The West is facing its most profound identity crisis since World War II. Events and movements like Brexit, President Donald Trump's promotion of American nationalism, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's celebration of “illiberal democracy,” and Poland's Euroskeptic Law and Justice Party have unsettled Western elites. This anxiety is compounded by threats from increasingly aggressive autocratic oligarchies in Russia and China. Furthermore, there's been a recent spate of popular books heralding, and even celebrating, the end of liberalism, such as Patrick Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed (2018), Rod Dreher's The Benedict Option (2017), and Yoram Hazony's The Virtue of Nationalism (2018).
These works, written from a broadly conservative viewpoint, have exposed a rift within American conservatism. On the one hand, some conservatives defend a form of classical liberalism (what I and others have called Natural Law Liberalism; see here and here) exemplified in the principles of the American Founding, and regard modern liberalism (or progressivism) as a corruption of classical liberalism. On the other side of the conservative divide are the new anti-liberals, who reject liberalism tout court as a destabilizing, despotic, or even incoherent public philosophy.
Those who follow this debate will be interested in what historian Helena Rosenblatt of the City University of New York has to say on the subject. Rosenblatt's The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century, while ultimately disappointing, helps highlight the formidable challenge, if not impossibility, of settling on a single meaning of liberalism.
Multiple Definitions
When an ancient Roman heard the word “liberal” he thought of someone who possess the virtue of “liberality,” or generosity. When most Americans hear the word “liberal” they think of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. When most Europeans hear the word “liberal” they think of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Some scholars trace the roots of liberalism to Christianity, whereas others trace it to a “battle againstChristianity,” to quote Rosenblatt (emphasis in original). This makes one wonder whether the word has any meaning at all.
According to the author, most scholars make the mistake of first defining liberalism and then recounting its history, but this “is to argue backward.” We human beings cannot, like Humpty Dumpty proposed, make words mean whatever we choose them to mean. “If we don't pay attention to the actual use of the word,” Rosenblatt writes, “the actual histories we tell will inevitably be different and even conflicting. They will also be constructed with little grounding in historical fact and marred by historical anachronism.”
She points out, for example, that “the word ‘liberalism' was not coined until the 19th century, and for hundreds of years prior to its birth, being liberal meant something very different.” For Rosenblatt, this means that the application of the concept to figures like John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, and Adam Smith is already problematic. Moreover, she usefully reminds her readers that many of the most prominent advocates of liberalism, although hostile to the ancien régime, were no friends of democratic government. The anti-democratic suspicions of most of the American Founders—not to mention more recent arguments like Jason Brennan's Against Democracy (2016)—are at the service of liberal concerns.
So Rosenblatt proposes to determine the “meaning of liberalism” by attending to “how liberals defined themselves and what they meant when they spoke about liberalism. This is a story that has never been told.”
The story Rosenblatt tells is an engaging one, and her effort to pin down the meaning of liberalism with history is commendable. But her project ultimately founders against two obstacles, one formal, the other substantive.
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