We have seen that the liberal tradition is shot through with two macroscopic exclusion clauses. In reality, there is a third—that directed at women, which in fact presents peculiar characteristics. When they belonged to the upper classes, they formed part, albeit in a subordinate role, of the community of the free; one thinks, in particular, of female slave-owners. The women’s liberation movement was only able to acquire a mass social base later, when women previously confined to a position of slavery or restricted to the inferior levels of a caste society were able to participate in it. The development of liberalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is explained, in the first instance, by the struggle waged by the bipedal machines of the metropolis, on the one hand, and slaves and colonial populations or populations of colonial origin, on the other.
In both cases, even more than for the achievement of specific objectives, the excluded protested against the fact that the dignity of man was denied them. This was a struggle for recognition—in the sense specified by Hegel in a celebrated chapter of The Phenomenology of Spirit. The shackled black depicted by abolitionist propaganda demanded freedom, stressing (in the text attached to the image) that he too was a ‘man’. In his turn, Toussaint L’Ouverture, the great protagonist of the San Domingo revolution, invoked ‘the absolute adoption of the principle that no man, whether red, black or white, can be the property of his fellow being’.1 Similar accents could be heard in Paris immediately following the July Revolution, when popular periodicals accused ‘bourgeois notables’ of insisting on viewing workers not as ‘men’ but ‘machines’, nothing but ‘machines’ called upon to produce exclusively for the ‘needs’ of their masters. After the revolution of February 1848, the achievement by proletarians of political rights demonstrated in their view that they too were finally beginning to be raised to the ‘rank of men’.2 Condorcet emphatically recognized this status in black slaves, but denied it to their white masters. Similarly, Engels, referring to the English workers whom he was ‘happy and proud’ to have known and who suffered a ‘slavery worse than that of the American negroes’,3 exclaimed: ‘I have found you to be men, members of the great, universal family of humanity’ who proclaimed ‘the cause of humanity’, trampled underfoot by capitalists engaged in an ‘indirect trade in human flesh’, in a barely disguised slave trade.4
Corresponding to the struggle of the excluded to be recognized in their dignity as men was the polemic against the Declaration of the Rights of Man on the other side. In the liberal camp the most celebrated intervention was Burke’s. His condemnation of this subversive theory was absolute: it paved the way for the political and social demands of ‘hair-dressers’ and ‘tallow-chandlers’, ‘to say nothing of a number of other more servile employments’, for the demands of the ‘swinish multitude’, or at any rate people whose ‘sordid mercenary occupation’ entailed ‘a mean contracted view of things’.5
Some decades later, in Bentham’s view the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man was nothing but a pile of ‘anarchical fallacies’. It sanctioned égalité between all men? The English liberal’s comment was sarcastic:
All men (i.e. all human creatures of both sexes) remain equal in rights. The apprentice, then, is equal in rights to his master; he has as much liberty with relation to the master, as the master has with relation to him; he has as much right to command and to punish him.
And hence the ‘absurd principle of égalité can only please “fanatics” and the “ignorant multitude”‘. The Declaration referred to law as an expression of the ‘general will’? But it is clear that therewith censitary restrictions of the vote could not be justified. The very theorization of property right contained in this solemn text was suspect to Bentham: the concrete object of such right was not clearly specified, and hence it involved a right which, once again, belonged ‘to every individual, without any limit’, even the propertyless person suffering from hunger:
In other words, a universal property right is established—that is, everything is common to everyone. But because what belongs to everyone belongs to no one, what follows from it is that the effect of the Declaration is not to establish property but to destroy it. And that is how it was understood by Babeuf’s supporters, those true interpreters of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, who can be criticized for nothing but being consistent in applying the most false and absurd of principles.6
Condemning these abstract ‘general principles’, for which Britain rightly displayed ‘extreme repugnance’ and which, when pronounced by ‘famished mouths’, could only result in catastrophe, Bentham referred to Malouet, one of the few in France to have attempted to dispel ‘the cloud of confused ideas’.7 In fact, it was the Anglomanes who sought to block the ratification of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. In appealing to ‘general principles’ and ‘metaphysical’ concepts, Malouet warned, people were playing with fire: they risked inciting the ‘immense multitude of propertyless men’, ‘the unfortunate classes of society’, ‘the men placed by fate in a condition of dependency’ and ‘lacking enlightenment and means’. They must be taught ‘just limits’, rather than the ‘extension of natural liberty’.8
It is significant that one of those to adopt a clear position against the category of rights of man was Malouet, who subsequently played a prominent part in the argument against abolitionism. It was this second aspect that played a central role in the United States, where within the white community the social question did not have the significance it possessed in France, but where the conflict over black slavery became increasingly impassioned. A particular target was the statement (contained in the Declaration of Independence) that ‘all men are created equal’, with the right to enjoy ‘certain unalienable Rights’. Present in it was the ‘metaphysical folly’ that subsequently found more concentrated expression in the French Revolution. This was the charge formulated by the ‘American Burke’—namely, Randolph—who in this context explicitly appealed to the British liberal.9 Born in the wake of the revolt against the alleged ‘imprescriptible rights of the king’ invoked by the British Crown, the United States now risked succumbing to the folly of the ‘imprescriptible rights of black slaves’.10 In similar fashion, Calhoun drew attention to the ‘poisonous fruits’ of that ‘place in the declaration of our independence’ which claimed to confer ‘the same right to liberty and equality’ on all men. This was the abolitionists’ starting-point in the fanatical struggle they had unleashed against black slavery and ‘Southern institutions’ as ‘outrageous on the rights of men’.11
In England, it was with his focus mainly on the colonies that Disraeli characterized the ‘rights of man’ as ‘nonsense’ in 1880.12 The struggle for recognition waged by colonial populations or populations of colonial origin proved particularly long and complex. It would only achieve decisive results in the twentieth century. For now we must turn our attention to the struggle waged by the bipedal machines in the capitalist metropolis and within the white community.
The social and political milieus which, on either side of the Atlantic, celebrated themselves as the community of the free understood by liberty not only the undisturbed enjoyment of the private sphere. Exclusion from representative bodies and political life was also perceived as an expression of despotism. On the other hand, denial of political rights to those with no title to be recognized as members of the community of the free seemed self-evidently proper. How could the ‘horse’ or ‘beast of burden’ to which Locke and Mandeville compared the wage-labourer, or the ‘speaking instrument’, ‘bipedal instrument’ or ‘work machine’ that Burke and Sieyès referred to, claim to form part of it? In other words, those who continued to be defined via the categories used by Aristotle to conceptualize the figure of the slave could not enjoy political citizenship. If they were men, they were members of a different, inferior people; they were barbarians (the quintessential slaves).
In the French case at least, the picture began to change significantly with the revolution. For some time Sieyès spoke nonchalantly of wage-labourers as the set of ‘work machines’ and ‘bipedal machines’, or of the ‘always childlike multitude’.13 But after 14 July 1789, while the Declaration of the Rights of Man was being discussed, he felt a new need—the need for greater ‘clarity of language’. Hence a distinction between ‘natural and civil rights’, or ‘passive rights’, on the one hand, and ‘political rights’, or ‘active rights’, on the other. The first, which included the protection of the ‘person’, ‘property’ and ‘liberty’, applied to every man. The former bipedal machine now saw his dignity not only as a man but also as a citizen recognized, albeit a ‘passive citizen’ excluded from participation in political life, like ‘women’, ‘children’ and ‘foreigners’.14
We are in the presence of a significant innovation. Just as ‘free labour’ had long been an oxymoron, because labour was in reality synonymous with servitus, so the category of ‘passive citizen’ had long sounded like an oxymoron. He who was subject to the necessity of labour, and hence to servitus, was by definition excluded from the group of freemen, who enjoyed liberty and citizenship to the full. For Locke it was meaningless to grant political rights to those who, as we have seen, were ‘made slaves’ by destitution, need, labour and the servitude implicit in this—and who did not form part of civil society, whose purpose was the defence of property. Blackstone argued in similar fashion: the right to vote could not be extended to ‘persons of indigent fortunes’, who by that token were ‘under the immediate domination of others’.15 Some decades later, Constant resorted to the same justification when he excluded the wage-labourer from the enjoyment of political rights: he lacked ‘the necessary revenue to subsist independently of any external will’ and ‘property holders are the masters of his existence, since they may refuse him work.’16 It is especially interesting to observe the development of the first major theorists of passive citizenship. In September 1789 Sieyès still did not hesitate to define as ‘forced’ the labour of the ‘uneducated multitude’, which was therefore ‘lacking freedom’.17 It made no sense to pose the problem of conferring political liberty on someone destined to be deprived of liberty as such. On the contrary, it might be asked if it was not appropriate to transform the actually existing ‘slavery of need’ into a ‘legally sanctioned slavery’, in accordance with the model adopted in America for indentured white servants.18
The French Revolution challenged the configuration of the servant as a mere instrument of labour. The figure now emerged of the purely passive citizen, which in fact had a long gestation period behind it. A significant role was played by an exigency internal to the community of the free, interested in imparting credibility to its discourse and self-celebration. In the wake of the Glorious Revolution, Locke, Mandeville and Blackstone on the one hand recognized and, in order to avoid any misunderstandings, even highlighted the servitus to which the wage-labourer was—and must be—subject. On the other, they celebrated England as the land of the free, where there was no place for ‘perfect slavery’ (Locke), ‘slavery in the strict sense’ (Blackstone), or colonial slavery (Mandeveille). In the nineteenth century Burke observed that among the subaltern classes the ‘common blessing’ of liberty ‘may be united with much abject toil, with great misery, with all the exterior of servitude’.19 There is here an obvious concern to stress the liberty of the wage-labourer, who is called upon not to let himself be vexed and misled by the harshness of his material living conditions, but to identify with an order that, despite everything, guarantees him liberty.
The ideological dimension of this discourse clearly emerges from reading an eighteenth-century English author. Compared with legal coercion of the labourer–slave, Joseph Townsend regarded economic compulsion as more effective. It silently but unfailingly imposed obedience on servants, terrorized by the prospect of death from starvation. Taken for granted was the power exercised by ‘the more delicate’, who were excused work and ‘left at liberty, without interruption’, over those who, in one way or another, must be forced to perform ‘the most servile, the most sordid, and the most ignoble offices’.20 In the transition from one condition to the other, coercion had not disappeared, but become more imperious. This did not prevent the English liberal pastor from painting an edifying picture of his country: even the poorest was a ‘freeman’, who supplied ‘free service’ on the basis of ‘his own judgement and discretion’, without the ‘compulsion’ to which the ‘slave’ was subjected.21
In the figure of the passive citizen there is something more. It is the expression of an exigency internal to the community of the free, but also and above all a response to the struggle for recognition waged by servants in the metropolis. At least potentially, the idea of universal citizenship, even if merely passive in a majority of cases, called into question the caste ordering of society with which Townsend continued to identify. Precisely on account of its novelty, the category of citizen did not impose itself at a stroke on Sieyès, who compared non-property-owners to ‘foreigners’ and ‘children’: the slave too was a foreigner—in fact, the foreigner par excellence, the barbarian. Or he was a child, and as such formed part of the master’s extended family. In this sense, Constant was less shrewd than Sieyès, given that he continued to refer to non-property-owners excluded from political rights primarily as ‘foreigners’ and ‘minors’.22
The category of ‘passive citizenship’ possessed the further advantage of answering Rousseau’s objection, subsequently taken up by Robespierre. In a well-ordered state, the Genevan philosopher had stressed, no-one should be able to feel himself a ‘stranger’.23 Clearly distancing himself from absolute monarchy and aristocracy, where a single individual or a few individuals could say they had a ‘homeland’, while everyone else was stateless, it was a question of constructing a society, a ‘democratic regime’, the Jacobin leader later reiterated, where ‘the state is genuinely the homeland of all individuals’, all of them admitted on an equal footing ‘to the rights of the citizen in full’.24 Now, if not exactly in the strict sense of the term, the proletarian was likewise a citizen, a member of the ‘nation’ dear to Sieyès that Boulainvilliers and the nobility had wrongly wanted to divide into an aristocratic people, descended from the victorious Franks, and a plebeian people, descended from the vanquished Gallo-Romans.25
Compelled by the struggle waged by the excluded to grant them at least passive citizenship, the community of the free now found itself facing a new challenge to its exclusivism. Already in June 1790, Marat had a representative of the ‘unlucky ones’ to whom political citizenship was denied argue thus against the ‘aristocracy of the rich’: ‘In your eyes we are still the rabble’.26 And we have seen Robespierre compare non-property-owners excluded from political rights to slaves: the concession of passive citizenship did not end the struggle for recognition.
Constant sought to answer the objections of the most radical currents that had emerged during the French Revolution. No, the non-property-owner excluded from the enjoyment of political rights could not be confused with the slave.27 Unlike the latter, the former, in common with all other citizens, was protected by laws and enjoyed full liberty within his private sphere. And this was what modern liberty consisted in. During the conflict with the monarchy, the community of the free in England and America had demanded a very different liberty, since it was in no way prepared to renounce administering public affairs. But it is clear that this platform could not survive the emergence of a struggle by the popular masses, which protested against exclusion from political rights and at the same time sought to change their labour relations and material living conditions. The dominant elite now developed a very different discourse: participation in political life was not an essential element of liberty; and, in the second place, labour relations and material living conditions pertained to an eminently private sphere, so that it was absurd and illegitimate to seek to change them through political action.
The new discourse did not impose itself at a stroke and wholly consistently. Constant let slip the admission that the provider of work was in fact ‘master’ of the worker’s ‘existence’. But even more significant is the oscillation we find in Macaulay. Fighting in 1831 for the political emancipation of Jews, the British liberal unhesitatingly rejected the thesis that a distinction should be made between civil rights and political rights, and that exclusion from the latter was not a factor of ‘mortification’ and discrimination. In reality, this was sophistry designed to justify ‘a system full of absurdity and injustice’.28 The polemic was incisive and effective, but the liberal author was careful not to intervene on behalf of the British popular masses as well as of property-owners whose religion was Judaism!
A similar consideration applies to other exponents of the liberal tradition. In regarding the enjoyment of political rights as an essential element of liberty, the Jacobins argued no differently from the American revolutionaries. But in Burke the proposal of ‘conciliation’ of the rebel colonists, who with their demand for the right to representation had confirmed that they were worthy members of the community of the free, was followed by the proclamation of a crusade against a revolution led by the mob, which had demanded and wrested political rights. As to de Tocqueville, his notes on his travels in England were almost coeval with the publication of Democracy in America. But the warm appreciation of widespread political participation in the North American republic was certainly not matched by bitter denunciation of strict censitary discrimination in Britain, or the slightest support for the Chartist demand for an extension of the suffrage.
De Tocqueville’s intervention was especially significant as regards the second point in the new liberal ideological platform, which drastically restricted the political sphere. In a text of 1842 he observed: ‘Equality is everywhere extending its dominion, except in industry, which is daily organized in increasingly aristocratic form’. The wage-labourer found himself in a ‘strict dependency’ (étroite dépendance) on the provider of work. Despite the charming appearance of ‘great French society’ as a whole, ‘industrial society’ (société industrielle) in the strict sense continued to be characterized by a strict hierarchy, which left little room not only for equality, but also for the individual liberty of those placed on the lowest rungs of the hierarchy.29 The harshness of the relations obtaining in factories was further confirmed by de Tocqueville’s comparison between working conditions and prison conditions, even if it was made not to challenge the former but to reject naively philanthropic projects for reform of the latter:
The majority of free workers, who in France painfully earn a living, have no rest but that taken at meal times, and cannot understand why criminals punished by society arouse so lively an interest that it gives way to tenderhearted exclamations and is on the verge of shedding tears at the idea of inflicting on them a deprivation suffered by all honest labourers.30
Besides, we should not forget that the panopticon theorized by Bentham, a building designed to achieve surveillance from which there was no escape, could serve as prison, workhouse or even factory.31
We are put in mind of the ‘immediate dominion’ or ‘forced labour’ to which Blackstone and Sieyès, respectively, refer. However, this coercive relationship was no longer explicitly highlighted to justify censitary discrimination in political rights (whose enjoyment belonged only to freemen in the full sense of the term). Instead, the condition that subjected the worker to a ‘strict dependency’ (de Tocqueville), compelled him to work in prison-like institutions (Bentham and de Tocqueville), and to sell his labour power to buyers who were ultimately the ‘masters of his existence’ (Constant), was now recognized reluctantly, declared to be without political relevance and hence not corrosive of negative liberty, from which no one in the metropolis was excluded.
At this point we can read the notes written by de Tocqueville during his trips to England in 1833 and 1835. The picture that emerges is no less dramatic than the one Engels was to draw some years later. The industrial region of Manchester and the working-class districts appeared as an ‘infected labyrinth’, an ‘inferno’: the miserable little cottages were like
the last asylum man can occupy between misery and death. Yet the unfortunate beings that inhabit such cubby-holes arouse the envy of their fellows. Under their wretched abodes one finds a row of cellars to which a semi-underground corridor leads. In each of these damp, repugnant places, ten or fifteen human creatures are massed higgledy-piggledy.
The appalling mass poverty formed a shocking contrast to the opulence of a few: ‘the organized forces of a multitude produce for the benefit of a single one’. Such a spectacle elicited a significant exclamation: ‘Here the slave, there the master; here the wealth of some, there the poverty of the greatest number’.32 On another occasion, de Tocqueville even warned against the danger of ‘slave wars’,33 thereby indirectly comparing modern proletarians with ancient slaves. We thus encounter the reality of unfreedom, and of unfreedom in its most drastic form. Yet this realistic analysis disappears as if by magic when it comes to drawing up an overall political balance sheet. We are dealing with the country that France was called upon to regard as a model, if it wished to save ‘the future of free institutions’.34 English liberal society realized liberty as such, regardless of the conditions of the kind of slavery had had to register in the inferno of the industrial regions. The fact is that this inferno had nothing to do with the political sphere proper. And once poverty or even a condition of tangible slavery had been confined to a sphere lacking political relevance (for pertaining to private life), in a sphere where it was not legitimate or possible to intervene politically, the initially slimy and repugnant portrait of Manchester turned into its opposite:
In the external appearance of the city, everything attests to the individual power of man and nothing to the regulatory power of society. At every step, liberty reveals its capricious, creative force there. Nowhere is the slow, continuous action of the government to be seen.35
The restriction of the political sphere is so radical as to seem paradoxical. Analysing the prison system in the United States, de Tocqueville drew attention to legislation that threw the poor into prison even for utterly insignificant debts. In Pennsylvania the number of individuals annually incarcerated for debt amounted to 7,000. If to this figure was added the number of those condemned for more serious crimes, it turned out that for every 144 inhabitants virtually one a year ended up in prison. But this was not the most important aspect. The French liberal was obliged to acknowledge the influence, direct as well as indirect, exercised by the wealthy over the administration of justice. The ‘vagrant’ or someone suspected of vagrancy was locked up in prison without having committed any offence. Worse, while awaiting legal proceedings, the poor witness or plaintiff lost his liberty, while the thief capable of standing bail retained his (see above, Chapter 4, §1). Clearly, the very principle of equality before the law ended up being travestied. But this was not de Tocqueville’s conclusion: ‘Of all modern peoples, it is the English who have instilled the greatest liberty in their political laws and made most frequent use of prison in their civil laws’. In their turn, although having largely altered the ‘political laws’, Americans had ‘preserved most of the civil laws’ of England.36
With this distinction we have reached a key point. The liberal author formulated his judgement on the countries visited by him exclusively on the basis of their lois politiques, while the lois civiles were by definition politically irrelevant. Not by chance, there is little trace in Democracy in America of the data gathered in the course of the inquiry into the US prison system. It might be said that de Tocqueville’s most interesting pages are those that did not make it into the work which sealed his fame. The almost triumphant conclusion then becomes explicable: in the transatlantic republic liberty had been comprehensively diffused, and did not constitute a privilege. Accustomed as he was to very different lois civiles, the traveller from France expressed his disappointment at legislation in the United States that seemed to him ‘monstrous’. But ‘the mass of [American] men of law’ found no fault with it and did not regard it as contradicting the ‘democratic constitution’.37 This was precisely the standpoint de Tocqueville ended up adopting—though not without contradictions and embarrassment. We can glimpse the former if we give the French liberal the floor once again:
It must be acknowledged that the American prison regime is severe. While US society affords the example of the most extensive liberty, this country’s prisons offer a spectacle of utter despotism. The citizens subject to the law are protected by it; they cease to be free only when they become felons.38
In fact, by de Tocqueville’s own admission, vagrants and poor witnesses also suffered ‘severe’ treatment in prisons, or workhouses similar to prisons.
And now let us observe the embarrassment. We have already encountered the protests of vagrants locked up in prison by a society that cannot solve the problem of unemployment in any other way. What was de Tocqueville’s reaction? Just as it did not come within his ‘tasks’ to investigate possible remedies for unemployment, so it did not fall to him ‘even to investigate to what extent the society is just that punishes the man who does not work and lacks work, and how it might furnish means of subsistence without putting him in prison’.39 The sphere of politics and ‘political laws’ was so narrowly defined as to exclude not only material living conditions and relations of dependency in factories, but even the censitary discrimination that pervaded the administration of justice in the United States.
Any expansion of the political was utterly intolerable to the liberal tradition, because it would involve relations that were not only private in character, but whose immutability was consecrated by nature or Providence. In Burke’s view it was at once mad and blasphemous to believe that among ‘the competence of government’ was ‘supply[ing] to the poor, those necessaries which it has pleased the Divine Providence for a while to with-hold from them’. Poverty was the result of ‘Divine displeasure’ and the latter could certainly not be placated by challenging ‘the laws of commerce’, which were ‘the laws of nature, and consequently the laws of God’.40 Some decades later, de Tocqueville argued no differently. On the eve of the 1848 Revolution, he noted with concern the behaviour of the ‘working classes’. They seemed calm, no longer ‘bedevilled by political passions’. Unfortunately, however, ‘where once they had been political, their passions have become social’. Rather than the make-up of this or that ministry, they tended to question property relations themselves and hence the natural order of ‘society’, tearing ‘to shreds the basis on which it rests’.41 When the revolution broke out, the French liberal regarded it as socialist or infected with socialism as early as February, because prominent in it were ‘the economic and political theories’ which would have people ‘believe that human miseries are the work of the laws and not of Providence, and that poverty can be abolished by changing the social order’.42 Ranging beyond the political sphere, the ‘threat of change in the social constitution’ was configured as an attack on the ‘ancient, holy laws of property and family on which Christian civilization is based’.43
Thus, on the one hand political economy was merged with theology, while on the other it tended to take its place, in the sense that ‘science’ was now called on to sanction and sanctify existing social relations. According to Malthus, it was wholly desirable that political economy be ‘taught to the common people’. Thanks to it, the poor would understand that they must attribute the cause of their privations to Mother Nature or their own improvidence. Indeed, ‘[p]olitical economy is perhaps the only science of which it may be said that the ignorance of it is not merely a deprivation of good, but produces great evil.’44 But this was also the opinion of de Tocqueville, who believed it necessary
to diffuse among the working classes … some of the most elementary and certain notions of political economy, which would make them understand, for example, what is constant and necessary in the economic laws that govern the wage rate. Because such laws, being in some sense of divine law, in that they derive from the nature of man and the very structure of society, are situated beyond the reach of revolutions. 45
While for Burke, ‘Divine displeasure’ explained the misery of the popular masses, for Malthus it was the immorality of their behaviour, the sexual incontinence that brought into the world beings whose subsistence people were not in a position to ensure. Referring to ‘Malthus’s principle of population’,46 de Tocqueville reprehended ‘all the excesses of intemperance’ widespread among ‘the lower classes’, their ‘improvidence’, or their tendency to live ‘as if there will be no tomorrow’, and above all ‘these early, imprudent marriages that seem to have no other purpose than multiplying the number of unfortunates on earth’.47
Notwithstanding the radical attitudes he liked to adopt, Bentham did not reach very different conclusions: ‘with respect to poverty, it is not the work of the laws’; the poor man was like a ‘savage’ who had not succeeded in transcending the state of nature. Or, to put it in the words of a French disciple and collaborator of the English philosopher, ‘Poverty is not a result of the social order. So why rebuke it? It is a legacy of the state of nature’.48 Arguing against natural law, the English philosopher waxed ironic about the recourse to nature to ground rights that only made sense in society. But now nature popped up again to remove responsibility for poverty from the politico-social order.
Given this elevation of existing social relations to the status of nature, and to nature sanctioned by Providence, attempts to alter them could only be an expression of madness. Burke expressed his utter ‘horror’ at revolutionaries or hasty reformists, who did not hesitate ‘to hack that aged parent [their country] in pieces, and put him into the kettle of magicians, in hopes that by their poisonous weeds, and wild incantations, they may regenerate the paternal constitution, and renovate their father’s life’.49 Similarly, for de Tocqueville the illusion that there was a political ‘cure for this hereditary, incurable ill of poverty and work’ provoked the incessant, ruinous expérimentations that characterized the French revolutionary cycle,50 or ‘the great social revolution’ begun in 1789.51
In pronouncing his judgement on England and the United States, de Tocqueville ignored, in addition to colonial peoples or peoples of colonial origin, material living conditions, labour relations and even ‘civil laws’. Extraneous to his research and analysis of democracy, he declared, was not only the oppression of blacks and Indians, but also the detention of white citizens (‘vagrants’ or poor people summoned to testify in a trial) who were not guilty of any offence. The cult of the ‘holy thing’ that was liberty52 ignored the fate of the excluded in their entirety, whether they lived in the colonies or the metropolis. And, once again, the divergence between liberalism and radicalism—of which Marx and Engels were the critical heirs—is already apparent at an epistemological level. In England, observed Engels, the ‘aiding and abetting of the rich is explicitly recognized even in the law’.53 Analysing the English ‘civil laws’ inherited by the United States, de Tocqueville arrived at the same conclusion. But this fact had political relevance only for Engels. And like the authors of the Communist Manifesto, the French liberal compared the worker of the time to the slave, forced to suffer a ‘strict dependency’ inside the factory and a degrading, oppressive poverty outside it. But de Tocqueville considered all this foreign to the political sphere proper.
It was precisely the drastic restriction of the political, and the consequent exclusion from it of the most profound dimension of the social totality, that prompted Marx’s criticisms. From the standpoint of bourgeois society and political theory, he observed in his early writings, social relations ‘have only a private significance, not any political significance’.54 In its most developed form, the bourgeois state limited itself ‘to closing its eyes and declaring that certain real oppositions do not have a political character, that these do not bother it’. While regarded as lacking political relevance, bourgeois social relations and power relations in the factory and society could develop without inhibition or external impediment.55
Over and above poverty, the reality of the factory (stressed the Communist Manifesto) highlighted the ‘despotism’ that hung over workers, ‘organised like soldiers’ and ‘[a]s privates of the industrial army … placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants’.56 De Tocqueville’s conclusion was scarcely milder. But now the despotism identified and denounced was not this reality, but attempts by political power to change or alleviate it. Against demands to put ‘the prescience and wisdom of the state in the place of individual prescience and wisdom’, the French liberal proclaimed that ‘nothing authorizes the state to interfere in industry’.57 This was the famous speech of 12 September 1848, made to persuade the Constituent Assembly to reject demands for the ‘right to work’ that had already been drowned in blood in the June Days. De Tocqueville went so far as to attribute to ‘socialist doctrines’ the regulation and reduction of working hours (‘the twelve-hour day’), which therefore became an object of unequivocal condemnation.58 Likewise dismissed as an expression of socialism and despotism was any legislative measure to alleviate the misery of the ‘lower classes’ through rent controls.59
The French liberal insisted on this intransigently. Immediately after the bloody June Days, he did not hesitate to accuse the Interior Minister of being inconsistent and soft: ‘While Cavaignac and Lamorcière fought socialism in the streets, Sénard supported socialist doctrine as regards the twelve-hour day’.60 Some months later, in his draft electoral circular of May 1849, de Tocqueville advertised as a badge of merit the fact that he had voted, inter alia, ‘against the limit it was proposed to place on the working day, against progressive taxation, and finally against the abolition of military substitution’.61 The last point was no less significant than the others. In de Tocqueville’s view, the option the rich man had of hiring a poor man to replace him when it came to performing the duty of military service did not involve an inequality, based on wealth and sanctioned by law, even in the face of the danger of death. Rather, it was a contract between individuals, which pertained to the private sphere and hence did not infringe the principle of legal equality.
Even in his capacity as a historian, when reconstructing the history of the collapse of the ancien régime, de Tocqueville stuck to this restriction of the political sphere and this peculiar phenomenology of power, which identified dominion and oppression exclusively with the intervention of political power in a private sphere that had been unduly expanded. He drew a terrible picture of the conditions of the popular classes. ‘Beggars’ and ‘vagrants’ were sometimes proceeded against ‘in the most violent way’, with the arrest and condemnation of thousands of people to forced labour without trial. Not much better was the treatment reserved for peasants. While, materially and socially, they lived in an ‘abyss of misery and isolation’, in terms of civil rights they were deprived of any protection: they ‘were constantly arrested in connection with the levies of forced labour or the militia; for begging, for misdemeanours, and countless other minor offences’. In conclusion, the peasants were viewed rather like ‘the Negroes in our colonies’.62 Was the revolution therefore legitimate and necessary? Such was not de Tocqueville’s opinion. France, which with the economists radically criticized and readied itself to overthrow the ancien régime, ‘wanted not so much a recognition of the “rights of man” as reforms in the existing system’!63 An organ of the titled aristocracy and hence jointly responsible for the degradation of the peasants to ‘negroes’, the parlements were the body which, before unfortunately being dissolved by the revolution, embodied the whole cause of liberty. In the years preceding the fatal 1789, ‘our judicial institutions were still those of a free people.’64
To the revolutionary demand for the rights of man and the equal dignity of every individual, which risked grinding society ‘into the dust and powder of individuality, and at length dispersed to all the winds of heaven’, Burke opposed the sacredness of a community: ‘a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born’, in ‘the great primaeval contract of eternal society’,65 thanks to a ‘relation in blood’ that united and founded in an indivisible unity ‘our state, our hearths, our sepulchers, and our altars’.66 In other words, as against the individualism reprehended in the French revolutionaries, the British liberal vindicated an emphatic organicism. Not by chance, the partnership celebrated by him subsequently became in German culture the Gemeinschaft that played such an important role in nineteenth- and twentieth-century conservative and reactionary thinking.67 Denunciation of the dissolvent charge contained in revolutionary individualism can also be found in de Tocqueville, who in 1843 observed: ‘For some years, doubt and individualism have made us such progressives that the nation will soon no longer offer any foothold for resistance’.68
But already during the French Revolution a different attitude had begun to emerge. Barnave warned as follows against the demand for an extension of political rights to non-property-owners: ‘Another step on the road of equality would mean the destruction of liberty.’69 According to Constant, too, the diffusion among the popular masses of the demand for political rights and stress on their enjoyment risked making people lose sight of the centrality of ‘private independence’ or ‘individual independence’, leading to the subjection of individual existence to the collective body.70 Albeit in a different idiom, Barnarve’s argument was reintroduced: the generalization of political rights had a levelling, homogenizing effect at the expense of individual liberty. Later, Guizot declared that to fight for a society where everything revolved around ‘order’, ‘well-being’ and the ‘equitable distribution … of the means of life’ meant forgetting ‘the development of individual life, the development of the human mind and its faculties’, and aspiring to an ‘ant-hill or bee-hive’.71
This was a theme that enjoyed enormous success after 1848. The more the struggle for recognition developed as a struggle for the conquest of political rights and of economic and social rights, the more the popular and socialist movement was accused of not understanding the autonomous dignity of the individual, and in fact of wanting to trample it underfoot. Rejecting the social demands that issued from the February Revolution, de Tocqueville gave full vent to his disgust at the emergence on the horizon of the spectre of a ‘levelled society’,72 a ‘society of bees and beavers’, composed ‘more of sapient animals than free, civilized men’.73 And so in his turn did John Stuart Mill: ‘At present individuals are lost in the crowd … The only power deserving the name is that of masses, and of governments while they make themselves the organ of the tendencies and instincts of masses.’74 Hence, in a reversal of positions compared with Burke, liberalism now rebuked the most radical currents not for their individualism, but for riding roughshod over the rights of the individual. De Tocqueville sought to provide this accusation with an epistemological foundation: conferring ‘a separate existence on the species [espèce]’, and expanding ‘the notion of genus [genre]’, radicalism and socialism were simply the application to politics of the ‘doctrine of the realists’ of scholastic fame. It entailed ‘contempt for particular rights’ and devaluation of the individual as such.75 But what is the value of this theoretical construct? It is interesting to see how de Tocqueville rejects proposals for reforming the prison system promoted primarily by the radical and socialist movement:
When philanthropy elicits our pity for an isolated unfortunate, we must not forget to reserve a little of our sympathy for a yet greater interest—that of the whole society. Let us distrust these narrow, ungenerous views that notice the individual but never the mass of men and let us eternally remember this thought of a great philosopher: pity for the wicked is a great cruelty to the good … The social interest, which is nothing if not the interest of the honest mass, requires that the wicked be severely punished.76
Even the troubled diagnosis of massification was made with an eye to the fate of ‘[t]he nation, taken as a whole’, which now risked turning out to be ‘less brilliant, less glorious, and perhaps less strong’.77 It was also in the name of an emphatic (and chauvinist) idea of the nation that de Tocqueville invoked ‘terror’ against those who risked compromising the honour of France (see below, Chapter 8, §15).
At a concrete level, too, de Tocqueville was concerned to see what were for him the requirements of society prevail. In the years of the July Monarchy, faced with the spread of mass misery, he proposed nothing to prevent it except police measures gravely corrosive of the liberty of the individual (the poor individual): ‘Could we not prevent the rapid movement of the population, so that men do not abandon the earth and move to industry, except to the extent that the latter can readily meet their needs?’78 Restrictions on freedom of movement should also be imposed on ‘vagrants’.79
Although committed to denouncing the expansion of the state—‘the great evil of adding unnecessarily to its power’—Mill did not hesitate to assert: ‘The laws which, in many countries on the Continent, forbid marriage unless the parties can show that they have the means of supporting a family, do not exceed the legitimate powers of the state’; they were ‘not objectionable as violations of liberty’.80 The view that any ‘interference’ in the procreation of human life was illegitimate was ‘a superstition which will one day be regarded with as much contempt, as any of the idiotic notions and practices of savages’.81 We can understand Proudhon’s irony in connection with the liberal school:
It, which in all circumstances and places professes laissez-faire, laissez-passer, which reprehends socialists for substituting their convictions for the laws of nature, which protests against any state intervention, and which demands liberty here, there and everywhere, nothing but liberty, does not hesitate when it comes to conjugal fertility to cry to the spouses: Stop there! What devil incites you!82
In the conflict between liberalism and its critics, an inversion of positions has occurred as regards laissez-faire for the individual.
Disgusted by the radicalism of the 1848 revolution and Louis Bonaparte’s coup d’état, de Tocqueville arrived at a bitter conclusion: ‘The revolution in England was made solely with a view to liberty, while that in France was made principally with a view to equality.’83 The criticism also encompassed the Enlightenment culture that had prepared and promoted the collapse of the ancien régime: in it a sure ‘zeal for equality’ was matched by a rather ‘tepid’ ‘desire for liberty’.84 As we know, the first to counterpose liberty and equality and denounce the demand for political equality as an attack on liberty was Barnarve, who was nevertheless a defender of slavery. This institution continued to be alive and well in the United States when de Tocqueville held up the transatlantic republic, together with England, as the model country for love of liberty to a France devoured by the passion for equality. It was precisely here that slavery was justified and even celebrated by southern theorists as an instrument to ensure, along with their liberty, the equality of members of the white community. For confirmation of the problematic character of the opposition between liberty and equality, we might adduce the pre-1848 de Tocqueville, who criticized England for an erroneous conception of liberty in as much as it was based on ‘privilege’ (and inequality), and who attributed to the French Revolution the merit of having, in the name of equality, promoted the cause of the abolition of slavery and the freedom of the blacks (see above, Chapter 4, §9; below, Chapter 8, §7). At this time, far from being in opposition, liberty and equality were fully in accord.
The opposition was represented, in significantly different form, in the work of another important representative of the liberal tradition. In Bentham we read: ‘When security and equality are in opposition, there should be no hesitation: equality should give way’.85 In the very country held up by de Tocqueville as a model for its ability to understand the absolute priority of the value of liberty, we see that the reassertion of the subordinate value of equality occurs, in the first instance, in the name of the ‘security’ of society and the existing order.
At this point it is appropriate to analyse nineteenth-century liberals’ individualist profession of faith at greater length. Especially after 1848, in the midst of the struggle against the massification they reprehended in socialism, they sometimes seemed to consider individualism a pre-modern reality, which had, alas, faded in the course of subsequent historical developments. According to Mill, ‘[i]n ancient history, in the Middle Ages, and in a diminishing degree through the long transition from feudality to the present time, the individual was a power in himself’; he was not ‘lost in the crowd’ and the ‘masses’.86 De Tocqueville likewise paid homage to the ‘individualism of the Middle Ages’.87 Manifestly, he did not take into consideration the fate of serfs, just as he did not take account of the fate of slaves and blacks in general when he pointed to the United States as the country where ‘every individual’ enjoyed unprecedented ‘independence’. When he subsequently asserted that in colonized Algeria, ‘the role of the individual is everywhere greater than in the motherland’, de Tocqueville ignored the Arabs, who, by his own admission, were often equated with the occupying forces to ‘evil beasts’ (see above, Chapter 5, §13; below, Chapter 7, §6).
Thus emerges the somewhat problematic character of the pathos of the individual, which was the flag waved by liberalism in its conflict with radicalism and socialism. Who was more individualist? Toussaint L’Ouverture, the great protagonist of the slave revolution? Or Calhoun, the great US theorist of the slaveholding South? Who demonstrated respect for the dignity of the individual as such? The black Jacobin who, taking the Declaration of the Rights of Man seriously, considered that it was always inadmissible to reduce a man to an object of ‘property’ of one of ‘his follow men’? Or Jefferson, who kept silent about his doubts about slavery out of a conviction of white superiority and his concern not to endanger the peace and stability of the South and the Union? Who expressed individualism better? Mill and his English and French followers, who considered the subjection and even slavery (albeit temporary) of colonial peoples beneficial and necessary? Or the French radicals who began to question colonial despotism as such (‘Let the colonies perish if they are to cost honour, freedom’88)?
The doubts are not dispelled even if we ignore the colonies and peoples of colonial origin. Prominent in the liberal tradition (for example, Laboulaye) is the polemic against the fanaticism of the French revolutionaries, who regarded access to the vote and representative office as a ‘natural, absolute right’ of every individual, rather than a ‘political function’ of society.89 So which of the two positions better expressed individualism? On the other hand, if the generalization of political rights imperilled ‘individual independence’, as Constant seemed to believe, why direct such a reproof solely against French radicalism and not also against the American Revolution (which erupted in the wake of the demand for the colonists’ right to political representation)?
Examined more closely, the cry of alarm at the danger of the disappearance of individuality, and the impeding ‘ants’ nest’, expressed the disquiet of the restricted community of the free first at the extension of political rights and then, increasingly, at the extension of economic and social rights. Yet it was de Tocqueville himself who compared the hungry man to a slave—that is, a man or an individual deprived of liberty and recognition. Compared with the liberal tradition, Nietzsche proved much more lucid and consistent. Although inspired by an implacable hatred of socialism and the social state demanded by it, and in fact precisely because inspired by such hatred, the brilliant reactionary thinker understood that, with its ‘individualistic agitation’, socialism aimed to ‘render many individuals possible’, raising them above their condition as instruments of labour and their herd-like relationship to the masters. With its universalistic charge, socialism issued in the recognition of every individual, independently of wealth, sex or race, as a subject endowed at a moral level with equal human dignity and possessor, politically, of inalienable rights. That was why Nietzsche indignantly condemned individualism and socialism. Albeit with a converse value judgement, Oscar Wilde also connected the two terms: ‘Individualism … is what through Socialism we are to attain.’90
Confirming the ambiguous character of the liberal tradition’s individualism, it is worth noting that, in criticizing the French Revolution and the danger of subversion represented by the working-class and socialist movement, it liked positively to oppose the countryside to the city. This is readily intelligible in the case of the theorist of organicist ‘partnership’, Burke, who with utter consistency celebrated the ‘agricultural class’ that ‘of all others is the least inclined to sedition’.91 With his attention still fixed on the French Revolution and the role in it played by Paris, Constant stressed the danger of ‘[a]rtisans, crowded into the towns’.92 But the theme of distrust or hostility towards the city, which was the prime site for development of the individual, runs deep in the liberal tradition. In Mandeville’s view, ‘London is too big for the Country’, and it was precisely there that disturbing phenomena of social insubordination were emerging. Much more reassuring were rural areas, where it was possible to count on ‘the poor silly Country People’, who in fact were conspicuous for their ‘Innocence and Honesty’ and who, ‘from their very Infancy’, could be educated into obedience to authority and respect for customs and tradition.93
A certain regret for this world can also be observed in de Tocqueville, when in 1834 he described the condition of the poor man in the ancien régime. Characterized by ‘limited’ desires and calm indifference to ‘a future that did not belong to him’, his lot ‘was less to be felt sorry for than that of men of the people of our days’. Accustomed to their condition from time immemorial, the poor under the ancien régime ‘enjoyed the kind of vegetative happiness whose attractiveness is so difficult for the civilized man to understand that he denies its existence’.94
With the resumption of revolution in France, against those who sought to ‘stir up the working population of the city’, Tocqueville called for reliance on ‘the inhabitants of the countryside, [who] are full of good sense and, thus far, of balance’.95 The first person to take this recommendation to heart was de Tocqueville himself, who described how he organized the elections in his native village as follows:
We all had to go to vote together in the village of Saint-Pierre, a league from our hamlet. The morning of the election, all the electors (that is, the whole male population over the age of twenty) met in front of the church, and all these men formed a queue in twos in alphabetical order … I reminded these good folk of the seriousness and importance of the act they were performing and recommended that they not allow themselves to be approached or led astray by those who, on our arrival in the village, might seek to mislead them, but instead proceed in a group and stay together, each in his place, until we had voted. ‘Let no one—I said—go home either to eat something or to dry himself (it rained that day) before he has done his duty’. They shouted that they would do this and did it. All the votes were cast at the same time, and I have reason to believe that virtually all of them were given to the same candidate.96
It is hard to regard as a manifestation of individualism the events narrated here by the French liberal, beneficiary of the plebiscitary vote of the village whose lord he remained.
Just as the dichotomy between English love of liberty and French egalitarianism proves unfounded, so the opposition between the individualism of the liberal tradition (whose favoured site was England) and the anti-individualism of radicalism (whose centre was in France) does not withstand critical analysis. To the French revolutionaries, who with their Declaration of the Rights of Man aimed simply ‘to excite and keep up a spirit of resistance to all laws—a spirit of insurrection against all governments’, Bentham opposed his principle of social utility: ‘there is no right which, when the abolition of it is advantageous to society, should not be abolished’.97 This was the view condemned by Marx, who indignantly reported the reasons with which the prime minister, Palmerston, had once justified his distrust or hostility towards the demand for emancipation advanced by Irish Catholics: ‘because the legislature of a country has the right to impose such political disabilities upon any class of the community, as it may deem necessary for the safety and the welfare of the whole’.98
In fact, we encounter a paradoxical phenomenon. While, on the one hand, it cultivated pre-modern nostalgia, on the other, liberalism contested the movement engaged in the demand for political rights and economic and social rights, accusing it of a basic inability to understand and accept modernity. The first to set off in this direction was Constant. Clinging to the idea of unanimous participation in political life and hence to ‘ancient liberty’, the Jacobins forgot that the latter was based on slavery, the institution that made it possible for freemen to enjoy the otium required for them to be genuinely active citizens in every respect.99 It was 1819 when the French liberal argued thus. At this time, in every country where modern liberty flourished, slavery continued in one form or another to be a living reality and, what is more, had assumed a harshness and naturalistic rigidity unknown in classical antiquity. Certainly, although it had not ceased to play a significant role, the institution was mostly isolated and concealed in the colonies. But that was not the case in the United States. There slavery was not only highly visible but, according to the analysis of not a few southern theorists (who took up and developed a suggestion of Burke’s), it encouraged the republican spirit of the free. In other words, ‘ancient liberty’ continued to survive in some sense in the United States, which was nevertheless pointed to by Constant as a ‘great example’ of the modern liberty dear to him.100 On the other hand, in stressing the invigorating function that the presence of slaves had on the spirit of liberty of free citizens, Burke explicitly referred to the example of the ‘ancient states’ (above, Chapter 5, §2). Hence Constant’s theoretical construct is based on a colossal repression, which is all the more amazing if we bear in mind the bitter struggles over slavery that developed in France. Abolished by the Jacobins, it had been restored by Napoleon, who arrived in power with the support not only of Sieyès, but also (as we shall see) of Constant himself.
Rather than emulating a model from antiquity, the French Revolution and the most radical currents thrown up by it were sometimes accused of encouraging nostalgia for the Middle Ages. Spencer compared progressive taxation to a corvée (see below, Chapter 8, §4). This was a theme subsequently developed by him with the observation that ‘national charity’ (i.e. laws benefiting the poor) was merely a new version of the pre-modern ‘established church’. And just as the old dissenter had fought for respect for the spontaneity of authentic religious sentiment, so the new ‘dissenter from a poor law, maintains that charity will always be more extensive, and more beneficial, when it is voluntary’. While the old dissenter denied any authority the right to dictate laws to his religious conscience, the new ‘dissenter from established charity, objects that no man has a right to step in between him and the exercise of his religion’, and indignantly rejected ‘the interference of the state, in the exercise of one of the most important precepts of [the] gospel’.101 In the last analysis, the demand for economic and social rights, to be legally ratified in the name of moral and religious values such as compassion and human solidarity, were simply a claim to restore life to a state religion! And the prophets of this state religion likewise referred to a pre-modern world. From the French Revolution onwards, as we shall soon see, the liberal tradition was fond of equating trade unions with medieval corporations. Even at the end of the nineteenth century, Lecky reproved trade unions and the working-class movement for aspiring to an ‘industrial organization’ similar to that of the Middle Ages and the Tudor period.102 Trade unions, Pareto stressed some years later, claimed to enjoy (and did enjoy) a kind of ‘Mediaeval immunity’.103 In Lord Acton’s view, even more so than the demand by unions for alleged economic and social rights, it was that for universal suffrage that amounted to a pre-modern, regressive phenomenon. It was ‘absolutist and retrograde’, since it favoured the expansion of the state and of despotism that had happily been transcended by liberalism.104 In conclusion, rather than classical antiquity as for Constant, Jacobinism, socialism and sometimes democracy itself were now accused of cultivating nostalgia for the ancien régime, whether it was of the Middle Ages or absolute monarchy.
The latter theme found fullest expression in de Tocqueville, according to whom, with their statist pathos, radicalism, Jacobinism and socialism were in a line of continuity with the statism, ‘administrative centralization’ and ‘paternal government’ of the ancien régime.105 However, this was an argument which, albeit with timely variations, proved especially dear to defenders of the ancien régime themselves! In Berlin the Berliner politische Wochenblatt never tired of repeating that revolution and absolutism were ‘identical, when regarded from a higher viewpoint’. In citing Louis XIV’s motto (‘L’état c’est moi!’), the journal observed that ‘revolutionary freedom … is reconciled with this centralization, this bureaucratic despotism, with this tutelage through ministerial assistants of the provinces and the community, with this Hobbesian governmental omnipotence’.106 De Tocqueville stressed the revolutionary role played, even before 1789, by the figure of the ‘intendant’ and ‘public administration’, which had in fact already expelled the nobility.107 The periodical cited above arrived at the same conclusion, identifying and branding in the figure of the ‘civil servant’ the author of the cancellation of ‘local liberties’ and all intermediate bodies liable to overshadow ‘state power’.108 According to de Tocqueville, ‘those peoples who are so constituted as to have the utmost difficulty in getting rid of despotic government for any considerable period are the ones in which aristocracy has ceased to exist and can no longer exist’.109 But this was precisely the guiding thread of the condemnation of the French Revolution pronounced by the organ of the Prussian nobility.
Immediately after the publication of The Ancien Régime and the Revolution, expressing his agreement and admiration, Lieber observed that the book as a whole was a historical running commentary on the analysis of ‘Gallican’ political tendencies he had already developed.110 Obviously, a degree of boasting is not absent. Yet we should understand the German-American liberal’s point of view. In 1849 he had underlined the continuity between Louis XIV and the 1789 revolution, and between it and Napoleon Bonaparte and the 1848 Revolution. It was a history utterly pervaded by the ideal of ‘equality’ and the ‘concentration’ and ‘centralization of power’, the ‘organization’ and generalized ‘interference of public power’, with a consequent inevitable sacrifice of freedom, ‘individualism’ and the principle of the ‘limitation of government’. By contrast, the latter was at the heart of the concerns and aspirations of the ‘Britannic race’ or ‘Anglican race’—i.e. England and the United States.111 We are, I repeat, in 1849; and at this time de Tocqueville confined himself to an indictment of socialism. While ‘on many points’ it had a different orientation from the ‘ancien régime’, it had inherited ‘the opinion that the only wisdom lies in the state’. But the partial and limited continuity established here did not in any way include the French Revolution. In fact, in his anti-socialist polemic, de Tocqueville did not hesitate to refer to Robespierre:
Flee … flee the old mania … of wanting to govern excessively; allow individuals, allow families the right freely to do anything that does not harm others; allow the communes the right to manage their own affairs; in a word, restore to the liberty of individuals everything that has illegitimately been taken from them, everything that does not of necessity pertain to the public authority.112
At this time, far from formulating the thesis of continuity between the ancien régime and the Revolution, de Tocqueville was refuting it in advance. Someone who did support it was Lieber, who was in a sense justified in claiming priority. In fact, it must be added that, by his own explicit admission, he had derived the thesis from Niebuhr, whose disciple he considered himself to be,113 and, more generally, from the German culture he had absorbed before leaving Prussia at the age of twenty-seven. In the first instance, the thesis of continuity between the ancien régime and the Revolution met with great success in the country where the ancien régime proved most tenacious.
We are clearly dealing with a rhetorical strategy: the revolutionary movement that claimed to be constructing a new world was branded as antiquated. Yet the strains are obvious. If we analyse the arguments of the various exponents of the liberal tradition, we see that the French Revolution and Jacobinism are variously situated in a line of continuity with classical antiquity, the Middle Ages and monarchical absolutism. The past to which the new is returned and reduced can assume the most diverse forms. Thus, the revolution was criticized with arguments that are difficult to reconcile with one another, and which are even opposed. On the one hand, it was accused of having destroyed the intermediate bodies that predated the advent of the absolute state; on the other, of wanting to preserve or reintroduce bodies, such as trade unions, that pertained to feudal particularism and that tended to take the form of a state within the state.
In the light of subsequent historical experience, it is difficult to regard the demand for economic and social rights (in our day also ratified by the UN) as pre-modern and, contrariwise, the view, which was not foreign even to de Tocqueville, regarding mass poverty as a datum of nature pertaining to Providence, rather than determinate politico-social relations, as modern. And, still with reference to the French liberal, it is difficult to reconcile condemnation of Jacobinism and socialism as movements situated in the wake of the ancien régime, with alarmist and apocalyptic denunciation of the ‘new race’ of delirious ideologues and agitators,114 who menaced ‘European civilization’, in fact civilization as such, with an unprecedented danger.115
In some instances, the individualist profession of faith played a manifestly repressive role. Together with the phenomenology of power and the restriction of the political sphere we are already familiar with, it operated to justify the proscription of working-class coalitions. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Mandeville expressed his utter consternation at a new, disturbing phenomenon:
I am credibly inform’d that a parcel of Footmen are arriv’d to that height of Insolence as to have enter’d into a Society together, and made Laws by which they oblige themselves not to serve for less than such a Sum, nor carry Burdens or any Bundle or Parcel above a certain Weight, not exceeding Two or Three Pounds, with other Regulations directly opposite to the Interest of those they Serve, and altogether destructive to the Use they were design’d for.116
What prompted the ban at this time was simply a refusal of recognition, as emerges from the contempt, in fact the disgust, provoked by the unheard of behaviour among servants. Organizing themselves autonomously, as if they were gentlemen, they pretended to raise themselves to the level of masters or even to usurp their rights (above, Chapter 3, §8). The absence of recognition continued to play a role in Burke. Certainly, in regarding only contracts drawn up outside any ‘collusion or combination’ as valid 117—the allusion to and support for the Combination Acts, which banned and penalized working-class coalitions in these years, are transparent—he appealed to the principle of freedom of trade, which did not tolerate impediments of any kind. But it is clear that the wage labourer, unrecognized in his autonomous subjectivity and dignity and degraded to an instrumentum vocale, was to see himself denied the right of autonomous organization from below.
Smith’s position was more tortured. He recognized that what led to the formation of workers’ coalitions was the desperate attempt to counter the de facto coalition whereby suppliers of work lowered wages, and to escape the threat of death from starvation. However, these ‘enlarged monopolies’118 must be prevented and repressed in order to assert the rights not only of the market, but also of the individual. It was necessary to ‘allow … every man to pursue his own interest in his own way, upon the liberal plan of equality, liberty, and justice’;119 in accordance with ‘the system of natural liberty’, every man must be able to contribute and bring into competition ‘both his industry and his capital’, without any obstacles whatsoever.120 In no case could ‘violations of natural liberty [and justice]’ be tolerated.121
In its turn, the Le Chapelier law, which banned workers’ coalitions in France in 1791, was also said to be aimed at defending individual freedom. In the name of ‘alleged common interests’, such coalitions violated the freedom to work possessed by every individual.122 And de Tocqueville referred to this law when, after 1848, he condemned the working-class and socialist movement thus: while ‘the revolution has swept away all the obstructions that impeded the liberty of the citizen, that is, corporations and craft associations [les maîtrises, les jurandes]’, the socialists proposed to reintroduce this junk, albeit ‘in a new form’.123
Perhaps Marx had in mind the liberalism of his time, as well as the French Revolution, when he criticized the Le Chapelier law for having banned ‘working-class associations of any kind’, on the pretext that they represented the ‘re-establishment of the mediaeval guilds’.124 The theme, which stigmatized trade unions as a residue or reminiscence of the Middle Ages and the ancien régime, was widely diffused in the second half of the nineteenth century. In England, while Lecky condemned resumption of the ‘guilds’,125 Spencer was even more vehement: acting as new tyrants and taking the place of monarchical despotism, trade unions suffocated individual autonomy and liberty in every way. It was true that they could also be consenting, but this did not alter the terms of the problem: ‘If men use their liberty in such a way as to surrender their liberty, are they thereafter any the less slaves?’126
The picture was the same across the Atlantic. Lieber condemned unions in the name of economics and morality alike: they were guilty of encouraging sloth and, ultimately, vice.127 By contrast, Laboulaye demonstrated an attitude of cautious openness,128 while Mill continued to be fundamentally hostile. He targeted the ‘moral police, which occasionally becomes a physical one’, exercised by the trade-union movement: ‘the bad workmen who form the majority of the operatives in many branches of industry’ tried to block ‘piecework’ and thus oppressed workers of ‘superior skill or industry’, who sought to earn more. In reality, the consequences of piecework had been described as follows by Smith some decades earlier: the workers subjected to it ‘are very apt to overwork themselves, and to ruin their health and constitution in a few years’; if they listened to ‘the dictates of reason and humanity’, it would be the masters themselves who restricted this type of remuneration. But philanthropic intervention from above was one thing. Quite another was intervention from below by organizations that trampled over individual rights and arbitrarily interfered in what Mill too continued to regard as ‘private concerns’.129
While they sought to impose intervention from above on bourgeois government itself, workers promoted an autonomous movement of transformation from below. However, in the sphere sovereignly declared by it to be ‘private’, the liberal bourgeoisie did not tolerate the intervention of political power, or even that deriving from civil society. Theoretically legalized in England in 1825, following a phase of persecution that even saw culprits condemned to deportation, trade unions continued to be attacked by the judiciary, in as much as they were defined as corporations hampering free enterprise. They acquired full legitimacy in 1871. However, ‘what Gladstone’s government gave with one hand it took away with another.’ If not trade unions as such, it was individual workers who could be dragged before the courts on the basis of a new law: ‘ “Watching and besetting”, that is “picketing” workmen continuing at work during a strike, was made illegal even when done only by a single person.’ This law was repealed by Disraeli in 1875.130 In France, the Le Chapelier law was only repealed in 1887. What lay behind full recognition of the legitimacy of workers’ coalitions and organizations was the gigantic struggles that culminated in the Paris Commune. Hence we are beyond 1870, the date that according to Hayek marks the beginning of ‘the decline of the liberal movement’.131 Expressing himself thus is an author who, not by chance, seems to want to call everything back into question. In his view, by destroying ‘the competitive determination of the price’ of labour power, and claiming to interfere in the ‘game’ of the market, trade unions undermined the liberal system at its roots; and it was ‘the clear moral duty of government’ to prevent this happening.132
The Paris Commune was a watershed in Europe, but not across the Atlantic. Passed in 1890, the Sherman Antitrust Act was ‘applied first and most effectively to labour’, which was guilty of combining in trade-union ‘monopolies’ that did not respect individual initiative and freedom. By contrast, so-called yellow-dog contracts were long considered perfectly respectful of the rules of the market and individual liberty: on the basis of them, when hired, workers and employees committed themselves (were forced to commit themselves) not to join any trade-union organization.133
A social-Darwinist streak ran through liberal thought from the start. The arguments used by Joseph Townsend in England in the second half of the eighteenth century against any attempt to introduce legislation in favour of the poor are eloquent: it would only end up destroying the balance of nature, cancelling the ‘peaceable, silent, unremitted pressure’ that was hunger and encouraging the growth of an idle, redundant surplus population. Left to itself, without the artificial interference of law-makers moved by false compassion, nature would restore its own balance, just as occurred on an island inhabited solely by goats and dogs. The struggle for survival selected the strongest, most vital elements, condemning the rest to their fate.134 From the outset, the tendency to naturalize social conflict, and to present the wealth and power of the dominant classes as the expression of an immutable natural law (in this sense Burke referred to a ‘natural aristocracy’ consecrated by ‘Nature’),135 contained a social-Darwinist element avant la lettre. We are familiar with Franklin’s criticisms of doctors for their commitment to saving lives ‘not worth saving’. The ‘disease’ such people suffered from was the manifestation of divine anger at ‘Intemperance, Sloth, and other Vices’; and it was fitting that all this met with the ‘punishment’ provided for by nature and Providence.136 God’s higher design must not be hindered, especially if colonial populations were the target. This applied not only to the Indians. The terrible famine that decimated an Irish population already severely tried by the British colonizers’ plundering and oppression in the mid-nineteenth century seemed to Sir Charles Edward Trevelyan—charged by the London government with following the situation—to be the expression of ‘omniscient Providence’, which thereby solved the problem of overpopulation.137
However, the social-Darwinist element was accentuated as the popular classes, shaking off their traditional subalternity, intervened directly on the political scene to assert their rights. In the United States, following the abolition of slavery, paternalism rapidly gave way to an explicitly violent attitude towards blacks, subject to the terror that threatened anyone who dared to challenge white supremacy. Something similar occurred in Europe. Large sections of the dominant class reacted to the new situation achieved by the struggle for recognition by brandishing the law of natural selection, which condemned the unfit to an early death.
The most conservative sections of the liberal movement responded to the demand for economic and social rights with a radical, uncompromising liberalism. The state must not in any way interfere with the kind of divine judgement, or struggle for existence, to which Spencer had referred before Darwin. The English political and economic liberal condemned any state interference in the economy with the argument that one should not frustrate that cosmic law which required the elimination of the unfit and life’s failures: ‘the whole effort of nature is to get rid of such—to clear the world of them, and make room for better’. All men were as if subject to a divine judgment: ‘If they are sufficiently complete to live, they do live, and it is well they should live. If they are not sufficiently complete to live, they die, and it is best they should die.’138 It was necessary to respect ‘that universal law of Nature under which life has reached its present height—the law that a creature not energetic enough to maintain itself must die’.139
Distancing himself from attempts to improve the hygienic and sanitary conditions of the popular classes, Lecky observed that, in reality, ‘in not a few cases’, infant mortality was ‘a blessing in disguise’. Indeed,
Sanitary reform is not wholly a good thing when it enables the diseased and feeble members of the community, who in another stage of society would have died in infancy, to grow up and become parent stocks, transmitting a weakened type or the taint of hereditary disease.140
Arguing thus, Lecky aligned himself with eugenics, the new ‘science’ that had made its appearance in England and met with extraordinary success in the United States, where between 1907 and 1915 as many as thirteen states passed legislation for compulsory sterilization. According to the legislation of Indiana (the first state to move in this direction), subject to it were ‘habitual delinquents, idiots, imbeciles and rapists’.141 Like eugenics, Spencer celebrated his greatest triumph in the transatlantic republic.142 Here William G. Sumner, often regarded as a kind of US Spencer, warned people not to forget the ‘struggle for existence’, as ‘poets and sentimentalists’ liked to.143 Socialism’s mistake primarily consisted in its claim ‘to save individuals from any of the difficulties or hardships of the struggle for existence and the competition of life by the intervention of “the state”‘.144 Anti-statism and Social Darwinism went hand in hand.
In Germany Heinrich von Treitschke drew attention to the example of the United States:
Let us examine the most delectable common people in the world, that of New York. It is a set of rejects who have merged from all over the whole earth. Yet left to themselves, these corrupted elements are compelled to control themselves. Do you think there is a Prussian police capable of keeping them at bay in the same way that they are held at bay by the harsh law of necessity? All are well aware: nobody takes any notice if someone dies of hunger.145
Still in Germany, in August L. von Rochau’s view the United States had the merit of applying the principle that every individual must, in the first instance, know how to help himself, unlike revolutionary, centralist France, which delegated care of individual well-being to the state, transforming the latter into a ‘hospital’ for ‘sickly, deformed people’ (Schwächlinge und Krüppel). The country across the Atlantic also asserted its ‘entrepreneurial spirit’ in its foreign policy, taking territory after territory from Mexico or the Indians, the latter a people now doomed to an ‘unstoppable decline’, and thus the equivalent on the international plane of the Schwächlinge und Krüppel who demanded state aid.146
It makes no sense to seek to exclude Treitschke and Rochau from the liberal tradition by looking forward to the Third Reich and presupposing a variety of infernal negative teleology at work in Germany. In reality, both authors, especially the first, viewed England and the United States with sympathy and admiration and, echoing a theme widely diffused in the liberal culture of the time, unstintingly denounced the statist and anti-individualist tradition that revolutionary, socialist and Bonapartist France had inherited from the ancien régime. In particular, the presence in Treitschke of the influence of Constant and de Tocqueville is immediately obvious. One thinks of his condemnation of the ‘deification of the state’ and the subsequent expansion of the political sphere. From ‘semi-ancient concepts’ and ‘Rousseau’s enthusiasm for the civic sense of the ancients’ derived the ‘omnipotent state power’ constructed by the Jacobins, who were likewise oblivious of the cost of the unanimous participation of citizens in political life: ‘the civic splendour of Athens rested on a vast foundation of slavery’.147 This inability to understand modern liberty led to tragedy: from the ancien régime to the revolution, from Napoleon I to Napoleon III, ‘under all the regimes, the state’s excessive activity has remained the hereditary disease of France’, whose ideal was ‘the state’s providential omnipotence’.148
We can understand why social Darwinism established itself above all in Britain, the United States and Germany. At the end of the nineteenth century, these were three countries on the crest of a wave of economic development and international influence and prestige. If the first two were able to boast powerful expansion overseas or continentally, the third was already engaged in a frenetic scramble for colonies. We shall see that all three regarded themselves as members of a single family or race which, setting out from Germany, had first crossed the Channel and then the Atlantic. And all three tended to regard Latins (not to mention colonial peoples) as failures, and to attribute their own success to the action of natural selection, which rewarded the best within any individual state, but especially at an international level.
1 L’Ouverture, quoted in Florence Gauthier, Triomphe et mort du droit naturel en Révolution, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1992, p. 282.
2 Cf. Domenico Losurdo, Democrazia o bonapartismo, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1993, ch. 1, §11.
3 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke, 38 vols, Berlin: Dietz, 1955–89, vol. 2, pp. 229, 400.
4 Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 230–1.
5 Edmund Burke, The Works: A New Edition, 16 vols, London: Rivington, 1826, vol. 5, pp. 154, 105–6.
6 Jeremy Bentham, Oeuvres, 3 vols, ed. Étienne Dumont, Brussels: Société belge de librairie, 1840, vol. 1, pp. 509–21. The text quoted here was subsequently reprinted with alterations in Jeremy Bentham, The Works, 11 vols, ed. John Bowring, Edinburgh: Tait, 1838–43, vol. 2, pp. 491ff.
7 Bentham, Oeuvres, vol. 1, pp. 524–5.
8 Malouet, quoted in Antoine de Baecque, Wolfgang Schmale and Michel Vovelle, eds, L’An des droits de l’homme, Paris: CNRS Press, 1988, pp. 104–7.
9 Randolph, quoted in Russell Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke, Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1978, pp. 63–6.
10 Randolph, quoted in ibid., p. 177.
11 John C. Calhoun, Union and Liberty, ed. R. M. Lence, Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1992, pp. 568–9, 464.
12 Benjamin Disraeli, Endymion, 2 vols, New York and London: Walter Dunne, 1976, vol. 2, p. 80.
13 Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, Écrits politiques, ed. Roberto Zapperi, Paris: Éditions des archives contemporaines, 1985, p. 80.
14 Ibid., p. 199.
15 William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 4 vols, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979, vol. 1, p. 165.
16 Benjamin Constant, Political Writings, ed. and trans. Biancamaria Fontana, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, p. 216.
17 Sieyès, Écrits politiques, p. 236.
18 Ibid., p. 76.
19 Burke, Works, vol. 3, p. 54.
20 Joseph Townsend, A Dissertation the Poor Laws by a Well-Wisher to Mankind, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971, p. 35.
21 Ibid., p. 24. On Townsend, cf. Karl Marx, Capital: Volume One, trans. Ben Fowkes, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976, pp. 800–1.
22 Constant, Political Writings, p. 214.
23 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ‘Discours sur l’économie politique’, in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, Paris: Gallimard, 1964, vol. 3, p. 255.
24 Maximilien de Robespierre, Oeuvres, 10 vols, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1912–67, vol. 10, pp. 352–3.
25 Cf. Domenico Losurdo, Nietzsche, il ribelle aristocratico, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2002, ch. 12, §8.
26 Henri Guillemin, Benjamin Constant muscadin, Paris: Gallimard, 1967, p. 13.
27 Constant, Political Writings, pp. 213–15.
28 Thomas Babington Macaulay, Critical and Historical Essays, 5 vols, Leipzig: Tauchnitz, 1850, vol. 1, pp. 291–2.
29 Alexis de Tocqueville, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Jacob-Peter Mayer, Paris: Gallimard, 1951–, vol. 3, pt 2, pp. 105–6.
30 Ibid., vol. 4, pt 1, p. 122.
31 Bentham, Works, vol. 4, p. 40.
32 Tocqueville, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 5, pt 2, pp. 80–2.
33 Ibid., vol. 3, pt 2, p. 727.
34 Ibid., vol. 5, pt 2, p. 84.
35 Ibid., vol. 5, pt 2, p. 80.
36 Ibid., vol. 4, pt 1, pp. 323–6.
37 Ibid., vol. 4, pt 1, p. 325.
38 Ibid., vol. 4, pt 1, p. 196.
39 Ibid., vol. 4, pt 1, p. 51.
40 Burke, Works, vol. 7, p. 404.
41 Tocqueville, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 3, pt 2, p. 750 (speech in the Chamber of Deputies, 27 January 1848).
42 Ibid., vol. 12, pp. 92–4, 84.
43 Ibid., vol. 3, pt 3, pp. 221, 258.
44 Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, 2 vols, ed. Patricia Joyce, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press and Royal Economic Society, 1989, vol. 2, p. 152 n. 10.
45 Tocqueville, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 16, p. 241 (speech to the Academy of Moral and Political Science, 3 April 1852).
46 Ibid., vol. 7, p. 283 (letter to L. von Thun, 1835).
47 Ibid., vol. 16, p. 142.
48 Bentham, Works, vol. 1, p. 309; Étienne Dumont, Introduction to Bentham, Oeuvres, vol. 2, p. 201.
49 Burke, Works, vol. 5, pp. 183–4.
50 Tocqueville, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 16, p. 240 (speech to the Academy of Moral and Political Science, 3 April 1852).
51 Ibid., vol. 16, p. 256.
52 Ibid., vol. 5, pt 2, p. 91.
53 Marx and Engels, Werke, vol. 1, p. 590.
54 Ibid., vol. 1, p. 284.
55 Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 101, 124.
56 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969, vol. 1, p. 115.
57 Tocqueville, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 3, pt 3, pp. 179–80.
58 Ibid., vol. 8, pt 2, p. 38 (letter to Gustave de Beaumont, 3 November 1848).
59 Ibid., vol. 15, pt 2, p. 182 (letter to F. de Corcelle, 1 November 1856).
60 Ibid., vol. 8, pt 2, p. 38 (letter to Gustave de Beaumont, 3 September 1848).
61 Ibid., vol. 3, pt 3, p. 259.
62 Alexis de Tocqueville, The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution, trans. Stuart Gilbert, London: Fontana, 1966, pp. 155, 151.
63 Ibid., p. 185.
64 Ibid., p. 139.
65 Burke, Works, vol. 5, pp. 183–4.
66 Ibid., vol. 5, pp. 79–80.
67 Cf. Domenico Losurdo, Heidegger and the Ideology of War, trans. Marella and Jon Morris, Amherst (NY): Humanity Books, 2001, ch. 3, §1; ch. 7, §6.
68 Tocqueville, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 3, pt 2, p. 117.
69 Barnarve, quoted in François Furet and Denis Richet, La rivoluzione francese, trans. Silvia Brilli Cattarini and Carla Patanè, Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1980, p. 168.
70 Constant, Political Writings, pp. 316–17, 318–19.
71 François Guizot, General History of Civilisation in Europe, Oxford and London: D. A. Talboys, 1837, pp. 13–15.
72 Tocqueville, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 12, p. 37.
73 Ibid., vol. 3, pt 3, p. 544.
74 John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, Liberty, Representative Government, ed. Harry B. Acton, London: Dent, 1972, p. 123.
75 Tocqueville, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 6, pt 1 (letter to H. Reeve, 3 February 1840).
76 Ibid., vol. 4, pt 1, p. 136.
77 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, London: Everyman’s Library, 1994, vol. 1, p. 10.
78 Tocqueville, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 16, p. 139.
79 Ibid., vol. 16, p. 160.
80 Mill, Utilitarianism, pp. 165, 163.
81 John Stuart Mill, Collected Works, 33 vols, ed. John M. Robson, Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press and Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963–91, vol. 20, p. 350.
82 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, La giustizia nella rivoluzione e nella Chiesa, ed. Mario Albertini, Turin: UTET, 1968, p. 408.
83 Tocqueville, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 2, pt 2, p. 334.
84 Tocqueville, The Ancien Régime, p. 185.
85 Bentham, quoted in Élie Halévy, The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism, trans. Mary Morris, London: Faber & Faber, 1972, p. 53.
86 Mill, Utilitarianism, p. 123.
87 Tocqueville, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 5, pt 2, p. 49.
88 Pierre Dockès, ‘Condorcet et l’esclavage des nègres’, in Jean-Michel Servet, ed., Les idées économiques sous la Révolution, Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1989, p. 85 n. (this is an assertion which, with some variations, can be found in Dupont de Nemours as well as Robespierre).
89 Édouard Laboulaye, Histoire des États-Unis, 3 vols, Paris: Charpentier, 1866, vol. 3, p. 319.
90 Cf. Losurdo, Nietzsche, ch. 33, §1 (for Nietzsche); Alain Laurent, Storia dell’individualismo, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1994, p. 66 (for Wilde’s The Soul of Man under Socialism).
91 Burke, Works, vol. 8, p. 400.
92 Constant, Political Writings, p. 218.
93 Bernard de Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, 2 vols, ed. Frederick B. Kaye, Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1988, vol. 1, pp. 269, 306–7.
94 Tocqueville, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 16, p. 121.
95 Ibid., vol. 15, pt 1, p. 242 (letter to F. de Corcelle, 3 April 1848).
96 Ibid., vol. 12, p. 114.
97 Bentham, Works, vol. 2, p. 501.
98 Palmerston, quoted in Karl Marx, Secret Diplomatic History of the Eighteenth Century and The Story of the Life of Lord Palmerston, ed. Lester Hutchinson, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971, p. 171.
99 Constant, Political Writings, pp. 309–28.
100 Ibid., p. 211.
101 Herbert Spencer, The Man versus the State, Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1981, pp. 197–9.
102 William Lecky, Democracy and Liberty, 2 vols, Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1981, vol. 1, p. 218; vol. 2, p. 373.
103 Vilfredo Pareto, ‘L’éclipse de la liberté’, in Mythes et ideologies, ed. Giovanni Busino, Geneva: Droz, 1999, pp. 14, 24.
104 Lord Acton, Selected Writings, 3 vols, ed. J. Rufus Fears, Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1985–88, vol. 3, pp. 554–5.
105 Tocqueville, Ancien Régime, pp. 61, 70.
106 Wolfgang Scheel, Das ‘Berliner politische Wochenblatt’ und die politische und soziale Revolution in Frankreich und England, Göttingen: Musterschmidt, 1964, pp. 74, 80–1.
107 Tocqueville, Ancien Régime, pp. 214, 217, 220.
108 Scheel, Das ‘Berliner politische Wochenblatt’, p. 78.
109 Tocqueville, Ancien Régime, p. 29.
110 Francis Lieber, Civil Liberty and Self-Government, Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1859, p. 259 n.
111 Francis Lieber, ‘Anglican and Gallican Liberty’, New Individualist Review, vol. IV, no. 2, 1966, pp. 718–21.
112 Tocqueville, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 3, pt 3, p. 173; Robespierre Oeuvres, vol. 9, pp. 501–2.
113 Lieber, Civil Liberty, pp. 51, 326; on his relations with Berthold Georg Niebuhr, cf. Francis Lieber, Erinnerungen aus meinem Zusammenleben mit Georg Berthold Niebuhr, trans. Karl Thibaut, Heidelberg: Winter, 1837.
114 Tocqueville, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 13, pt 2, p. 337 (letter to L. de Kergolay, 16 May 1858).
115 Ibid., vol. 3, pt 3, p. 292.
116 Mandeville, Fable of the Bees, vol. 1, pp. 305–6.
117 Burke, Works, vol. 7, p. 380.
118 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1981, p. 79.
119 Ibid., p. 664.
120 Ibid., p. 687.
121 Ibid., p. 530.
122 The text of the Le Chapelier law is quoted in Jean-Pierre Potier, ‘L’Assemblé constituante et la question de la liberté du travail’, in Jean-Michel Servet, Les idées économiques sous la Révolution, Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1989, pp. 251–2.
123 Tocqueville, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 3, pt 3, p. 193.
124 Marx and Engels, Werke, vol. 31, p. 48.
125 Lecky, Democracy and Liberty, vol. 1, pp. 218–19.
126 Spencer, The Man versus the State, pp. 512–13, 25.
127 Lieber, quoted in Frank Freidel, Francis Lieber, Gloucester (MA): Peter Smith, 1968, p. 194.
128 Édouard Laboulaye, Le parti libéral, Paris: Charpentier, 1863, pp. 25–6, 310.
129 Mill, Utilitarianism, p. 144; Smith, Wealth of Nations, p. 100.
130 George M. Trevelyan, British History in the Nineteenth Century and After, London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1937, p. 369.
131 Friedrich von Hayek, New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics and the History of Ideas, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978, p. 128.
132 Ibid., p. 146; Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982, p. 142.
133 Allan Nevins and Henry S. Commager, America: Story of a Free People, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1943, p. 318; Valerie Jean Conner, The National War Labor Board, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983, p. 10.
134 Townsend, Dissertation on the Poor Laws, pp. 23, 36–41.
135 Burke, Works, vol. 6, p. 218.
136 Benjamin Franklin, Writings, ed. J. A. Leo Lemay, New York: Library of America, 1987, p. 803 (letter to J. Fothergill, 1764).
137 Cf. Domenico Losurdo, Il revisionismo storico, Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1996, ch. 5, §10.
138 Herbert Spencer, Social Statics, New York: Appleton, 1877, pp. 414–15.
139 Spencer, The Man versus the State, pp. 32–3.
140 Lecky, Democracy and Liberty, vol. 1, p. 275.
141 Cf. Losurdo, Nietzsche, ch. 23, §2.
142 Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1944, pp. 18–36.
143 William Graham Sumner, On Liberty, Society and Politics, ed. Robert C. Bannister, Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1992, pp. 187, 190–1.
144 Sumner, quoted in Hofstadter, Social Darwinism, p. 48.
145 Heinrich von Treitschke, Politik, 2 vols, ed. Max Cornicelius, Leipzig: Hirzel, 1897–98, vol. 2, p. 272.
146 Augus Ludwig von Rochau, Grundsätze der Realpolitik, ed. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1972, pp. 150, 186, 212.
147 Heinrich von Treitschke, ‘Die Freiheit’, in Historische und politische Aufsätze, vol. 3, Leipzig: Hirzel, 1886, pp. 9–10.
148 Heinrich von Treitschke, ‘Der Bonapartismus’, Preussische Jahrbücher, vol. 16, 1865, p. 209.