CHAPTER ONE

The usual answer to this question admits of no doubt: liberalism is the tradition of thought whose central concern is the liberty of the individual, which is ignored or ridden roughshod over by organicist philosophies of various kinds. But if that is the case, how should we situate John C. Calhoun? This eminent statesman, vice president of the United States in the mid-nineteenth century, burst into an impassioned ode to individual liberty, which, appealing to Locke, he vigorously defended against any abuse of power and any unwarranted interference by the state. And that is not all. Along with ‘absolute governments’ and the ‘concentration of power’, he unstintingly criticized and condemned fanaticism¹ and the spirit of ‘crusade’,² to which he opposed ‘compromise’ as the guiding principle of genuine ‘constitutional governments’.³ With equal eloquence Calhoun defended minority rights. It was not only a question of guaranteeing the alternation of the various parties in government through suffrage: unduly extensive power was unacceptable in any event, even if limited in duration and tempered by the promise or prospect of a periodic reversal of roles in the relationship between governors and governed.⁴ Unquestionably, we seem to have all the characteristics of the most mature and attractive liberal thought. On the other hand, however, disdaining the half-measures and timidity or fear of those who restricted themselves to accepting it as a necessary ‘evil’, Calhoun declared slavery to be ‘a positive good’ that civilization could not possibly renounce. Calhoun repeatedly denounced intolerance and the crusading spirit, not in order to challenge the enslavement of blacks or the ruthless hunting down of fugitive slaves, but exclusively to brand abolitionists as ‘blind fanatics’⁵ who ‘consider themselves under the most sacred obligation to use every effort to destroy’ slavery, a form of property legitimized and guaranteed by the Constitution.⁶ Blacks were not among the minorities defended with such vigour and legal erudition. In fact, in their case, tolerance and the spirit of compromise seem to turn into their opposite: if fanaticism actually succeeded in its mad project of abolishing slavery, what would follow would be ‘the extirpation of one or the other race’.⁷ And, given the concrete balance of forces in the United States, it was not difficult to imagine which of the two would succumb: blacks could only survive on condition of being slaves.

So is Calhoun a liberal? No doubts on this score were harboured by Lord Acton, a prominent figure in liberalism in the second half of the nineteenth century, an advisor and friend of William Gladstone, one of the major figures in nineteenth-century England. In Acton’s view, Calhoun was a champion of the cause of the struggle against any form of absolutism, including ‘democratic absolutism’; the arguments he employed were ‘the very perfection of political truth’. In short, we are dealing with one of the major authors and great minds in the liberal tradition and pantheon.⁸

Albeit in less emphatic language, the question has been answered in the affirmative by those who in our time celebrate Calhoun as ‘a strong individualist’,⁹ as a champion of the ‘defense of minority rights against the abuse of an overbearing majority’,¹⁰ or as a theorist of the sense of limits and the self-limitation that should characterize the majority.¹¹ In no doubt is one US publishing house, committed to republishing in a neo-liberal key ‘Liberty Classics’, among which the eminent statesman and ideologue of the slaveholding South features prominently.

The question we have posed does not only emerge from reconstructing the history of the United States. Prestigious scholars of the French Revolution, of firm liberal persuasion, have no hesitation in defining as ‘liberal’ those figures and circles that had the merit of opposing the Jacobin diversion, but who were firmly committed to the defence of colonial slavery. The reference is to Pierre-Victor Malouet and members of the Massiac Club, who were ‘all plantation-owners and slaveholders’.¹² Is it possible to be a liberal and slaveholder at the same time? Such was not the opinion of John Stuart Mill, judging at least from his polemic against the ‘soi-disant’ British liberals (among them, perhaps, Acton and Gladstone), who, during the American Civil War, rallied en masse to ‘a furious pro-Southern partisanship’, or at any rate viewed the Union and Lincoln coolly and malevolently.¹³

We face a dilemma. If we answer the question formulated above (Is Calhoun a liberal?) in the affirmative, we can no longer maintain the traditional (and edifying) image of liberalism as the thought and volition of liberty. If, on the other hand, we answer in the negative, we find ourselves confronting a new problem and new question, which is no less embarrassing than the first: Why should we continue to dignify John Locke with the title of father of liberalism? Calhoun refers to black slavery as a ‘positive good’. Yet without resorting to such brazen language, the English philosopher, to whom the US author explicitly appealed, regarded slavery in the colonies as self-evident and indisputable, and personally contributed to the legal formalization of the institution in Carolina. He took a hand in drafting the constitutional provision according to which ‘[e]very freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over his Negro slaves, of what opinion or religion soever.’¹⁴ Locke was ‘the last major philosopher to seek a justification for absolute and perpetual slavery’.¹⁵ However, this did not prevent him from inveighing against the political ‘slavery’ that absolute monarchy sought to impose.¹⁶ Similarly, in Calhoun the theorization of black slavery as a ‘positive good’ went hand in hand with warnings against a concentration of power that risked transforming ‘the governed’ into ‘the slaves of the rulers’.¹⁷ Of course, the American statesman was a slave-owner, but the English philosopher also had sound investments in the slave trade.¹⁸ In fact, the latter’s position proves even more compromising; for good or ill, in the slaveholding South of which Calhoun was the interpreter, there was no longer any place for the deportation of blacks from Africa, in a terrible voyage that condemned many of them to death before they landed in America.

Do we want to bring historical distance to bear in order to distinguish the positions of the two authors being compared here, and exclude from the liberal tradition only Calhoun, who continued to justify or celebrate the institution of slavery in the mid-nineteenth century? The southern statesman would have reacted indignantly to such inconsistency of treatment: as regards the English liberal philosopher, he would perhaps have repeated, in slightly different language, the thesis formulated by him in connection with George Washington: ‘He was one of us—a slaveholder and a planter.’¹⁹

Contemporary with Calhoun was Francis Lieber, one of the most eminent intellectuals of his time. Sometimes saluted as a sort of Montesquieu redivivus, in correspondence and on respectful terms with de Tocqueville, he was doubtless a critic, if a cautious one, of the institution of slavery. He hoped it would wither away through its gradual transformation into a kind of servitude or semi-servitude on the autonomous initiative of the slaveholding states, whose right to self-government could not be questioned. That is why Lieber was also admired in the South, all the more so because he himself, albeit on a rather modest scale, owned and sometimes rented male and female slaves. When one of the latter died, following a mysterious pregnancy and subsequent abortion, he recorded in his diary the painful financial loss suffered: ‘fully one thousand dollars—the hard labor of a year’.²⁰ New, painful economies were required to replace the deceased slave, because Lieber, unlike Calhoun, was not a planter and did not live off profits, but a university professor who essentially used slaves as domestic servants. Does this authorize us in including the first, rather than the second, in the liberal tradition? In any event, temporal distance plays no role here.

Let us now take a contemporary of Locke’s. Andrew Fletcher was ‘a champion of liberty’ and, at the same time, ‘a champion of slavery’.²¹ Politically, he professed to be ‘a republican on principle’²² and culturally was ‘a Scottish prophet of the Enlightenment’.²³ He too fled to Holland in the wake of the anti-Jacobite and anti-absolutist conspiracy, exactly like Locke, with whom he was in correspondence.²⁴ Fletcher’s reputation crossed the Atlantic: Jefferson defined him as a ‘patriot’, whose merit was to have expressed the ‘political principles’ characteristic of ‘the purest periods of the British Constitution’—those that subsequently caught on and prospered in free America.²⁵ Expressing positions rather similar to Fletcher’s was his contemporary and fellow countryman James Burgh, who also enjoyed the respect of republican circles à la Jefferson,²⁶ and was mentioned favourably by Thomas Paine in the most celebrated opuscule of the American Revolution (Common Sense).²⁷

Yet, in contrast to the other authors—though like them characterized by a peculiar tangle of love of liberty and legitimation or revindication of slavery—Fletcher and Burgh are virtually forgotten today, and no one seems to want to include them among exponents of the liberal tradition. The fact is that, in underlining the necessity of slavery, they were thinking primarily not of blacks in the colonies, but of the ‘vagrants’, the beggars, the odious, incorrigible rabble of the metropolis. Should they be regarded as illiberal for this reason? Were that to be the case, what would distinguish liberals from non-liberals would be not the condemnation of the institution of slavery, but only negative discrimination against peoples of colonial origin.

Liberal England presents us with another, different case. Francis Hutcheson, a moral philosopher of some significance (he was the ‘never to be forgotten’ master of Adam Smith),²⁸ on the one hand expressed criticisms and reservations about the slavery to which blacks were indiscriminately subjected. On the other hand, he stressed that, especially when dealing with the ‘lower conditions’ of society, slavery could be a ‘useful punishment’: it should be the ‘ordinary punishment of such idle vagrants as, after proper admonitions and tryals of temporary servitude, cannot be engaged to support themselves and their families by any useful labours’.²⁹ We are dealing with an author who, while evincing unease at hereditary, racial slavery, demanded a sort of penal slavery for those who, regardless of their skin colour, were guilty of vagrancy. Was Hutcheson a liberal?

Historically positioned between Locke and Calhoun, and with his focus precisely on the reality accepted by the two of them as obvious and indisputable, or even celebrated as a ‘positive good’, Adam Smith constructed an argument and expressed a position that warrants being cited at some length. Slavery could be more easily abolished under a ‘despotic government’ than a ‘free government’, with its representative bodies exclusively reserved in practice for white property-owners. In such circumstances, the condition of the black slaves was desperate: ‘every law is made by their masters, who will never pass any thing prejudicial to themselves’. Hence ‘[t]he freedom of the free was the cause of the great oppression of the slaves … And as they are the most numerous part of mankind, no human person will wish for liberty in a country where this institution is established.’³⁰ Can an author who, in at least one concrete instance, expressed his preference for ‘despotic government’ be regarded as liberal? Or, differently put, is Smith more liberal or are Locke and Calhoun, who, along with slavery, defended the representative bodies condemned by Smith as the prop, in a slaveholding society, of an infamous institution contrary to any sense of humanity?

In fact, as the great economist had foreseen, slavery was abolished in the United States not thanks to local self-government, but by the iron fist of the Union’s army and the temporary military dictatorship imposed by it. For this Lincoln was accused by his opponents of despotism and Jacobinism. He resorted to ‘military government’ and ‘military commissions’ and interpreted ‘the word “law”‘ as ‘[t]he will of the President’ and habeas corpus as the ‘power of the President to imprison whom he pleases, as long as he pleases’.³¹ Together with representatives of the secessionist Confederacy, the drafters of this indictment were those who aspired to a compromise peace, for the purposes of returning to constitutional normality. And once again we are obliged to ask the question: Is it Lincoln who is more liberal, or his adversaries in the South, or his opponents in the North who came out in favour of compromise?

We have seen Mill adopt a position in favour of the Union and condemn the ‘soi-disant’ liberals who cried scandal over the energy with which it conducted the war against the South and kept at bay those who, in the North itself, were inclined to tolerate the slaveholders’ secession. However, we shall see that, when he turned his attention to the colonies, the English liberal justified the West’s ‘despotism’ over ‘races’ that were still ‘under age’, and who were obliged to observe an ‘absolute obedience’ in order to be set on the path of progress. This is a formulation that would not have displeased Calhoun, who likewise legitimized slavery by reference to the backwardness and nonage of populations of African origin. It was only in America, and thanks to the paternal care of white masters, that the ‘black race’ succeeded in progressing and making the transition from its previous ‘low, degraded and savage condition’ to ‘its present comparatively civilized condition’.³² In Mill’s view, ‘any means’ were licit for those who took on the task of educating ‘savage tribes’; ‘slavery’ was sometimes a mandatory stage for inducing them to work and making them useful to civilization and progress (see below, Chapter 7, §3). But this was also the opinion of Calhoun, for whom slavery was an unavoidable means if one wished to achieve the end of civilizing blacks. Certainly, by contrast with the permanent slavery which, according to the US theorist and politician, blacks must be subjected to, the pedagogical dictatorship Mill refers to was destined to disappear in the distant, uncertain future. But the other side of the coin is that now explicitly subjected to this condition of unfreedom was not a particular ethnic group (the fragment of Africa located at the heart of the United States), but all the peoples invested by the West’s colonial expansion and forced to endure political ‘despotism’ and servile or semi-servile forms of labour. Is demanding ‘absolute obedience’, for an indeterminate period of time, from the overwhelming majority of humanity compatible with the liberal profession of faith? Or is it synonymous with ‘soi-disant’ liberalism?

2. The American Revolution and the revelation of an embarrassing truth

It is now clear that what primarily divides the authors mentioned up to this point is the problem of slavery. In one way or another, they all refer to the Britain deriving from the Glorious Revolution or the United States. These are two countries that for around a century were a single state entity and formed, as it were, a single political party. Prior to the crisis that led to the American Revolution, the British on both sides of the Atlantic felt themselves to be proud subjects or citizens of ‘[a] land, perhaps the only one in the universe, in which political or civil liberty is the very end and scope of the constitution’.³³ Thus Blackstone. To confirm his thesis, he referred to Montesquieu, who spoke of England as the ‘one nation in the world whose constitution has political liberty for its direct purpose’.³⁴ Not even the French liberal doubted the fact that ‘England is currently the freest country in the world, not discounting any republic’: the ‘free nation’, the ‘free people’ par excellence.³⁵

At this time, no dark clouds seemed to threaten relations between the two shores of the Atlantic. There were no conflicts and, according to Montesquieu at least, there could not be, because even in its relationship with the colonies what characterized England was its love of liberty:

In these years, the English colonists in America proudly identified with Blackstone’s thesis that ‘our free constitution’, which ‘falls little short of perfection’, differed markedly ‘from the modern constitutions of other states’, from the political order of ‘the continent of Europe’ as a whole.³⁷

This was the ideology with which the Seven Years’ War was fought by the British Empire. The English colonists in America were the most determined in interpreting it as a clash between the ‘supporters of freedom in the world’—the British ‘sons of noble liberty’, or defenders of Protestantism—and a ‘cruel and oppressive’ France—despotic politically, and follower of ‘Roman bigotry’ and Popery religiously. At the time, even the British Crown’s transatlantic subjects liked to repeat with Locke that ‘slavery’ was ‘directly opposite to the generous temper and courage of our nation’; it was utterly inconceivable for an ‘Englishman’.³⁸ The French allegedly wanted to reduce the American colonists to a ‘slavish subjection’. Fortunately, however, arriving to foil this attempt was Great Britain, ‘[t]he Mistress of the Nations—the grand Support of Liberty, the Scourge of Oppression and Tyranny!’³⁹

It was an ideology that Edmund Burke sought to breathe new life into as late as 1775, in a desperate attempt to avoid the impending rupture. Presenting his motion of conciliation, he called upon people not to lose sight of, and not to sever, the ties that bound the American colonists to the mother country: what was at stake was a single ‘nation’ that shared ‘the sacred temple consecrated to our common faith’, the faith in ‘liberty’. Largely unchallenged in countries like Spain or Prussia, slavery was ‘a weed that grows in every soil’ except the English. Accordingly, it was absurd to try to subdue the rebel colonists by force: ‘An Englishman is the unfittest person on earth to argue another Englishman into slavery.’⁴⁰

Obviously, the slavery referred to here is the one of which the absolute monarch is guilty. The other slavery, which shackles blacks, is passed over in silence. With the increasing inevitability of the revolution, or ‘civil war’ with all its ‘horrors’⁴¹—as loyalists faithful to the Crown and British politicians in favour of compromise and preserving the unity of the English ‘nation’ and ‘race’⁴² preferred to call it—the picture changed markedly. The element of continuity is clear. Each of the two contending parties accused the other of wanting to reintroduce despotism, or political ‘slavery’. The rebel colonists’ charges are well known: they tirelessly denounced the tyranny of the British Crown and parliament, and their mad project of subjecting residents in America to a condition of ‘perpetual bondage and slavery’.⁴³ But the response was not slow in coming. As early as 1773, a loyalist from New York had issued a warning: hitherto they had been ‘watchful against external attacks on our freedom’ (the reference is to the Seven Years’ War), but now a much more insidious danger had emerged—that of ‘becom[ing] enslaved by tyrants within’. Again in New York, another loyalist repeated the point two years later: the rebels aspired ‘to make us worse than slaves’.⁴⁴ In polemicizing against one another, the two branches the liberal party had divided into adopted the ideology and rhetoric that had presided over the self-celebration of the English nation in its entirety, as the sworn enemy of political slavery.

The novel factor was that, in the wake of the exchange of accusations, the other slavery—the one both branches had repressed as a disruptive element in their proud self-consciousness as members of the people and party of liberty—burst into the polemics alongside political slavery. In the rebel colonists’ view, the London government, which in sovereign fashion imposed taxation on citizens or subjects not represented in the House of Commons, was behaving like a master towards his slaves. But—objected the others—if slavery is the issue, why not start to discuss the slavery that is manifested in brutal, unequivocal form precisely where liberty is so passionately lauded? As early as 1764, Benjamin Franklin, in London at the time to plead the colonists’ cause, had to face the sarcastic comments of his interlocutors:

The self-styled champions of liberty branded taxation imposed without their explicit consent as synonymous with despotism and slavery. But they had no scruples about exercising the most absolute and arbitrary power over their slaves. This was a paradox: ‘How is it’, Samuel Johnson asked, ‘that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of negroes?’ Across the Atlantic, those who sought to contest the secession ironized in similar fashion. Thomas Hutchinson, royal governor of Massachusetts, rebuked the rebels for their inconsistency or hypocrisy: they denied Africans those rights that they claimed to be ‘absolutely inalienable’ in the most radical way imaginable.⁴⁶ Echoing him was an American loyalist (Jonathan Boucher), who, having taken refuge in England, revisited the events that forced him into exile and observed: ‘the most clamorous advocates for liberty were uniformly the harshest and worst masters of slaves’.⁴⁷

It was not only the people most directly involved in the polemical and political struggle who expressed themselves so harshly. The intervention of John Millar, prominent exponent of the Scottish Enlightenment, was especially stinging:

Millar was a disciple of Adam Smith. The master seems to have seen things in the same way. When he declared that to a ‘free government’ controlled by slaveowners, he preferred a ‘despotic government’ capable of erasing the infamy of slavery, he made explicit reference to America. Translated into directly political terms, the great economist’s words signify: the despotism the Crown is criticized for is preferable to the liberty demanded by the slave-owners, from which only a small class of planters and absolute masters benefits.

English abolitionists went even further, calling for the defence of British institutions threatened by ‘arbitrary and inhuman uses, which prevail in a distant land’. So arbitrary and inhuman that, as indicated by an advert in the New York Journal, a black woman and her three-year-old daughter could be sold on the market separately, as if they were a cow and a calf. And hence (concluded Granville Sharp in 1769) one should not be led astray by ‘theatrical bombast and ranting expressions in praise of liberty’ employed by the slaveholding rebels; free English institutions must be vigorously defended against them.⁴⁹

The accused reacted in their turn by upbraiding England for its hypocrisy: it boasted of its virtue and love of liberty, but who promoted and continued to promote the slave trade? And who was it that transported and sold slaves? Thus argued Franklin,⁵⁰ advancing an argument that became central in the first draft of the Declaration of Independence elaborated by Jefferson. This is how, in the original version of that solemn document, the Britain derived from the Glorious Revolution and George III himself were charged. The latter

3. The role of slavery between the two Atlantic shores

What should we make of this furious, unexpected polemic? There is no doubt that the accusations against the rebels struck a weak point. Virginia played a central role in the American Revolution. Forty per cent of the country’s slaves were to be found there, but a majority of the authors of the rebellion unleashed in the name of liberty also came from there. For thirty-two of the United States’ first thirty-six years of existence, slave-owners from Virginia occupied the post of president. This colony or state, founded on slavery, supplied the country with its most illustrious statesmen. It is enough to think of George Washington (great military and political protagonist of the anti-British revolt) and Thomas Jefferson and James Madison (authors, respectively, of the Declaration of Independence and the federal Constitution of 1787), all three of them slave-owners.⁵² Regardless of this or that state, the influence slavery exercised on the country as a whole is clear. Sixty years after its foundation, we see that ‘of the first sixteen presidential elections, between 1788 and 1848, all but four placed a southern slaveholder in the White House’.⁵³ Hence the persistence of the anti-American polemic on this point is understandable.

On the other side, we are familiar with Franklin’s and Jefferson’s ironic remarks about the moralizing anti-slavery lectures offered by a country deeply involved in the slave trade. Burke, theorist of ‘conciliation with the colonies’, likewise stressed this. In rejecting the proposal of those who urged ‘a general enfranchisement of their slaves’ to counter the rebellion of their masters and the colonists generally, he observed: ‘Slaves as these unfortunate black people are, and dull as all men are from slavery, must they not a little suspect the offer of freedom from that very nation which has sold them to their present masters?’ All the more so if this nation insisted on practising the slave trade, clashing with colonies that wished to restrict or abolish it. In the eyes of slaves landed in or deported to America, this would represent a peculiar spectacle:

Burke’s irony hits home. In addition to Britain’s role in the slave trade, slaves long continued to be present in the metropolis itself. It has been calculated that in the mid-eighteenth century there were around 100,000 of them.⁵⁵ Were British abolitionists horrified by the market in human flesh in the American colonies and New York? In Liverpool in 1766, eleven black slaves were put on sale and the market in ‘black cattle’ was still open in Dublin twelve years later, regularly advertised in the local press.⁵⁶

The role played in the country’s economy by the trade in slaves and their exploitation was sizeable: ‘The Liverpool Courier, 22 August 1832, estimated that three-quarters of Britain’s coffee, fifteen-sixteenths of its cotton, twenty-two twenty-thirds of its sugar, and thirty-four thirty-fifths of its tobacco were still produced by slaves.’⁵⁷ In sum, we should bear in mind the candid judgement of two eighteenth-century British witnesses. The first, Joshua Gee, acknowledged that ‘[a]ll this great increase in our treasure proceeds chiefly from the labour of negroes in the plantations’.⁵⁸ The second, Malachy Postlethwayt, engaged as he was in defending the role of the Royal African Company—the company that controlled the slave trade—was even sharper: ‘The Negroe Trade and the natural Consequences resulting from it, may be justly esteemed an inexhaustible Fund of Wealth and Naval Power to this Nation’; they were ‘the first principle and foundation of all the rest, the main spring of the machine which sets every wheel in motion’.⁵⁹ The British Empire as a whole was merely ‘a magnificent superstructure’ upon this commerce.⁶⁰ Finally, there was the political influence of the institution of slavery. Although obviously inferior to what it was in the American colonies, it was certainly not nugatory in England: in the 1790 parliament, two or three dozen members sat who had interests in the West Indies.⁶¹

The exchange of accusations between rebel colonists and the mother country—that is, between two branches of the party that had hitherto proudly celebrated itself as the party of liberty—was a mutual, pitiless demystification. Not only did the England derived from the Glorious Revolution not challenge the slave trade, but on the contrary the latter experienced strong growth.⁶² And one of the new liberal monarchy’s first acts of international policy was wresting a monopoly on the slave trade from Spain. On the other side, the revolution that broke out across the Atlantic in the name of liberty involved official consecration of the institution of slavery, and the conquest and prolonged exercise of political hegemony by slave-owners.

Possibly the most articulate and pained intervention in this polemic was by Josiah Tucker, ‘who, though a parson and a Tory, was, apart from that, an honourable man and a competent political economist’.⁶³ He denounced England’s pre-eminent role in the slave trade: ‘We … the boasted Patrons of Liberty, and the professed Advocates for the natural Rights of Mankind, engage deeper in this murderous inhuman Traffic than any Nation whatever.’ But even more hypocritical was the behaviour of the rebel colonists: ‘the Advocates for Republicanism, and for the supposed Equality of Mankind, ought to have been foremost in suggesting some such humane System for abolishing the worst of all the Species of Slavery’.⁶⁴ But instead …

4. Holland, England, America

If, prior to constituting themselves as an independent state, the rebel colonies in America formed part of the British Empire, the latter assumed its liberal form with the ascent to the throne of William of Orange, who landed in England from Holland. On the other hand, while with his draft constitution for Carolina Locke referred to America, he wrote his first Letter Concerning Toleration in Holland, which was then ‘the centre of conspiracy’ against Stuart absolutism;⁶⁵ and Holland was also the birthplace of Bernard de Mandeville, unquestionably one of the more important figures in early liberalism.

We must not lose sight of the fact that the United Provinces, which emerged from the struggle against Philip II’s Spain, equipped themselves with a liberal type of set-up a century before England. This was a country that from a socio-economic point of view as well had left the ancien régime behind. In the seventeenth century it had a per capita income one-and-a-half times that of England; whereas in the latter 60 per cent of the labour force was engaged in agriculture, the figure in Holland was 40 per cent. Moreover, the power structure was rather significant: in the country which emerged victorious from the clash with Philip II, ‘a bourgeois oligarchy that had broken decisively with the aristocratic landholding ethos’ was dominant.⁶⁶ It was these enlightened, tolerant, liberal bourgeois who embarked on colonial expansion; and in this historical period the slave trade was an integral part of it:

Locke was a shareholder in the Royal African Company. But the history of the United Provinces leads to America as well as Britain. It would seem that it was a Dutch peddler who introduced African slaves into Virginia.⁶⁸ New Amsterdam, which the Dutch were forced to cede to the British and which became New York, had a population 20 per cent of which was composed of blacks, in large part slaves. In 1703 around 42 per cent of homeowners were also slave-owners.⁶⁹

This represents the paradox already glimpsed in connection with Britain and the United States. Until the mid-seventeenth century, the country where the prologue to the successive liberal revolutions occurred—namely, Holland—had a ‘hold’ on the trade in slaves:⁷⁰ ‘By the beginning of the eighteenth century, all of their [Dutch] possessions were slave or bound-labor societies.’⁷¹ If, in one respect, it was synonymous with liberty at the time, in another, Holland was synonymous with slavery—and a particularly brutal form of it. In Voltaire’s Candide a severe blow is dealt to the protagonist’s naive optimism by the encounter in Surinam (‘where the Dutch are’) with a black slave, reduced to a ‘dreadful state’ by his Dutch master. The slave refers as follows to the working conditions to which he is forced to submit:

In his turn, Condorcet, launching his abolitionist campaign in 1781, in particular targeted England and Holland, where the institution of slavery seemed especially deep-rooted on account of ‘the general corruption of these nations’.⁷³ Finally, it is worth citing the American loyalist (Jonathan Boucher) whom we have seen ironizing about the passion for liberty displayed by slave-owners engaged in the rebellion. In his view, ‘[d]espotic nations treated their slaves better than those under republics; the Spanish were the best masters while the Dutch were the worst.’⁷⁴

The first country to embark on the liberal road is one that exhibited an especially tenacious attachment to the institution of slavery. It appears that colonists of Dutch origin offered the most determined resistance to the first abolitionist measures, those introduced in the northern United States during the Revolution and in its wake.⁷⁵ As regards Holland itself, in 1791 the States-General formally declared that the slave trade was essential to the development of the colonies’ prosperity and commerce. Still in this period, clearly distinguishing itself from Britain, Holland recognized the right of slave-owners to transport and deposit their human chattels in the mother country before returning to the colonies. Finally, it is to be noted that Holland only abolished slavery in its colonies in 1863, when the secessionist and slaveholding Confederacy of the southern United States was going down to defeat.⁷⁶

5. The Irish, the Indians and the inhabitants of Java

The English colonists’ revolt in America was accompanied by another major controversy. For a long time, like that of the blacks, the Indians’ fate had not in the slightest unsettled the deep conviction of the English on either side of the Atlantic that they were the chosen people of liberty. In both cases, they appealed to Locke, for whom (as we shall see) the natives of the New World approximated to ‘wild beasts’. But with the eruption of the conflict between colonies and mother country, the exchange of accusations also encompassed the problem of the relationship with the Indians. England, Paine proclaimed in 1776, was ‘that barbarous and hellish power, which hath stirred up the Indians and the Negroes to destroy us’ or ‘to cut the throats of the freemen of America’.⁷⁷ Similarly, the Declaration of Independence berated George III for having not only ‘excited domestic insurrections amongst us’ by black slaves, but also ‘endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions’. In 1812, on the occasion of a new war between the two shores of the Atlantic, Madison condemned England for indiscriminately striking the civilian population with its fleet, not sparing women or children, and hence displaying a conduct similar to that of the red-skinned ‘savages’.⁷⁸ Having been accomplices of the barbarians, the English became barbarians themselves.

In fact, the argument had begun much earlier, following the Crown proclamation of 1763 that sought to halt or contain expansion west of the Allegany Mountains. This was a measure that did not please the colonists and George Washington, who regarded it as ‘a temporary expedient’, destined to be rapidly superseded, but which should not be respected even in the immediate present: those ‘who neglect the present opportunity of hunting out good lands’ were foolish.⁷⁹ The future president of the United States was not one of these ‘fools’. In his new capacity, while declaring in official speeches that he wanted to bring the ‘blessings of civilization’ and ‘happiness’ to ‘an unenlightened race of men’,⁸⁰ in private correspondence he identified the Indians as ‘savages’ and ‘wild beasts of the forest’. Given this, the British Crown’s pretension to block further expansion by the colonists was absurd and ultimately immoral: they (Washington declared in a letter of 1783) would force ‘the Savage [like] the Wolf to retire’.⁸¹

Even more extreme in this respect was Franklin, who in his Autobiography observed: ‘if it be the Design of Providence to extirpate these Savages in order to make room for Cultivators of the Earth, it seems not improbable that Rum may be the appointed Means. It has already annihilated all the Tribes who formerly inhabited the Seacoast.’⁸² The decimation or destruction of a people who worshipped ‘the Devil’ was part of a kind of divinely inspired eugenicist plan.⁸³ The de-humanization of the Indians was also subscribed to by those in Britain who supported reconciliation with the rebels. The Crown’s attempt to block the colonists’ expansionistic march seemed to Burke absurd and sacrilegious, for ‘attempting to forbid as a crime, and to suppress as an evil, the command and blessing of Providence, “Increase and multiply.”‘ Ultimately, it was an ill-fated ‘endeavour to keep as a lair of wild beasts, that earth, which God, by an express charter, has given to the children of men’.⁸⁴

Those on either side of the Atlantic who supported or justified the Crown’s policy of ‘conciliation’ not of the colonists, but of the Indians, mounted some resistance to this process of de-humanization. In this context, a particular mention should be made of the figure of the likeable American loyalist whom we have encountered several times, in his capacity as a critic of the peculiar libertarian zeal displayed by the ‘harshest and wickedest slave masters’. To these same circles he attributed cruelty to the Indians. Sometimes they were killed and scalped with veritable religious fervour; they even became targets for shooting practice. They were branded savages and yet (objected Jonathan Boucher) they were no more savage ‘than our progenitors appeared to Julius Caesar or to Agricola’.⁸⁵ We have seen Paine accuse the London government of seeking an alliance with Indian cut-throats. In reality, warned an English commander in 1783, it was precisely the now victorious colonists who ‘were preparing to cut the throats of the Indians’. The victors’ behaviour (added another officer) was ‘shocking to humanity’.⁸⁶ This was an enduring controversy. In the later nineteenth century a historian descended from a family of loyalists who had taken refuge in Canada argued as follows: Did the rebels claim to be the descendants of those who had disembarked in America to escape intolerance and stay loyal to the cause of liberty? In fact, reversing the policy of the British Crown, which aimed at conversion, the Puritans had initiated a massacre of the Indians, assimilated to ‘Canaanites and Amalekites’—that is, stocks marked out by the Old Testament for erasure from the face of the earth. This was ‘one of the darkest pages in English colonial history’, which was followed by the even more repugnant one written during the American Revolution, when the rebel colonists engaged in ‘the entire destruction of the Six Indian Nations’ that had remained loyal to England: ‘by an order which, we believe, has no parallel in the annals of any civilized nation, [Congress] commands the complete destruction of those people as a nation … including women and children’.⁸⁷

In his private correspondence at least, Jefferson had no problem acknowledging the horror of the war against the Indians. But in his view responsibility for it resided with the London government, which had incited these savage, bloodthirsty ‘tribes’. This was a situation that ‘will oblige us now to pursue them to extermination, or drive them to new seats beyond our reach’. The ‘confirmed brutalization, if not the extermination of this race in our America’ was to be laid at Britain’s door. As with the similar fate of ‘the same colored man in Asia’, as well as of the Irish—who for the English, whose skin ‘colour’ they shared, should be ‘brethren’—it was attributable to a policy committed to sowing death and destruction ‘wherever … Anglo-mercantile cupidity can find a two-penny interest in deluging the earth with human blood’.⁸⁸

Jefferson was not wrong to compare the treatment suffered by the Indians with that reserved for the Irish. Just as, according to the loyalist accusation, Puritans and rebel colonists assimilated the Indians to ‘Amalekites’, so the Irish had already been compared to ‘Amalekites’ marked out for extermination, this time by the English conquerors.⁸⁹ The colonization of Ireland, with all its horrors, was the model for the subsequent colonization of North America.⁹⁰ If the British Empire as a whole mainly swept away Irish and blacks,⁹¹ Indians and blacks were the principal victims of the territorial and commercial expansion first of the English colonies in America and then of the United States.

As with the black question, in the case of the Indians the exchange of accusations ended up taking the form of a mutual demystification. There is no doubt that, along with black enslavement and the black slave trade, the rise of the two liberal countries either side of the Atlantic involved a process of systematic expropriation and practical genocide first of the Irish and then of the Indians.

Similar observations can be made of Holland. A senior English civil servant, Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, who during the Napoleonic Wars was deputy governor of Java for a time, stated that the previous administration was ‘one of the extraordinary relations of treachery, bribery, massacre and meanness’. It is clear that colonial rivalry played a role in this judgement. Marx reports it, but pools ‘Dutch colonial administration’ and the English administration in his condemnation. As regards Holland more specifically:

Once again, processes of enslavement and practical genocide were closely intertwined.

6. Grotius, Locke and the Founding Fathers: a comparative interpretation

At the start of the eighteenth century, Daniel Defoe underlined the ideological fraternity between the country that had emerged from the Glorious Revolution and the country which, a century earlier, had rebelled against Philip II and won ‘freedom’ and prosperity thanks to ‘Heaven and the Assistance of England’.⁹³ In the mid-nineteenth century, liberal authors liked to contrast the ordered triumph of liberty that had occurred in Holland, England and the United States with a France in the grip of an interminable revolutionary cycle and Bonapartism.⁹⁴ It might therefore be useful to proceed to a brief comparative analysis of the texts and authors in which the liberal revolutions of these three countries found theoretical expression and consecration.

In the case of the Holland, we cannot but refer to Hugo Grotius, who dedicated two of his most important books (Annales et Historiae de Rebus Belgicis and De Antiquitate Reipublicae Batavicae) to the revolt against Philip II and the country that derived from it. Liberal Holland immediately engaged in overseas expansion and slave-trading, and it is interesting to observe the position Grotius adopted towards colonial peoples. Having condemned the superstitious and idolatrous character of the ‘religious rites’ peculiar to paganism, he added:

Targeted here were peoples with

Against peoples who, staining themselves with ‘[o]ffences that are committed against GOD’ and violating the most basic norms of natural law, took the form of ‘barbarians’ or ‘rather Beasts than men’, war was ‘natural’, regardless of state borders and geographical distance. Indeed, ‘the justest War is that which is undertaken against wild rapacious Beasts, and next to it is that against Men who are like Beasts [homines belluis similes].’⁹⁶

This is the ideology that presided over the conquest of the New World. The sin of idolatry was the first of the arguments prompting Sepúlveda to regard war on the Indians and their enslavement as ‘just’.⁹⁷ And in Grotius, along with the implicit legitimation of the genocidal practices underway in America, an explicit and insistent justification of slavery emerges. Sometimes it was punishment for criminal behaviour. Answerable for the latter were not only single individuals: ‘a whole People may be brought into Subjection for a publick Crime’.⁹⁸ As well as in their capacity as ‘rebels’ against the Lord of the Universe, the inhabitants of America and Africa could also succumb to slavery as a result of a ‘just war’ (bellum justum), conducted by a European power. The prisoners captured during an armed conflict, formally declared in the requisite forms by the supreme authority of a state, were legitimately slaves.⁹⁹ And their descendants too were legitimate slaves: otherwise, what interest would the victor have in keeping the vanquished alive? As the slave of the one who had spared his life, the prisoner became part of the victor’s property, and such property could be transmitted hereditarily or be an object of sale, just like ‘the Property of Goods’ (rerum dominium).¹⁰⁰

Naturally, all this did not apply to ‘those Nations where this Right of Bondage over Captives is not practised’; it did not apply to ‘Christian’ countries, which limited themselves to exchanging prisoners.¹⁰¹ Banned in intra-European conflicts, slavery by right of war continued to be a reality as and when Christian, civilized Europe confronted colonial peoples, barbarians and pagans in what, by definition, was a ‘just’ war. On the other hand, regardless of their actual behaviour, the lesson of a great master should not be forgotten: ‘as Aristotle said, some Men are naturally Slaves, that is, turned for Slavery. And some Nations also are of such a Temper, that they know better how to obey than to command’.¹⁰² This was a truth also confirmed by Holy Scripture: ‘the Apostle St Paul’ called on individuals and peoples who had legitimately been reduced to slavery to put up with their lot and not escape it by rebellion or flight.¹⁰³

On the one hand, Grotius paid homage to the ‘free People’ who in Holland had availed themselves of their right of resistance, legitimately shaking off the yoke of a despotic prince.¹⁰⁴ On the other, he had no difficulty justifying slavery and even the kind of ‘wild beast’ hunt against Indians underway in America.

Let us now pass on to the Glorious Revolution and Locke. The Two Treatises of Government may be regarded as key moments in the ideological preparation and consecration of the event that marks the birth of liberal England. We are dealing with texts deeply impregnated with the pathos of liberty, the condemnation of absolute power, the appeal to rise up against the wicked ones who seek to deprive man of his liberty and reduce him to slavery. But every now and then frightening passages open up in this ode to liberty, where slavery in the colonies is legitimized. As ultimate proof of the legitimacy of the institution, Grotius adduced the example of the Germans who, according to Tacitus’ testimony, ‘ventured their very Liberty upon the Cast of a Die’.¹⁰⁵ In Locke’s view, ‘captives taken in a just war’ (on the part of the victors) had ‘forfeited their lives and, with it, their liberties’. They were slaves ‘subjected to the absolute dominion and arbitrary power of their masters’.¹⁰⁶

Up to now the thinking applies to blacks deported from Africa. But the fate reserved for Indians was not manifestly better. In addition to having an interest in the slave trade as a shareholder in the Royal African Company, the liberal English philosopher was concerned with the white colonists’ expansionist march as secretary (in 1673–74) of the Council of Trade and Plantations. As has been justly observed:

The Second Treatise makes repeated reference to the ‘wild Indian’, who moved around ‘insolent and injurious in the woods of America’ or the ‘vacant places of America’.¹⁰⁸ Ignorant of labour, which was the only thing that could confer property right, and occupying a land not ‘improv[ed] by labour’, or ‘great tracts of unused’ ground’, the Indian inhabited ‘unpossessed quarters’, in vacuis locis.¹⁰⁹ In addition to labour and property, Indians were also ignorant of money. They thus not only proved alien to civilization, but were also ‘not … joined with the rest of mankind’.¹¹⁰ As a result of their behaviour, they were not solely subject to human condemnation. Unquestionably, ‘God commanded … labour’ and private property, and could certainly not want the world created by him to remain ‘common and uncultivated’.¹¹¹

When he sought to challenge the march of civilization, violently opposing exploitation through labour of the uncultivated land occupied by him, the Indian, along with any other criminal, could be equated with ‘one of those wild savage beasts with whom men can have no society nor security’, and who ‘therefore may be destroyed as a lion or a tiger’. Locke never tired of insisting on the right possessed by any man to destroy those reduced to the level of ‘beasts of prey’, ‘savage beasts’; to the level of ‘a savage ravenous beast that is dangerous to his being’.¹¹²

These are phrases that remind us of those used by Grotius in connection with barbarous peoples and pagans in general, and by Washington in connection with the Indians. However, before coming to the Founding Fathers and the solemn documents that mark the birth of the United States, it is worth dwelling on another macroscopic exclusion clause that characterizes the celebration of liberty in Locke. ‘Papists’, declared the Essay Concerning Toleration, are ‘like serpents never [to] be prevailed on by kind usage to lay by their venom’.¹¹³ Even more than to English Catholics, this harsh declaration was formulated with a view to Ireland, where at the time unregistered priests were branded with a red-hot iron, when they were not punished with more severe penalties or death.¹¹⁴ The Irish, in endemic, desperate revolt against spoliation and oppression by Anglican settlers, were contemptuously referred to by Locke as a population of ‘brigands’. As for the rest, he reiterated the point the men are:

The warning against feelings of ‘compassion’ makes it clear that we are dealing with Ireland primarily. Locke seems to have had no objections of any kind to the ruthless repression suffered by the Irish, whose fate calls to mind that reserved for Indians across the Atlantic.

We can now move on to examine the documents that informed the third liberal revolution and the foundation of the United States. At first sight, the Declaration of Independence and the 1787 Constitution seem inspired and pervaded by a universal pathos of liberty: ‘all men are created equal’—such is the solemn preamble to the first document; it is necessary to ‘secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity’—such is the no less solemn preamble to the second. But it requires a scarcely more attentive reading to encounter, already in Article 1 of the Constitution, a contrast between ‘free Persons’ and ‘all other Persons’. The latter were, of course, slaves, whose number, reduced to three-fifths, had to be factored in and added to that of ‘free persons’ when it came to calculating the number of members in the House of Representatives to which slaveholding states were entitled.

Where initially it was concealed among ‘other persons’ (the part of the population not made up of ‘free persons’), now the relationship of slavery is modestly subsumed under the general category of persons ‘held to Service or Labour’. On the basis of the principles of self-government, each individual state has the right to regulate it as it sees fit, while every state’s obligation to return fugitive slaves is a moral obligation to guarantee a legitimate property-owner the services that ‘may be due’. In a further linguistic expedient, tinged with the same discretion, the black slave trade becomes ‘[t]he migration or importation of such persons as any of the states now existing shall think proper to admit’. It was ‘not [to] be prohibited by Congress prior to the year [1808]’, and, pending that, could only be subjected to a fairly modest tax (‘not exceeding ten dollars for each person’ or slave). The articles requiring the Union to suppress insurrections or ‘domestic violence’—primarily, a possible dreaded slave revolt in some particular state¹¹⁶—are formulated in similarly elliptical fashion.

Although repressed through a strict linguistic proscription, the institution of slavery proves to be a pervasive presence in the American Constitution. It is not even absent from the Declaration of Independence, where the accusation against George III of having appealed to black slaves takes the already noted form of having ‘excited domestic insurrections amongst us’.

In the transition from Grotius to Locke, and from them to the founding documents of the American Revolution, we observe a phenomenon worth reflecting upon: although regarded as legitimate in all three cases, the institution of slavery was theorized and affirmed without the least reticence solely by the Dutch author, whose life straddled the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In Locke, by contrast, at least in the case of the Two Treatises of Government, which were written and published on the eve and at the end of the Glorious Revolution, legitimation of slavery tends to occur exclusively between the lines of the discourse celebrating English liberty. The reticence reaches its peak in the documents that consecrate the foundation of the United States as the most glorious chapter in the history of liberty.

In conclusion, the countries that were the protagonists of three major liberal revolutions were simultaneously the authors of two tragic chapters in modern (and contemporary) history. If that is so, however, can the habitual representation of the liberal tradition—namely, that it is characterized by the love of liberty as such—be regarded as valid? Let us return to our initial question: What is liberalism? As we register the disappearance of the old certainties, a great saying comes to mind: ‘What is well-known, precisely because it is well-known, is not known. In the knowledge process, the commonest way to mislead oneself and others is to assume that something is well-known and to accept it as such’.¹¹⁷

Throwing a widespread apologia into crisis, the paradoxical tangle we have encountered while historically reconstructing the origins of liberalism is disturbing. We can therefore understand the tendency to repression. After all, that was the gesture, in their own day, of Locke and, especially, the rebel American colonists, who liked to draw a more or less thick veil of silence over the institution of slavery.

The same result can be arrived at in other ways. According to Hannah Arendt, what characterized the American Revolution was the project of realizing a political order based on liberty, while the persistence of black slavery referred to a cultural tradition homogeneously diffused either side of the Atlantic:

In fact, disquiet about slavery was so strongly felt in the Europe of the time that prominent authors not infrequently proceeded to a sharp contrast between the two shores of the Atlantic. Let us attend to Condorcet:

‘The American’ condemned here is the transatlantic colonist, whether French or English. In his turn, in 1771 Millar denounced ‘the shocking barbarity to which the negroes in our colonies are frequently exposed’. Fortunately, ‘the practice of slavery [has] been … generally abolished in Europe’. Where it survived, across the Atlantic, the practice poisoned the whole society: cruelty and sadism were ‘exhibited even by persons of the weaker sex, in an age distinguished for humanity and politeness’.¹²⁰ This was also the opinion of Condorcet, who pointed out how ‘the young American woman witnesses’, and sometimes even ‘presides over’, the brutal ‘tortures’ inflicted on black slaves.¹²¹

The thesis formulated by Arendt can even be inverted. In the late eighteenth century the institution of slavery began to be unacceptable in salons where the ideas of the philosophes circulated, and in churches influenced by the Quakers or other abolitionist sections of Christianity. Even as the Philadelphia Convention ratified the Constitution that sanctioned racial chattel slavery, a French defender of this institution bitterly noted his isolation:

Some years later, another French defender of slavery bemoaned the fact that ‘negrophilia’ had become a ‘fashionable oddity’, to the point of abolishing any sense of distance between the two races: ‘African blood circulates much too abundantly in the veins of the Parisians themselves.’¹²³

If we start out from the presupposition of a general ‘indifference’ to the lot of black slaves in these years, we shall understand nothing of the American Revolution. The ‘last great philosopher’ to justify slavery—Locke—was quite the reverse of unchallenged; and it is interesting to note that he was criticized together with the ‘current American rebellion’, which he was regarded as having inspired.¹²⁴ In both cases, celebration of a tendentially republican liberty was bound up with legitimation of the institution of slavery. After having cited various passages from the philosopher that leave no room for doubt in this regard, Josiah Tucker commented: ‘[s]uch is the language of the humane Mr Locke! The great and glorious Assertor of the natural Rights and Liberties of Mankind’; here were ‘his real Sentiments concerning Slavery’.¹²⁵ Similarly, the American loyalist we have already encountered—Boucher—conjointly condemned the republican secession and Locke’s claim to confer on ‘every freeman of Carolina absolute power and property over his slaves’.¹²⁶

While English patriots and loyalists opposed to secession ironized about the flag of liberty waved by slave-owners, the rebel colonists reacted not by invoking the legitimacy of enslaving blacks, but by highlighting the British Crown’s massive involvement and principal responsibility in trafficking and trading human flesh. It is clear that the institution of slavery was now largely delegitimized. This explains the linguistic proscriptions that characterized the new state’s Constitution. As a delegate to the Philadelphia Convention observed, his colleagues ‘anxiously sought to avoid the admission of expressions which might be odious to the ears of Americans’, but were ‘willing to admit into their system those things which the expressions signified’.¹²⁷ The fact is that, from the start of the debate on the new constitutional order (pointed out another witness), people ‘had been ashamed to use the term “Slaves” & had substituted a description’.¹²⁸ Less scrupulous (observed Condorcet in 1781) were the slaves’ ‘owners’: they were ‘guided by a false consciousness [fausse conscience]’ that rendered them impervious to the ‘protests of the defenders of humanity’ and ‘made them act not against their own interests, but to their own advantage’.¹²⁹

As we can see, notwithstanding Arendt’s contrary opinion, ‘class interests’—principally of those who owned large plantations and a considerable number of slaves—played an important role, which did not escape contemporary observers. The fact is that Arendt ultimately ends up identifying with the viewpoint of the rebel colonists, who retained a clear conscience as champions of the cause of liberty, repressing the macroscopic fact of slavery by means of their ingenious euphemisms: what takes the place of such euphemisms is now the ‘historicist’ explanation.

8. Colonial expansions and the rebirth of slavery: the positions of Bodin, Grotius and Locke

Decidedly misleading as regards the American Revolution, might the ‘historicist’ approach be of some use in clarifying the reasons for the tangle of freedom and oppression that was already manifest in the two preceding liberal revolutions? Although contemporaries, in as much as both of them straddled the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Hugo Grotius and Jean Bodin expressed diametrically opposed positions on the issue of concern to us here. While the first justified slavery by appealing to the authority of the Bible and Aristotle, the second refuted both these arguments. Having observed that in the Hebrew world only gentiles could be subjected to perpetual slavery, and that Christians and Muslims observed similar norms and customs, Bodin concluded that ‘those who profess all these three religions only partially observe the law of God with regard to slaves’, as if the prohibition of this horrible institution only applied to blood relations, not humanity as a whole. If a distinction among the three monotheistic religions could be made, it was to the advantage of Islam, which had proved capable of expanding thanks to a courageous policy of emancipation.¹³⁰

Bodin also rejected Aristotle’s thesis, adopted and even radicalized by Grotius, that some individuals and peoples are naturally slaves. As proof of this, the universal diffusion, temporal and spatial, of the institution of slavery was often cited. But (objected the French author) no less universally diffused were slave revolts:

While it had long seemed obvious and been generally accepted, and still continued to be, the institution of slavery pertained not to nature but to history—more precisely, to a deplorable and execrable chapter of history, which must rapidly be closed once and for all. It made no sense to try to justify it on the basis of right of war (as did Grotius): ‘[W]hat charity is there in sparing captives in order to derive some profit or pleasure from them as if they were cattle?’¹³² In short, Grotius and Bodin were contemporaries. While the former was an expression of liberal Holland, the latter was a theorist of absolute monarchy. But it was he—not Grotius—who questioned the absolute power wielded by the master over his slaves.

We arrive at a similar result when, rather than with Grotius, we compare Bodin with Locke, whom he predated by some decades. Whereas the English liberal, also justifying slavery with his gaze on the past, pointed to Spartacus as culpable of an ‘aggression’ against ‘property’ and legitimate power, Bodin expressed himself quite differently: ‘The Romans, who were so great and powerful … however many laws they made, could not prevent the revolt of sixty thousand slaves led by Spartacus, who defeated the Roman army in open battle three times’.¹³³ In the English liberal the universalistic charge present in Bodin has disappeared, just as there is no longer any trace of the unconditional condemnation of slavery we can read in the French theorist of absolute monarchy. If we bear in mind ‘the homicides, the cruelties and barbarities inflicted on slaves by their masters, it was an unmitigated catastrophe that the institution was ever introduced, and then, that once it had been declared abolished, it should ever have been allowed to persist.’¹³⁴

The quotation above refers to persistence. In fact, Bodin traced a brief history of slavery in the world or, more precisely, the West (and the geographical area dominated by it). Certainly, the institution had been vital in Greco-Roman antiquity. As late as the American Civil War, the theorists and defenders of the southern cause appealed to the example and model of that splendid civilization in order to condemn abolitionism. By contrast, Bodin drew a rather realistic picture of classical antiquity. It was based on the enslavement of a number of human beings that was significantly greater than the number of free citizens. Consequently, it lived under the constant menace of slave revolts and, in order to solve the problem, did not hesitate to resort to the most barbaric measures, as proved by the massacre of 30,000 helots in Sparta ‘in a single night’.¹³⁵ Subsequently, as a result also of the influence of Christianity, things seemed to change: ‘Europe was freed of slavery after about 1250’, but ‘we see it today newly restored’. Following colonial expansion, it was ‘in the process of being renewed throughout the world’. There had been a massive restoration of slavery, and already Portugal ‘derives from it veritable herds as of beasts’.¹³⁶

Hence, far from being affected by vulgar historicism’s attempts at repression, the paradox that characterizes the American Revolution and early liberalism in general not only survives, but proves even more marked. We are in the presence of a political movement counter to the trend of authors who, centuries earlier, had pronounced an unequivocal condemnation of the institution of slavery. While Locke, champion of the struggle against absolute monarchy, justified the white master’s absolute power over the black slave, a theorist of monarchical absolutism—Bodin—condemned such power.

In analyzing the relationship that the three liberal revolutions developed on the one hand with the blacks, and on the other with the Irish, Indians and natives, it is misleading to start out from the presupposition of a homogeneous historical time unmarked by fractures and flowing in unilinear fashion. Clearly predating Locke and Washington, and a contemporary of Grotius, was Montaigne, in whom we find a memorable self-critical reflection on the West’s colonial expansion that we would seek in vain in them. Such a reflection can even be read as a prefigurative but timely critique of the attitude of Grotius, Locke and Washington towards non-European populations. Among them there was ‘nothing savage or barbarous’; the fact was that ‘every man calls barbarous anything he is not accustomed to’. People took their own country as a model: ‘There we always find the perfect religion, the perfect polity, the most developed and perfect way of doing anything!’¹³⁷ Going back further, we encounter Las Casas and his critique of the arguments employed to de-humanize the Indian ‘barbarians’¹³⁸—the arguments that are more or less widely echoed by Grotius, Locke and Washington.

It should be added that the ‘historicist’ explanation turns out to be unfounded not only as regards the relationship with colonial peoples. While Fletcher, a self-defined ‘republican on principle’, member of the Scottish parliament and supporter of the liberal political world derived from the Glorious Revolution, called for ‘mak[ing] slaves of all those who are unable to provide for their own subsistence’,¹³⁹ Bodin also condemned slavery for ‘vagrants and idlers’.¹⁴⁰ According to the observation of a great historian, it was in ‘the period between 1660 and 1760’ (the decades of the rise of the liberal movement) that an attitude of unprecedented harshness spread in England towards wage-labourers and the unemployed, ‘which has no modern parallel except in the behaviour of the less reputable of white colonists towards coloured labour’.¹⁴¹

To understand the radical character of the paradox we are examining, let us return to Bodin. He primarily attributed the return of slavery in the world to the ‘greed of merchants’, and then added: ‘If the princes do not set things in good order, it will soon be full of slaves.’¹⁴² Not only was slavery not a residue of the past and backwardness, but the remedy for it was to be sought not in the new political and social forces (liberal in orientation), but, on the contrary, in monarchical power. Thus argued Bodin, but thus likewise argued Smith two centuries later. On the other hand, in recommending the conversion of beggars into slaves, Fletcher polemicized against the Church, which he rebuked for having promoted the abolition of slavery in classical antiquity and for opposing its reintroduction in the modern world, thus encouraging the sloth and dissipation of vagrants.¹⁴³ In this case, too, the institution of slavery was felt to be in contradiction not with the new social and political forces, but with a power that was pre-modern in origin. Such considerations can also be applied to Grotius, who likewise developed an argument, if not against Christianity as such, then against interpretations of it in an abolitionist register:

The Virginian property-owners who prevented the baptism of slaves in the late seventeenth century, so as not to spoil the spirit of submission and to avoid the emergence of a sense of pride in them because they belonged to the same religious community as the masters, provoked complaints from Church and Crown alike.¹⁴⁵ Once again, we see that it was the forces of the ancien régime which acted to check and contain the novelty represented by racial slavery.

Recourse to vulgar historicism to ‘explain’ or repress the surprising tangle of freedom and oppression that characterizes the three liberal revolutions we have referred to is fruitless. The paradox persists and awaits a genuine, less comforting explanation.