Aradhya Jain

Roll Number- S173DHS13

Making of the Modern World (SLS2HS002)

Question 1) Both Paul Kelly and Domenico Losurdo ask and attempt to answer the question
‘What is Liberalism?’ a) How are their answers to that question different? b) Inherent in their
answers to what is liberalism, is also a rationale for WHY liberalism. What is that rationale, in
other words, ‘Why liberalism?’

Modernity is, for many, an essentially or exclusively a European phenomenon. The

Liberalism is an important legacy of both European history and philosophy and is not simply of
local significance to the Atlantic democracies and their close relatives such as Australia and New
Zealand. It has a scope and resonance that continues to inspire political emancipation both
within Europe and far beyond. Liberalism is a political view based on liberty and equality and
generally supports civil rights, democracy, secularism, gender equality, internationalism and the
freedoms of speech, the press, religion and markets. It is a political doctrine that takes
protecting and enhancing the freedom of the individual to be the central problem of politics.
Liberals typically believe that government is necessary to protect individuals from being harmed
by others, but they also recognize that government itself can pose a threat to liberty. The
founders of liberalism were well aware of the paradox that lies at the heart of their philosophy:
full freedom of one man or woman is the slavery of another; a comprehensive self-fulfillment of
one person will prevent achievements by another. The need to have some kind of government
stands in contrast to the complete freedom of each individual. This is the topic that forms the
crux of the contradictory articles of Paul Kelly ‘Liberalism’ and Domenico Losurdo’s ‘Liberalism-
A Counter-History’ and through these articles, I’ll attempt to explain how the meaning and
reason for liberalism differ.
Paul Kelly’s ‘Liberalism’ formulates a positive restatement and defence of egalitarian liberalism
as a theory about the proper limits to the exercise of political power and about the scope of just
political action. His motivation for writing such a book rests on two observations: firstly, the
critics of egalitarian liberalism are on the rise; and secondly, its proponents are caught up in
micro-debates about the minutiae of their theory. Thus, Kelly’s ambitions are focused on
tracing the historical roots of contemporary liberal thought, presenting its key arguments and
defending the doctrine against its major critics. Kelly’s examination focuses on a specific variant
of liberalism, namely political liberalism that places liberal-egalitarianism distributive principles
at its core. It is political for the reason that it is intended to accommodate the plurality of
different views about how individuals should live their lives and places limits on the variety of
moral and political perspectives that are found in modern democratic societies. Paul Kelly holds
the view that liberalism means the recognition of equal status of individuals, not to coerce
them and encroach upon their personal religious, moral and political views as it is their own
private matter rather than a source of public political conflict. Liberalism for Kelly is freeing of
the individual from the corrosive and oppressive effects of the fakeness of community,
culture and majority public opinion. This variant of liberalism is criticized heavily as it is
considered that it leads to the fragmentation of the society and dissolution of social bonds; but
Kelly asserts that liberal egalitarianism is individualistic in an ethical or normative sense only
and does not entail the denial of any particular social ontology. It just claims that the social
construct of identity is not the final word on ethical significance. What liberals do claim is that
no constitutive attachment, either to state, nation, family or cultural group, must trump the
claims of individuals and their basic rights and status. Kelly also attaches the idea of personal
autonomy of equal moral status in terms of the distribution of a set of basic rights and titles.
These consist of both civil and political rights and protections, as well as claims of economic
resources and wealth. These rights place the individual in protected spheres beyond the reach
of the coercive claims of the state or society but, at times, are also considered as an
inconvenience that interferes with the real demands of politics. Liberal egalitarians also give
supremacy to the choice and will of the individual that are not subjected to direct external
political coercion and are made within the sphere of an individual’s personal discretion, even
if the choice is the wrong one; some choices are morally wrong or personally harmful, but it is
not appropriate that they be subject to political coercion or force.

Now we’ll shift our focus to Domenico Losurdo’s ‘Liberalism- A Counter-History’ which is a
trenchant analysis of the question what is Liberalism in its historical development and who may
we consider to be a Liberal? Without very serious reflection few people would contest that
George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Adam Smith, John Locke, Thomas Paine, Alexis de
Tocqueville, are both Liberals, and worthy of the designation. Losurdo however demonstrates
that the classical Liberals we learned about are in fact separated by huge gulfs in their
philosophical views and political practice. Moreover, what frequently unites them in practice is
more their tolerance and often cheerful willingness in implementing certain forms of severe
oppression (e.g., indigenous genocides, slavery, work labor camps). Losurdo’s aim is to get
beyond what he calls the ‘habitual hagiography’ and to present a much more critical account of
liberalism and its historical rise to ascendancy. He is clear that one cannot adequately
understand this political tradition simply with reference to proclaimed normative
commitments in abstraction from the concrete social and political relations that liberalism
actually established and found expression in. In fact, it is a peculiar characteristic of liberal
thought to assume that political ideas can be analysed and grasped in a state of more or less
abstract purity with little or no reference to the concrete social conditions in which those
ideas emerge and are manifested. It is only on this basis that liberalism can maintain its highly
flattering view of itself. The history of liberalism as a political movement and as an evolving set
of political practices as well as ideas that established and reproduced a shifting series of
concrete social relations – is, in fact, not a very pretty one as Losurdo shows. Analysed in this
way the history of liberalism as a political movement is a history of coercive expropriation,
violence, racism and exploitation as much as it is a history of the unfolding extension of
modern individual liberty, political rights and so on. Losurdo’s focus throughout remains very
much on the dark side of liberal history since it is this that is consistently obscured and
repressed in the prevailing historical narrative.

Losurdo’s counter-history begins with a paradox. The birth and early consolidation of the
liberal political order which was supposedly devoted to liberty was accompanied by
concurrent expansion and intensification of colonial slavery. Indeed the three countries that
Losurdo identifies as the key pioneers of liberalism – Holland, Britain and America – were all
deeply involved in the slave trade and in the direct employment of slave labour. The form of
slavery that emerged with the liberal revolutions was much more radical than it was in the
previous ages. This period saw slaves increasingly reduced to chattels and established slavery as
a permanent, hereditary condition from which it was almost impossible to escape. 
Furthermore, slavery under liberalism took on a racial character – the institution was
increasingly justified by its apologists in terms of an ideology of white supremacy and the
non- or sub-human status of black people. A similar paradox emerges in relation to liberalism
and colonialism. This racism supremacy often took murderous, even genocidal, forms and the
non-white people were branded as ‘barbarians’, ‘savages’ and ‘wild beasts’ in order to justify
slavery, colonial expropriation and domination. Losurdo tries to explain why liberalism
prevailed during such a time by basing his explanation on the logic of exclusion. According to
him, liberalism has always relied on drawing a dividing line between ‘us’ (being the colonists
and leading liberal countries) and ‘them’ (the colonial subjects) – those who are worthy or
capable (morally, intellectually, racially) of the whole range of rights and liberties we
associate with liberalism and those who are not. Liberalism was always centrally concerned
with the condemnation and limitation of despotic power and the corresponding assertion of
rights to self-government, autonomy and so on – but this struggle was always waged by an
exclusive section of humanity – what Losurdo terms ‘the community of the free’. The history
of liberalism is thus in great part a history of how the particular specification and location of the
boundary line between ‘the community of the free’ and the excluded has evolved and shifted.
The liberty of the community of the free has depended on the exclusion and oppression of the
unfree. 

So here we see contrasting views presented by both the authors regarding liberalism and why
it prevailed. Paul Kelly regards the individualistic freedom of a person in high esteem and also
attaches the power of autonomy to that freedom which gives them enough rights to make their
own decisions. Whereas Losurdo criticizes this fact and regards the ultimate freedom of one
man as the slavery and domination of other. He argues that one should see the history of
liberalism as a ‘tangle of emancipation and dis-emancipation’ rather than as a story of
progressively unfolding freedom. Losurdo also rejects the view of seeing liberty in purely
individualistic terms because, historically, it crushed over these principles in relation to the
treatment of slaves, colonial peoples and the poor.

Refernces

1) Liberalism- A Counter History by Domenico Losurdo. Published by Verso, 2011.

2) Liberalism by Paul Kelly. Published by Polity Press, 2005.