were inspired by ideals of perfectionism and progressivism. So why did liberalism become so retrenched in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? His answer is compelling: Cold War liberals, terrified by collectivist and violent governments like Nazi Germany and the USSR, made a conscious commitment to scale liberalism way back to a narrow doctrine of individual rights and protection.
His book is a bracing call for liberalism to get its mojo back.
"[A] daring new book."-Becca Rothfeld, Washington Post
"A fascinating and combative intellectual history."-Gideon Rachman, Financial Times
By the middle of the twentieth century, many liberals looked glumly at the world modernity had brought about, with its devastating wars, rising totalitarianism, and permanent nuclear terror. They concluded that, far from offering a solution to these problems, the ideals of the Enlightenment, including emancipation and equality, had instead created them. The historian of political thought Samuel Moyn argues that the liberal intellectuals of the Cold War era-among them Isaiah Berlin, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Karl Popper,…
I'm a retired economics professor from the US who studied Japan for most of my 46-year career and have lived in Kyoto since 2008. I first visited Kyoto in 1981, naively hoping to revel in the splendors of the Heian era, and was disappointed to find that the physical manifestations of medieval Japan as evoked in The Tale of Genjihad vanished. But the persisting legacy of that ancient age is still evident to the trained observer. Japan today embodies its past. It's not enough to know that Japan today is a prosperous country. Curious people also want to know how it got that way. The roots lie deep in the past.
Britain, America, and France collectively adopted deflationary policies after 1920 to reestablish the gold standard at the pre-World-War-I parity. Japan's government joined in. The ensuing Japanese deflation retarded growth, produced widespread economic hardship, precipitated a banking crisis in 1927, and ultimately contributed to the sharp swing in Japan's politics towards fascistic, right-wing reactionaries, punctuated with an exclamation mark by the “Manchuria incident” of 1931. Metzler describes in granular detail this historical arc, with special attention to the key persons—including Innoue Junnosuke, Takahashi Korekiyo, and Thomas W. Lamont—and their own written justifications or critiques for the policies they or others implemented. It is not an economic analysis (like much of my book is) but a historical narrative, and a gripping one.
If you already know the economics of the gold standard, it’s even more gripping, because those behind the return to the gold standard in Japan, particularly including Innoue Junnosuke, were…
This book, the first full account of Japan's financial history and the Japanese gold standard in the pivotal years before World War II, provides a new perspective on the global political dynamics of the era by placing Japan, rather than Europe, at the center of the story. Focusing on the fall of liberalism in Japan in late 1931 and the global politics of money that were at the center of the crisis, Mark Metzler asks why successive Japanese governments from 1920 to 1931 carried out policies that deliberately induced deflation and depression. His search for answers stretches from Edo to…
Dillon Stone Tatum is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Francis Marion University. His research interests are on the history, development, and politics of liberal internationalism, international political theory, and critical security studies.
Beate Jahn’s Liberal Internationalism is an exciting blend of analysis of the liberal tradition of political thought, while also providing an “immanent critique” of liberalism’s global contradictions—both historically, and in contemporary constellations. Jahn’s book represents, to me at least, the “sweet-spot” between carefully considered analysis, concept-building, and ethical reflection.
This study provides an original conception of liberalism that accounts for its internal contradictions and explains the current crisis of liberal internationalism. Examining the disjuncture between liberal theory and practice, it offers a firmer grasp on the historical role of liberalism in world politics.
I'm a history professor at the University of Mississippi and I've been a political junkie for a long time. I really began following politics during the 1988 presidential election and I vividly remember reading about the race in the newspaper every morning and then watching the evening news coverage each night. Thus, it seemed like the perfect topic for my second book. It was really fascinating to see the similarities and differences between my memories and the sources from the time.
This book is engaging because it shows how the base of the Democratic party has changed since Franklin Roosevelt first assembled the New Deal political coalition in the 1930s.
Today, it is increasingly the party of college-educated suburban voters and reflects their cultural and political priorities. From the Great Depression until the 1960s, however, working-class urban voters formed the heart of the party. Geismer uses metropolitan Boston as a template to depict this important transition, which helped produce suburban candidates such as Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, whose political career emerged from and was shaped by his life in Brookline, MA.
Don't Blame Us traces the reorientation of modern liberalism and the Democratic Party away from their roots in labor union halls of northern cities to white-collar professionals in postindustrial high-tech suburbs, and casts new light on the importance of suburban liberalism in modern American political culture. Focusing on the suburbs along the high-tech corridor of Route 128 around Boston, Lily Geismer challenges conventional scholarly assessments of Massachusetts exceptionalism, the decline of liberalism, and suburban politics in the wake of the rise of the New Right and the Reagan Revolution in the 1970s and 1980s. Although only a small portion of…
I am researching how elites and societies in Russia and East Central Europe have adapted to the social, political, and economic transformation processes following the end of Communism. What fascinates me about this topic is understanding why many of these countries continued to fall back to the same patterns of re-autocratization as they did during the Communist times. My answer is that it is because many institutions and elites in these regions have continued certain policies and behaviors from Communist times, which are still affecting their politics and economics. I also examine the impact of the transformational shock on Russia's international revisionism and democratic backsliding across the region.
Another influential book explains why left parties decided to rebrand and adopt seemingly suicidal economic policies. Mudge traces the evolution of left parties' economic policies and the adoption of neoliberal policies as a function of their adaptation to waning voter loyalties.
This book explains the motivation behind the Third Way rebranding that many such parties underwent.
Left-leaning political parties play an important role as representatives of the poor and disempowered. They once did so by promising protections from the forces of capital and the market's tendencies to produce inequality. But in the 1990s they gave up on protection, asking voters to adapt to a market-driven world. Meanwhile, new, extreme parties began to promise economic protections of their own-albeit in an angry, anti-immigrant tone.
To better understand today's strange new political world, Stephanie L. Mudge's Leftism Reinvented analyzes the history of the Swedish and German Social Democrats, the British Labour Party, and the American Democratic Party. Breaking…
I grew up and completed the formative years of my college education in Cape Town, South Africa, while active also in anti-apartheid struggles. My Ph.D. dissertation in the 1980s focused on the elaboration of key racial ideas in the modern history of philosophy. I have published extensively on race and racism in the U.S. and globally, in books, articles, and public media. My interests have especially focused on the transforming logics and expressions of racism over time, and its updating to discipline and constrain its conventional targets anew and new targets more or less conventionally. My interest has always been to understand racism in order to face it down.
Lisa Lowe and I were in sustained conversation as we were composing our respective books. I read earlier drafts of hers as I was writing mine. Her analysis of settler-colonialism, the African slave trade, and trade in Asian goods and peoples in the Caribbean and Americas illustrated for me ways of thinking about the global relations and interactive impacts of the movements of people, culture, and thought. Her focus on how liberal thought shaped and is shaped by these relations helped to surface the coercive and discriminatory practices that made liberal thought possible. This “history of the present” by extension was enormously generative for thinking about the history of the neoliberal present too.
In this uniquely interdisciplinary work, Lisa Lowe examines the relationships between Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- centuries, exploring the links between colonialism, slavery, imperial trades and Western liberalism. Reading across archives, canons, and continents, Lowe connects the liberal narrative of freedom overcoming slavery to the expansion of Anglo-American empire, observing that abstract promises of freedom often obscure their embeddedness within colonial conditions. Race and social difference, Lowe contends, are enduring remainders of colonial processes through which "the human" is universalized and "freed" by liberal forms, while the peoples who create the conditions…
I’ve been trying to understand people’s politics since I was a kid and wondered why my dad, who had been a boy in Sicily under Mussolini, spoke so fondly of “il Duce”—even though Dad was an otherwise independent thinker who believed in people’s inherent dignity, not to mention a man who was an immigrant and an outsider and thus exactly the kind of person fascists hate. I think this background partially explains why I focus my writing on interpreting the significance and appeal of widespread and, in some cases, morally indefensible and contradictory cultural-political ideologies such as neoliberalism and racism.
Fascism always holds out a promise of belonging to the tribe, the race, and, most importantly, the nation. Lepore’s very short and beautifully readable history of the US explicitly rejects the right-wing and fascist assumption that the nation and nationalism are theirs.
This America retells US history from the perspective that the country has not lived up to its promises of equality, but the first step to making that happen is acknowledging its painful history. The book contextualizes the invocations of some of its greatest critics, such as DuBois, Douglass, and Baldwin, in their clear-eyed pronouncements of the United States’ failures of justice and democracy.
Lepore’s hope rests on the belief that a pluralistic, truly democratic United States is possible if Americans own the nation’s failures to live up to its stated standards and commit to the painful work of holding ourselves and the structures of civic life accountable to…
At a time of much despair over the future of liberal democracy, Jill Lepore makes a stirring case for the nation in This America, a follow-up to her much-celebrated history of the United States, These Truths.
With dangerous forms of nationalism on the rise, Lepore, a Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer, repudiates nationalism here by explaining its long history-and the history of the idea of the nation itself-while calling for a "new Americanism": a generous patriotism that requires an honest reckoning with America's past.
Lepore begins her argument with a primer on the origins of nations, explaining how…
Dillon Stone Tatum is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Francis Marion University. His research interests are on the history, development, and politics of liberal internationalism, international political theory, and critical security studies.
Charles Mills was a giant in contemporary political theory and is perhaps best known for his book The Racial Contract. In his most recent book, Black Rights/White Wrongs, Mills interrogates what he calls “racial liberalism” and the racist underpinnings of modern liberal theory. What I think is most remarkable about this book, though, is its further attempt to reconstruct a “radical liberalism” meant to address issues of racial justice. This book has been a major influence on me in the way I think about and imagine the limits and possibilities of liberalism as a tradition.
Liberalism is the political philosophy of equal persons - yet liberalism has denied equality to those it saw as sub-persons. Liberalism is the creed of fairness - yet liberalism has been complicit with European imperialism and African slavery. Liberalism is the classic ideology of Enlightenment and political transparency - yet liberalism has cast a dark veil over its actual racist past and present. In sum, liberalism's promise of equal rights has historically been denied to blacks and other people of color.
In Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism, political philosopher Charles Mills challenges mainstream accounts that ignore this…
