CHAPTER EIGHT

Having briefly reconstructed periods in the history of liberalism and the concrete politico-social relationships developed in its name, we must now return to our opening question. Use of the term ‘liberal’ is usually dated to the political struggles that developed in Spain in the wake of the 1812 revolution and the opposition that emerged between ‘liberals’, engaged in defending the constitution, and their opponents, whom they branded ‘servile’. Only now was the adjective transformed into a substantive. In fact, in revolutionary America the author of an article opposed to the institution of slavery had already signed himself ‘A Liberal’ (see Chapter 2, §10). But that is not the key point. When we come across a text from 1818 in which Constant sets out and supports the programme of the ‘liberal party’, it can be said that we are dealing with an adjective.¹ The political meaning of the term is clear; and implicit in it is the transition to the noun employed to define members of the party in question. On the other hand, there is not much difference between this stance in favour of the ‘liberal party’ and the stance in favour of the ‘liberal political system’ that we have seen make its appearance in a text by Washington as early as 1783. Hence the real problem is to identify the moment when, partly inheriting and partly transforming the meaning bequeathed by a long tradition, the term ‘liberal’ began to assume its modern political meaning. This was the precondition for the transition from the adjective to the substantive.

It was a semantic event that cannot be uncoupled from the actual history of the liberal movement and liberal revolutions. We can start with the Glorious Revolution. Arguing against Robert Filmer, defender of the thesis that the Almighty had conferred exclusive ownership of, and dominion over, the earth to Adam, the first absolute monarch, Locke objected that God had bestowed his blessings ‘with a liberal hand’. The hypothetical absolute property-owner or monarch who, rather than displaying ‘liberal allowance’, sought to exploit the needy situation of all other men in order to reduce them to ‘hard service’ or even the condition of a ‘vassal’, would be acting no differently from the bandit who threatened a man with death in order to reduce him to ‘slavery’.² Clearly, ‘liberal’ is synonymous with generous here. However, God’s liberal generosity is in contradiction with the political slavery that Filmer would like to impose on all men. The, as it were, constitutional and liberal God presupposed here refutes the claims of absolute monarchy. The vile, miserable condition of the ‘vassal’, of the individual subjected to ‘hard service’, of the servant or ‘slave’, was incompatible with the mode of being and feeling, in the first instance, of an Englishman and ‘gentleman’, who scornfully rejected the servile view that ‘we are all born slaves’.³

In his turn, Hume on the one hand used the term ‘liberal’ synonymously with ‘disinterested’ and ‘generous’, and on the other criticized as ‘illiberal’ the popular agitation and plebeian riots that characterized the first English revolution.⁴ Similarly, Smith distinguished in the moral field between the ‘liberal’ view peculiar to the well-off classes, restive at overly rigid bans on ‘luxury’ and the other pleasures of life, and the ‘strict or austere’ view peculiar to poorer classes, who by force of circumstance could not indulge in ‘thoughtlessness and dissipation’.⁵

In the context of the ‘liberal’/‘servile’ opposition that was crystallizing, the ‘liberal’ attitude was defined by antithesis either to the absolute power of the monarch or the servile or even merely plebeian condition. The liberal/illiberal dichotomy referred to a difference and conflict between two world-views, but also between two social conditions. In the course of the American Revolution, adopting a position in favour of conciliation of the rebel colonists, Burke deplored the restrictions on individual liberty introduced in Britain on account of the war, and regretted the fact that ‘the liberal government of this free nation is supported by the hireling sword of German boors and vassals’.⁶ Once again the liberal profession of faith criticized the unwarranted expansion of the Crown’s power, on the one hand, and distanced itself from the subaltern classes, subjected to work and hence servile, on the other. We can now understand the British Whig’s scorn for those who, in the name of a so-called ‘indiscriminate’ freedom, wished to appeal to the servile hands of slaves or emancipated slaves to suppress the revolt of colonists who, precisely as slaveowners, nurtured with particular sincerity the love of liberty that must dwell in any non-servile soul. And we can also understand why as early as 1790, on account of the restructuring of the nobility’s political influence, the ‘liberty’ of the French seemed to the British statesman to be contaminated with ‘coarseness and vulgarity’: it ‘is not liberal’.⁷ Opposed to anything vulgar and plebeian, ‘liberal’ tended to be synonymous with aristocratic. In fact, among Virginia’s slave-owners the ‘aristocratic spirit’ was intimately bound up with ‘a spirit of liberty’ distinguished by its ‘more noble and liberal’ character.⁸ While paying homage to the ‘liberal government of this free nation’, Burke declared himself a member of the ‘aristocratick Party’—the party ‘connected with the solid, permanent long possessed property of the Country’—and felt committed to fighting with all his energy for ‘aristocratick principles, and the aristocratick Interests connected with them’.⁹

During the American Revolution, along with the celebration of the ‘liberal political system’ we have already noted, we find in Washington a celebration of patrons of the ‘liberal arts’, contrasted with ‘mechanics’, with immigrants of a modest social condition from Europe.¹⁰ But particularly illuminating is the discourse of John Adams. For a well-ordered liberty to be achieved, it could not be ‘mechanics’ and the ‘common people’, ‘without any knowledge in liberal arts or sciences’, who exercised power. Instead, it must be those who had ‘received a liberal education, an ordinary degree of erudition in liberal arts and sciences’; and they were the ‘well-born and wealthy’.¹¹

In France, too, the liberal party, which was in the process of being formed, defined itself during the polemic against the absolute monarchy but also, and possibly above all, against the popular masses and their vulgarity. Attention was turned to the Third Estate, to those circles where ‘a sort of affluence allows men to receive a liberal education’.¹² Expressing himself thus was Sieyès, who subsequently played an important role on the occasion of the 18th Brumaire in 1799. Sealing the coup d’état was the ‘proclamation of general-in-chief Bonaparte’, who announced the ‘disbandment of factions’—i.e. of popular and plebeian agitation—and the triumph of ‘conservative, tutelary, liberal ideas’ (idées conservatrices, tutélaires, libérales). This language was not the invention of a general, however brilliant: he enjoyed the support of the liberal circles of the time. The adjectival usage just noted refers to them. Constant, who later (as we know) declared himself a member of the ‘liberal party’, had already been recommended by Talleyrand to Napoleon in 1797 as a man ‘passionate about liberty’ and as an ‘unshakeable, liberal republican’.¹³ The following year, Constant had underlined the Directory’s merit in having ‘proclaimed its unshakeable attachment to the conservative system’.¹⁴ Finally, shortly after the coup d’état, he paid homage to ‘France’s tutelary genius which, from 9 Thermidor, has rescued it from so many dangers’.¹⁵ Synonymous with ‘aristocratic’ in Burke, ‘liberal’ was now synonymous with ‘conservative’ (and tutelary). For Constant (as for Madame de Staël), the cause of liberalism found expression in ‘respectable people’ (honnêtes gens),¹⁶ or (as Necker made clear in a letter to his daughter) well-off, ‘decent people’ (gens de bien: see below, Chapter 10, §1).

As in England and America, so too in France it was the property-owning classes, proud of their non-servile condition and spirit, who tended to define themselves as liberals. This is further confirmed, even after the mid-nineteenth century, by de Tocqueville’s stance. Those genuinely capable of defending the cause of liberty against Louis Bonaparte’s ‘illiberal’ government were not ‘the people strictly speaking, with their incomplete education’, but the ‘property-owners’, the ‘bourgeoisie’, the ‘men of culture’—‘in a word, all those who have received a liberal education’.¹⁷

Under the spur also of popular struggles, the liberal/servile dichotomy gradually tended to lose its class connotation and came to refer exclusively to political ideologies. But at moments of acute struggle the original meaning re-emerged with all its discriminatory charge. For de Tocqueville, as we shall see, anyone who wanted to endow the ideal of liberty with a social content was ‘made for serving’!

Bitter conflicts could, and did, develop within the property-owning classes. Debating with Burke, who suspected wealth not rooted in the mother country’s land and soil of lacking in patriotism and even of subversive tendencies, Mackintosh declared that ‘[t]he commercial, or monied interest, has … been less prejudiced, more liberal, and more intelligent, than the landed gentry.’¹⁸ Similarly, in France, Sieyès saw ‘liberal education’ embodied in the Third Estate, and certainly not in an aristocracy used to pursuing ‘the favour of servitude’ at court.¹⁹ Invitations not to discriminate, and create conflicts, between the different types of property were more frequent. In the view of the anti-Jacobin Jean-Joseph Mounier, in addition to the United States, the country that had diffused ‘in the France the idea of liberty’ was England, construed in fact as the country where ‘a liberal education without genealogical tests confers the quality of gentleman’.²⁰

It is clear that the term ‘liberal’ was generated by a proud self-consciousness, which had a simultaneously political, social and even ethnic connotation. We are dealing with a movement and party that intended to rally persons furnished with a ‘liberal education’ and genuinely free, or people who had the privilege of being free, the ‘chosen race’ (as Burke put it), the ‘nation in whose veins the blood of liberty circulates’. All this is not surprising. As has been made clear by distinguished scholars of the Indo-European languages, ‘freemen’ is a ‘collective notion’—a sign of distinction that applies to the ‘well-born’ and them alone. For this very reason, outside the community of the free and the well-born, not only was service or slavery not excluded, it was even presupposed. In Cicero’s view, at the head of the liberi populi was Rome, which engaged in the mass enslavement of defeated peoples considered unworthy of freedom.²¹ Similarly, in eighteenth-century liberal England what became a popular song (‘Rule Britannia’) lauded in these terms the empire that had just wrested the asiento, a monopoly on the slave trade, from Spain: ‘This was the charter of the land, / And guardian angels sang this strain: / “Rule, Britannia! rule the waves: / Britons never will be slaves.”‘

This was a self-proclamation that was simultaneously an act of exclusion. It was not only colonial peoples who were affected by it. Even before the American Revolution, Franklin had established a hierarchy of nations on the basis of skin colour, which claimed to classify the whole human race: ‘All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny.’ The same applied to pre-Columbian America; it was ‘wholly so’. The quantitative prevalence of peoples of colour was evident. In a way, their presence even made itself felt in Europe: ‘the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion’. The inhabitants of Germany did not come off much better. Representing the highest form of humanity were the English settled on both shores of the Atlantic, ‘the Principal Body of White People’, of ‘purely white People’,²² and the only community to embody the cause of liberty. The classical seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theme of the great chain of Being²³ becomes here the great chain of Colour. And it excluded the non-European peoples from the sacred space of civilization, relegating much of the West to its margins.

If it rarely took such a naively naturalistic form, the pyramid dear to Franklin continued, in one shape or another, to be present in liberal culture. We find it again in Lieber. At its apex, obviously, was the ‘Anglican race’, which fully expressed authentic liberty, while forming the base were the colonial peoples (not only the blacks, but also the Chinese). In the middle we find jostling Spanish, Portuguese and Neapolitans, who had hitherto proved incapable of elevating themselves to the principle of self-government.²⁴

John Stuart Mill employed a language that was scarcely different. The apex continued to be composed of the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ (to be precise, England and the United States), peerless champions of representative government and ‘the general improvement of mankind’, while at the base, in addition to more or less savage peoples,²⁵ we find the Chinese. It is true that the latter could boast a very ancient civilization. Yet ‘they have become stationary—have remained so for thousands of years; and if they are ever to be farther improved, it must be by foreigners’.²⁶ Ireland could be assimilated to the other colonies or semi-colonies. ‘[H]alf civilized’, in Bentham’s view,²⁷ Ireland for Mill was not only incapable of self-government, but also in need of ‘a good stout despotism’, exactly like India.²⁸ Not much better was the situation of Greece: situated as it was at the confines of Europe, it was still ‘too Oriental’ in many respects to be able to govern itself.²⁹ Finally, at the centre of the pyramid we have the people of ‘southern Europe’, whose ‘inactivity’ and ‘envy’ prevented the development of industrial society, the establishment of a strong ruling group and the orderly functioning of institutions. By comparison with them, too, the Anglo-Saxons proved superior, free as they were of those characteristics (‘submission’, ‘endurance’, statism) typical of the French and ‘continental nations’, all of them rendered gangrenous by ‘bureaucracy’ and an envious craving for equality.³⁰

Certainly, the ‘continental nations’ were not some homogenous whole. With its geographical location close to Africa and an Arabic past behind it, Spain came out of things badly. In the list Mill drew up of ‘envy’ of grandeur and ‘inactivity’, its inhabitants came immediately after ‘Orientals’.³¹ Visiting Spain in 1836, at a time when it was plunged in a civil war, Richard Cobden, rather than taking sides with one of the parties, reached a general conclusion about ‘barbarians beyond the Bay of Biscay’: Spain was ‘a nation of bigots, beggars and cut-throats with a government of whores and rogues’.³² The Spanish of Latin America were not worth speaking about because, from the standpoint of the dominant ideology in the United States at any rate, they formed part of the colonial world. Finally, distinguishing themselves negatively in Senior’s view were also the Neapolitans: ‘I never saw so hateful a people; they look as wicked as they are squalid and unhealthy.’ Moreover, no barrier separated the plebs from the upper classes.³³

3. The community of the free and its dictatorship over peoples unworthy of liberty

Obviously, the charge of exclusion implicit in the self-proclamation of the community of the free displayed its full force in the relationship with colonial peoples. In most cases, far from being perceived as a contradiction, the theorization and practice of slavery at the expense of the excluded further strengthened the proud self-consciousness of the community of the free, who lauded themselves for their immunity from the servile spirit attributed to the barbarians subjugated by them. That was why Locke could set himself up as a champion of liberty and, at the same time, legitimize the absolute power the community of the free was called upon to exercise over black slaves. In 1809 Jefferson celebrated the United States as ‘an empire for liberty’, founded on a constitution that guaranteed ‘self government’.³⁴ Expressing himself thus was a slave-owner, who exercised power over his slaves brutally, if need be selling the individual members of the family of his property as separate pieces or chattels. And he indulged in this celebration in a letter sent to another slave-owner, who had just taken his place in the US presidency. The Constitution held up as a model consecrated the birth of the first racial state, while the self-government extolled here guaranteed southern slave-owners legitimate enjoyment of their property without interference by the federal government.

The transition from hereditary slavery to semi-slavery, still at the expense of colonial peoples, did not radically change the overall picture. Albeit in different forms, the phenomenon we are already familiar with emerged. Thus, major authors such as Mill, de Tocqueville and Lecky passionately denounced monarchical or Jacobin absolutism, and at the same time enthusiastically saluted despotism at the expense of colonial peoples. This was a power relationship which, for a whole historical period, far from being fought or contained, was to be extended and generalized. Given that a ‘vigorous despotism’ was the only method capable of raising backward peoples or ‘barbarians’ to a higher level, the interests of civilization and peace were served by colonial conquests, which must therefore be expanded to embrace the entire globe. Already ‘common’, ‘direct subjection’ of ‘backward populations’ by ‘the more advanced’ was becoming ‘universal’.³⁵

So proud and self-confident was the self-consciousness of the community of the free that it could face down possible refutations from the history or empirical analysis of society without difficulty. In the years of the July Monarchy, unperturbed, de Tocqueville registered a disconcerting fact: in the Islamic world and ‘the whole East’, slavery presented itself in a ‘milder’ form than in the West. Tunisia was engaged in abolishing this institution, which by contrast continued to survive in the colonies of liberal France (and democratic America).³⁶ The balance-sheet drawn up by Mill on the morrow of the American Civil War was significant. In the United States a ‘[h]opeless slavery’ that ‘brutifies the intellect’, and where ‘it was a highly penal offence to teach a slave to read’, had only just been abolished. Even worse, added the English liberal, was the situation at the time of the slave trade in ‘our slave colonies’, where slaves were in practice condemned to work themselves to death, to be rapidly replaced through the ‘importation’ of other unfortunates, who in their turn were soon doomed to be consumed. In the British colonies and the United States a form of slavery had prevailed with particularly repugnant characteristics, which was largely unknown ‘in the ancient world and the East’.³⁷ Here the phenomenon of the twin birth of liberalism and racial chattel slavery seems to be perceived or intuited. And yet, like de Tocqueville, Mill had no doubts about the complete coincidence of the West and the cause of liberty, or about the West’s right to exercise despotism over Islamic peoples.

The English liberal had no difficulty construing the Opium War as a crusade for free trade and for liberty as such: ‘the prohibition of the importation of opium into China’ violated ‘the liberty … of the buyer’, rather than that of ‘the producer or seller’.³⁸ The lesson taught to the Chinese ‘barbarians’ could only be salutary. This was not the time to split hairs over forms: ‘appeals to humanity and Christianity in favour of ruffians, & to international law in favour of people who recognize no laws of war at all’, were ‘ridiculous’.³⁹ We are in 1857–58: even if we pass over the lot of the coolies in silence, in these years Britain had stained itself with the ‘barbarism’ referred to by de Tocqueville in connection with the repression of the sepoys’ mutiny in India; in China it gave decisive support to the liquidation of the attempt by the Taiping to reverse the autocratic and decrepit Manchu dynasty; in Ireland a ferocious dominion continued to obtain (‘in no country have I ever seen so many gendarmes’, observed Engels);⁴⁰ finally, in the United States, Britain contributed to the wealth of the South, absorbing much of the cotton produced by the labour of black slaves. Yet Mill was in no doubt: his country promoted the cause of liberty in the world, imposing on China by force of arms the importation of opium produced in India on the initiative of the colonial power!

When the sepoys’ revolt broke out in India, de Tocqueville did not conceal the fact that ‘massacres by the [Indian] barbarians’ were followed by ‘the barbarism of the civilized’.⁴¹ But this did not prevent him from arriving at a Manichaean conclusion: ‘these Hindus are beasts who are as brutal as they are ferocious’; their victory would mean ‘the restoration of barbarism’, the victory of ‘savages’ and the defeat of the ‘only surviving country of political liberty in Europe’.⁴² The aspiration of the Chinese or Indians to maintain or recover their national independence, the desire to liberate themselves from colonial domination, were not even taken into consideration. Precisely because it assumed the position of exclusive representative of the cause of liberty, the community of the free interpreted the challenges it occasionally had to confront as attacks on liberty, as expressions of the servile spirit as well as barbarism.

Macaulay acknowledged that the English colonists in India behaved like Spartans confronting helots: we are dealing with ‘a race of sovereigns’ or a ‘sovereign caste’, wielding absolute power over its ‘serfs’.⁴³ But this did not prompt any doubts about the right of free England to exercise dictatorship over the barbarians of the colonies. It was a dictatorship that could take the most ruthless forms. Macaulay powerfully describes how the governor of India, Warren Hastings, proceeded when, at a difficult moment for Britain, already engaged in the struggle against the American colonists and their French allies, he had to confront the colony’s native population:

A wave of arrests without any charge was unleashed, not even sparing the elderly of ‘the most venerable dignity’. There was an orgy of violence that did not respect sanctuaries and unchained the most bestial instincts. There were Indians who ‘shed their blood in the doorway, while defending, sword in hand, the sacred apartments of their women’. In conclusion: ‘All the injustice of former oppressors, Asiatic and European, appeared as a blessing when compared with the justice of the Supreme Court.’ And yet, despite this horrifying description, Macaulay concluded that, for having saved England and civilization, Hastings deserved ‘high admiration’ and to rank among ‘the most remarkable men in our history’.⁴⁴

4. How to confront the barbarian threat in the metropolis in timely fashion

The challenge to the community of the free could arise in the metropolis as well as from the colonies. The status of the popular classes, whom the dominant elite often tended to assimilate to ‘savages’, long remained uncertain. The assimilation became a veritable identification on the occasion of rebellions and revolutions. And as in the case of external barbarism, the remedy for the internal variety was dictatorship. Montesquieu was in no doubt about the fact that ‘the usage of the freest peoples that ever lived on earth makes me believe that there are cases where a veil has to be drawn, for a moment, over liberty, as one hides the statues of the gods’.⁴⁵ This is what occurred in a state of emergency: in facing it, it was necessary to take to heart the ‘admirable institution’ that was the Roman dictatorship.⁴⁶ However ‘terrible’, at the opportune moment it ‘violently return[ed] the state to liberty’.⁴⁷

People argued no differently across the Atlantic. The Federalist maintained that, with the onset of a state of emergency, the powers granted to the federal authorities ‘ought to exist without limitation’ and without ‘constitutional shackles’. Hamilton pointed out that even the Roman republic did not hesitate ‘to take refuge in the absolute power of a single man, under the formidable title of Dictator’, when this was required to confront grave dangers and defend Rome against ‘the seditions of whole classes of the community whose conduct threatened the existence of all government’.⁴⁸ The ‘existence of all government’ mentioned by Hamilton took the form of ‘the public good’ in Locke. When it was imperilled, ‘prerogative’ legitimately enabled the ‘prince’ to safeguard it through ‘an arbitrary power’, or ‘discretion’, which could be exercised ‘without the prescription of the law and sometimes even against it’.⁴⁹ In favour of granting emergency powers to General Cavaignac, during the crisis of 1848, was de Tocqueville (see below, Chapter 10, §1).

It is particularly interesting to note that what prompted an energetic reaction from the community of the free was not necessarily an actual revolt. An indirect, potential threat was enough. For Locke the right to employ force already existed in the event of the imposition of a tax not authorized by those directly affected: ‘the supreme power cannot take from any man any part of his property without his own consent’.⁵⁰ Even if mediated by the intervention of the legislative power, the intrusion of non-property-owners in the sphere of property was always an act of illegality and plunder, of violence, and hence one that could legitimately be countered with violence by the person under attack. There is more: paving the way for unlawful interventions in property, any alteration in the composition of the legislative power, with the restructuring, for example, of the House of Lords or abolition of the hereditary transmission of its seats, betokened ‘the dissolution of government’ and hence the unavoidability of a test of arms.⁵¹

Montesquieu was fairly explicit on the subject:

While Montesquieu denounced any interference that abolished the hereditary privileges of the nobility as illiberal and despotic, Constant regarded any challenge to a property-owners’ monopoly on representative bodies as inadmissible. Since ‘the necessary aim of those without property is to obtain some: all the means which you grant them are sure to be used for this purpose’; and political rights ‘will inevitably serve to encroach upon property’. It was sufficient for non-property-owners to be admitted into ‘representative assemblies’ for ‘[t]he wisest of laws’ to be ‘suspected and consequently disobeyed’.⁵³ More explicitly, the Thermidorian Boissy d’Anglas, having warned against the ‘fatal taxes’ that would inevitably be imposed by the legislative power once it was at the mercy or under the influence of non-property-owners, added: ‘A country governed by property-owners is in the social order; by contrast, one where non-property-owners govern is in the state of nature.’⁵⁴ And, in a situation without a legal order and legal norms, arms obviously came to the fore.

Constant’s reasoning continued to resonate in de Tocqueville: ‘For various reasons, all governments can be led to maintain the poor at state expense, but the democratic form of government is led by its very nature to act in this way.’⁵⁵ Encouraged by democracy more than by any other political regime, ‘legal charity’ (i.e. aid to the poor through the use of resources procured by the state through taxes on the wealthy) could only be synonymous with despoliation in the view of its victims: ‘The rich man whom the law, without consultation, strips of part of his surplus regards the poor man as nothing but a grasping foreigner summoned by the legislator for the division of his goods’.⁵⁶ In effect, this was an expropriation: if prolonged, laws in favour of the poor would end up transforming ‘proletarians’ into effective beneficiaries of the land and ‘property-owners’ into their mere ‘farm managers’.⁵⁷

Mill fluctuated more. On the one hand, he reiterated positions we have already encountered: ‘any power of voting’ in the hands of those who did not pay taxes was ‘a violation of the fundamental principle of free government’; to assign political rights, and hence participation in legislative power, to poor citizens, not subject to taxation, ‘amounts to allowing them to put their hands into other people’s pockets for any purpose which they think fit to call a public one’.⁵⁸ On the other hand, the English left-liberal expressed a more flexible position:

This is a distinction that would seem to pave the way for a policy of income redistribution.

Any such prospect was violently opposed by the most conservative wing of liberalism. According to Spencer, taxation aimed at income redistribution ultimately introduced a sort of ‘state corvée’, which was no less iniquitous and slave-like than the medieval one just because it imposed payment of a determinate sum of money, rather than the provision of free services to the master.⁶⁰ In his turn, Lecky, having adopted the thesis already noted in Constant, according to which non-property-owners with political rights would inevitably be led to pursue ‘predatory and anarchic purposes’ and even ‘break up society’, defined the system that enabled non-property-owners to burden the well-off with taxes as ‘a system of veiled confiscation’. In this way, the latter would in fact end up being ‘completely disenfranchised’.⁶¹ The unwarranted political emancipation of the popular classes involved the dis-emancipation of the only classes qualified to run the country.

As well as averting the real or potential threat of the barbarians in the colonies or metropolis, dictatorship could also be useful and indispensable in confronting the most serious problems that the community of the freemen could not resolve by ordinary means. To abolish the institution of slavery, to which representative bodies hegemonized by slave-owners proved stubbornly attached, Smith looked to ‘despotism’, which effectively took shape during the Civil War and in the early post-war years. The attitude adopted in these circumstances by Lieber was significant. In publishing his principal work, he certainly foresaw the possibility of recourse to ‘martial law’ to confront a possible state of emergency, but was concerned to specify that it would not be the executive power which declared it. But with the outbreak of hostilities, he discarded his previous constitutional scruples: the suspension of habeas corpus must be implemented in any event and as extensively and radically as possible. In silencing his critics, Lincoln declared: ‘Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier-boy who deserts, while I must not touch a hair of a wily agitator who induces him to desert?’ Lieber was not only in full agreement, but as early as January 1862 was amazed and angry at the fact that no traitor or spy had as yet been hanged.⁶²

A theory of temporary modernizing dictatorship can also be found in de Tocqueville. Reconstructing the catastrophe of the French Revolution, he arrived at a conclusion: given the irreversible crisis of the ancien régime, the radical transformation of society was inevitable, but it would have been better if, ‘instead of being carried out by the masses on behalf of the sovereignty of the people, [it] had been the work of an enlightened autocrat’; indeed, ‘[a]n absolute monarch would have been a far less dangerous innovator.’⁶³ He would have been able to exercise against the most reactionary feudal aristocracy the temporary dictatorship over slave-owners invoked by Smith. Modernizing dictatorship was not evoked by de Tocqueville solely with a view to the past. The French liberal asked himself, and one of his English interlocutors, whether a ‘temporary dictatorship, exercised in firm, enlightened fashion like that of Bonaparte after 18 Brumaire, is not the only way of saving Ireland’.⁶⁴ The dictatorship hypothesized here is different from that theorized by Locke against ‘papists’, which was directly exercised by the British Protestant settlers, albeit with the support of central government. De Tocqueville seems to envisage a power imposed from London that would be above the parties (Catholic peasants and Anglo-Protestant property-owners), just as in Smith ‘dictatorship’ is called upon to situate itself above both property-owners and their slaves.

By contrast, the position taken by Mill was more general in character: ‘I am far from condemning, in cases of extreme exigency, the assumption of absolute power in the form of a temporary dictatorship.’ The dictator could, ‘for a time strictly limited’, ‘employ … the whole power he assumes in removing obstacles which debar the nation from the enjoyment of freedom’.⁶⁵

An integral part of the self-celebration of the community of the free (and the liberal tradition) was the opposition between intransigent, unconditional guardianship of the liberty it assigned itself and the inclination to despotism reprehended in opponents. In reality, we have seen three theories of dictatorship emerge: the dictatorship of civilized peoples over barbarians in the colonies; the dictatorship that suppresses popular subversion in the metropolis; and the dictatorship which, in a situation of stalemate, imposes the requisite reforms from above. A contrast with authors not within the liberal tradition, or even foreign to it, might prove useful. Mazzini invoked ‘a highly centralized dictatorial Power’, which proceeded to the ‘suspension’ of the bill of rights and finished its work only with the achievement of national independence and the final victory of the national revolution.⁶⁶ Marx applied this perspective to the social revolution as well as the national revolution. In both cases a dictatorship is envisaged that emerges in the wake of a popular revolution from below. But for de Tocqueville (and the liberal tradition as a whole), it was precisely ‘revolutionary dictatorship’ from below that was ‘most hostile to liberty’.⁶⁷ Although not free of uncertainties, in Marx criticism of the pedagogical dictatorship that the community of the free claimed to exercise over barbarians was recurrent. In reality, it was precisely in the colonies that the ‘profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization lies unveiled before our eyes’.⁶⁸ This also applied to Ireland: it groaned under ‘police terrorism’,⁶⁹ ‘English terrorism’,⁷⁰ a regime that kept the population under control ‘solely by bayonets and by a state of siege sometimes open and sometimes disguised’,⁷¹ resorting to summary executions and the most drastic war measures.⁷²

6. The ills of the community of the free: the psychopathology of French radicalism

In the central area of the pyramid of peoples, Mill also inserted the French. Likewise, along with the Spanish, Portuguese and Neopolitans despised by him, Lieber combined the people who more than any other embodied the spurious and wicked ‘Gallic’ or ‘Gallican’ freedom, which in reality was synonymous with extreme centralization and despotism.⁷³ The combination is surprising. According to Burke, at the point when the Estates General was summoned France was already in possession of a good legal order. Rid of the absolute monarchy, it had become a full member of the community of the free. What had occurred in the intervening years to provoke such a ruinous descent and consequent confinement to the grey border area between civilization and barbarism?

Unfortunately, Burke observed on 9 February 1790, with the transformation of the Estates General into a constituent National Assembly, and hence with the restructuring of the political influence of the nobility and clergy, the French had turned out to be infected with a ‘disease’. Passing from despotism to anarchical subversionism, they had proved that they were ‘a people, whose character knows no medium’;⁷⁴ and (added the British Whig a year later) ‘[i]t is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free.’ Lecky referred to this analysis some years later, repeating it: ‘It was … in the opinion of Burke a total mistake to suppose that political liberty of any kind can be, or ought to be, possessed by all nations’.⁷⁵

The further radicalization of the revolution that had been sparked off in Paris confirmed this diagnosis. While the outbreak and manifestation of the disease could be variously dated, it was understood that the French lacked the ‘practical good sense’ that had enabled the Anglo-Americans and the United States in particular to avoid ‘revolutionary times’, the devastation and ‘adventure’ of civil war. This was a point tirelessly stressed by de Tocqueville and, in his wake, by Laboulaye and Guizot.⁷⁶

Moreover, on inspection, it was not merely good sense and practical spirit that were wanting. In Anglo-Americans these qualities were a constitutive element in a more general mental disposition, whereby ‘a man by following his own interest, rightly understood, will be led to do what is just and good’.⁷⁷ We know that, although de Tocqueville deplored it, the fate of Indians and blacks was irrelevant when it came to forming an overall judgement on the republic across the Atlantic. What promoted the undisturbed flourishing of liberty here was the mature personality of its inhabitants, who displayed manifest political and moral superiority to the French. De Tocqueville found the explanation suggested by his fellow countryman Victor Lanjuinais ‘profound and original’: ‘socialism is our natural disease’. And socialism was synonymous with abstraction, but also with something worse. The French were ‘afraid of isolation’ and harboured a ‘desire to be in the crowd’; they felt themselves members of a ‘nation that marches to the same step in perfect alignment’; they regarded liberty as ‘the least important of their possessions, and thus are always ready to offer it up with reason at moments of danger’. Hence a France irremediably ‘revolutionary and servile’.⁷⁸

Immediately after Louis Bonaparte’s coup d’état, having stressed that it was ‘contained in germ in the February revolution’, when ‘socialism had been seen to make its appearance’, de Tocqueville offered a kind of epitaph on the French nation: ‘It is incapable and, I say it certainly with regret, unworthy of being free’.⁷⁹ The oscillation between anarchical revolutionism and submission to despotism, and an inclination to surrender to passing impulses and moods, confronted one with a people whose ‘basic characteristics are so constant that we can recognise the France we know in portraits made of it two or three thousand years ago’.⁸⁰ The fact that the process begun in 1789 or 1787 had finally issued in the establishment of the Bonapartist dictatorship, dragging the country down to the level of the ‘nations best made for servitude’, clarified everything. In France, ‘what at first seemed a genuine love of liberty proves to have been merely hatred of a tyrant. But what a nation with a real instinct for freedom cannot endure is the feeling of not being its own master.’⁸¹

The closing chapters of The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution are a bravura rhetorical performance. Rarely has the love of liberty been hymned in such impassioned terms. And the beauty and power of these passages prove all more the engaging if we bear in mind the polemic, allusive but transparent and courageous, against Napoleon III’s despotism. However, read more coolly, this hymn to liberty proves problematic and even disturbing, with the opposition it sets up between ‘peoples made to be free’ and ‘nations best made for servitude’. It was a divide reproduced within France at the level of social classes. The enlightened love of liberty, which had manifested itself at the start of the revolution, was rapidly overwhelmed by the blind passion for equality, from which the Terror and the equal enslavement of all to an unprecedented despotic power derived. How was this distortion to be explained? De Tocqueville had no doubts: it became ‘less startling when we remember that the Revolution, though sponsored by the most civilized classes of the nation, was carried out by its least educated and most unruly elements’.⁸²

A disdainful warning was issued to the latter, intent on pursuing ‘material benefits’ and incapable of appreciating liberty in and for itself: ‘The man who asks of freedom anything other than itself is born to be a slave.’ Once again we are presented with an opposition between those born for liberty and those born for servitude, between freemen and servants, between liberals and serviles. And for de Tocqueville it was futile to try to explain the presence or absence, or variable intensity, of the ‘desire’ for liberty by the level of historical development and material living conditions of particular peoples and social classes. It was ultimately of little use even to challenge the influence of erroneous theories; or rather, these referred to something more profound. The ‘lofty aspiration’ to liberty was a thing that some men are capable of feeling, while others are not: ‘[i]t is a privilege of noble minds which God has fitted to receive it, and it inspires them with a generous fervour.’ The discourse has hitherto focused on a few noble souls: ‘to meaner souls, untouched by the sacred flame, it may well seem incomprehensible’.⁸³ An original curse, which cannot be lifted, seems to hang over the men, classes or peoples who, on account of their vulgarity or coarseness, are excluded or expelled from the community of the free.

Moreover, in its sad destiny France was not alone. Some years earlier—in September 1848, to be precise—de Tocqueville had seen the spectre of socialism lurking across the Alps and had not hesitated to conclude that the Italians ‘have likewise shown themselves unworthy of liberty’.⁸⁴ ‘Likewise’: which country is being alluded to? At this time, not yet invested by a coup d’état, France was still part of the community of the free. The reference is to Germany: as in much of Europe, there too the revolution continued to flare up and pursue radical objectives. The ambit of countries deserving of liberty thus risked being extremely restricted.

7. Interpretations of the interminable French Revolutionary cycle: from ‘disease’ to ‘race’

It is not by chance that politico-social conflict came to be interpreted in a psychopathological register. Immediately after the February revolution, de Tocqueville was concerned to specify that ‘[i]t is not needs but ideas that have led to this great upheaval’ and made the French ‘so ill’.⁸⁵ It was madness that encouraged the socialist pretension to alter not only ‘political laws’, but even social and ‘civil laws’—in particular, relations of property and production consecrated by nature and Providence. In the course of his journey in England, de Tocqueville compared workers to slaves and drew attention to the relations of ‘strict dependency’ that were being established within the factory. On the basis of this analysis, the struggle to overcome or alleviate the condition of slavery or ‘strict dependency’ could be construed as a struggle for freedom. But, as we know, this was not how the French liberal argued, as he denounced the ‘despotism’ of those who sought to regulate working hours and the servile spirit of those who contaminated the ideal of liberty with economic and social demands. The community of the free claimed the merit of pursuing the ideal of liberty in all its purity and in any circumstances for itself. Hence it interpreted not only challenges from the colonial and barbaric world, but also challenges arising in the zone of civilization itself, as an attack on the ideal of liberty, which was lashed out at by those not in a position to appreciate its grandeur and beauty. Wholly understandable and, indeed, natural among savages, such deafness was construed as a pathological anomaly in a civilized people.

In this sense, the resort to explaining conflict in a psychopathological register was immanent in the liberal tradition. Burke spoke of French ‘disease’ in the very first stages of the revolution. And it should be added that for a time it was in fact the ‘American inoculation’, and hence a disease from across the Atlantic, which was held responsible for the contraction and contagious spread of ideas marked by abstract, insane extremism.⁸⁶ Denunciation of the disease and psychopathological diagnosis of the adversary could occur in the converse direction. As the abolitionist movement developed, it became a commonplace in the United States to condemn it as an expression of an illiberal spirit, fanaticism and madness. However, at the time of the British colonists’ revolt in America, we find Josiah Tucker inviting the London government to accept and even encourage the secession, so as to avoid the ‘contagion’ of a ‘mad, fanatical liberty’, which was sweeping through slaves or serfs, the contagion of a ‘republicanism’ that was indeed ‘American’, but which ultimately dated back to Locke and the ‘Lockian Sect’ and could count on the sympathy of Burke himself.⁸⁷

After 1848, following the umpteenth return of revolution with yet more radical slogans, the tendency to warn against the disease raging in France dramatically intensified. Underlining the rootedness in the United States of the rule of law and liberal institutions, Democracy in America attributed much more weight to history and geography than The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution. Why had Napoleon Bonaparte’s military dictatorship been imposed on France?

The situation across the Atlantic was very different: ‘Fortune, which has conferred so many peculiar benefits upon the inhabitants of the United States, has placed them in the midst of a wilderness, where they have, so to speak, no neighbours; a few thousand soldiers are sufficient for their wants.’⁸⁹ While we once again encounter the dubious assimilation of the Indians (and even Mexico) to a ‘wilderness’, we are far removed from the explanation that peremptorily and definitively opposes a ‘sublime desire’ for freedom to vulgar indifference to it, ‘noble souls’ to ‘mediocre souls’.

By way of confirming the anthropological drift that manifested itself with 1848, we can adduce the long letter (a small essay) sent by de Tocqueville twenty years earlier to his friend de Beaumont. The history of Europe was conceived here in such a unitary way that the terminology became interchangeable: mention was made of the ‘Commons’ in the case of France and the ‘Third Estate’ in the case of England. In the two countries the victory of the bourgeoisie had been achieved in different ways, which were in fact the ‘forced result of the state of things’—that is, of the different configuration of power relations between the contending politico-social subjects.⁹⁰ Were statism and despotism the hereditary disease of the country where Jacobinism and Bonapartism had made their appearance? In truth, England had not only succeeded in constructing a strong state and military apparatus before France, but at the time of the Tudors had suffered an unlimited despotism: ‘I know of no tyranny in history more complete than that of … Henry VIII’; the Commons, ‘which had denied the king’s will a man’s life’, now ended up ‘condemning without even giving a hearing’. A worse terror than the Jacobin version had manifested itself, as demonstrated by ‘ “bills of attainder”, a diabolical invention that not even the revolutionary Tribunal called into being’. Yet it was nonetheless a revolution that had played a positive role. It nurtured the ‘first fruit of civilization’ as a result of the fact that, albeit in its terrible absolutism, in England royal power attacked the ‘vices of the feudal system’ and subdued ‘oligarchical liberty’. This was a general tendency, though in no country did ‘despotism prove more terrible’. Was the island across the Channel, unlike France, characterized and blessed by a gradualism of historical evolution? The letter/essay we are examining explicitly argued against the thesis that the English Constitution had passed through ‘successive, regular stages, before reaching the point it has arrived at today’, so that it could be considered ‘a fruit which has matured over successive centuries’. In truth, de Tocqueville observed, from Henry VIII onwards, ‘I see the English people change religion four times according to the will of their master’.⁹¹

Naturally, one might try to devalue the letter/essay of 1828 as ‘youthful’. However, even in subsequent years, if there was a contrast between France and England, it was often to the detriment of the latter, which continued to interpret liberty as a ‘privilege’ rather than a ‘common right’, as occurred in the country that was the protagonist of the 1789 revolution (see above, Chapter 4, §9). In 1843, having compared slave-masters in the colonies with the ‘aristocracy’ overthrown by the French Revolution, de Tocqueville celebrated ‘the great principles’ of the revolution, ‘which was carried out entirely in the name of equality’, in the name of the equality of the ‘human race’, and which had the further merit of being first to abolish slavery.⁹² Starting from the 1848 revolution, under the impression made by the spectre of socialism, it was precisely the pathos of equality that defined the failure of the French Revolution and the disease of an entire people, who now prostrated themselves before Louis Napoleon.

The psychopathological interpretation of developments in the French situation had the advantage of dispelling possible anxieties in the community of the free, which absolved itself of any responsibility for the Bonapartist outcome of the 1848 revolution. De Tocqueville might have drawn up a critical balance-sheet of the conduct of the liberal party and himself. After the dictatorship’s advent, with some exaggeration he denounced the limited resistance met with by Louis Napoleon in French society. Had the disappointment they experienced with the exclusion of three million Frenchmen from political rights contributed to the passivity of the popular masses? This was a measure the liberal bourgeoisie had been guilty of in 1850, thereby furnishing the dictator with the possibility of elevating himself into a champion of universal suffrage and the struggle against privilege and discrimination.⁹³ And what role in undermining the Second Republic had been played by intransigent liberalism à la de Tocqueville, who had branded the reduction of working hours and any intervention by political power in favour of the most deprived as intolerable ‘despotism’? The Bonapartist regime had its stronghold in the countryside: had it not been primarily the liberal bourgeoisie, with de Tocqueville’s active participation, which stirred it up against the city and mobilized it in the name of the struggle against the terrible threat that hung over civilization, dictating extraordinary measures commensurate with the situation? And again: Had the discrediting of institutions and the rule of law been aided by the supreme contempt for the Constitution displayed by de Tocqueville, when in his capacity as foreign minister he demanded ‘the right, in spite of our Constitution, to overthrow the Roman Republic’?⁹⁴

Moreover, a basic contradiction ran through the French liberal’s attitude. On the one hand, on an immediate political level, he vigorously condemned the Bonapartist regime; on the other, as an historian he regretted the fact that the requisite modernization of France had not been completed by an ‘absolute prince’ or ‘despot’, rather than a popular revolution (see above, Chapter 8, §5). But a modernizing ‘absolute prince’ or ‘despot’ is precisely what Napoleon I had wanted to be and what Napoleon III aspired to be! Rather than engage in an examination that was possibly too painful at a personal level, the author of The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution preferred to come to blows with a mythical, eternal France.

A not dissimilar evolution is found in Mill. In 1849 he vigorously defended the February Revolution of the previous year. Thereafter, he continued to make an important acknowledgement of ‘the heroic and calumniated Provisional Government of France’ for having promptly abolished slavery in the colonies, in an implicit contrast not only with the North American republic, but also with England, on whose history ‘a lasting blot’ was left by the support of ‘the leading portion of our higher and middle classes’ for the South’s pro-slavery secession from the United States.⁹⁵ In his Autobiography, reminiscing about the debate that developed in Europe over the American Civil War, having denounced the ‘furious’ pro-Southern position of much of the English liberalism of the time, Mill added: ‘None of the Continental Liberals committed the same frightful mistake.’⁹⁶ Yet in 1861 we have seen him inclined to exclude the French people and ‘continental nations’ in general from the community of the free in the strict sense. These were years when, not altogether in jest, people liked to say that ‘negroes begin in Calais’, just across the Channel.⁹⁷ In fact, if not skin colour alone, ‘race’ was now called on to explain the differential development of European countries. What must not be overlooked, observed Lieber, still pointing a finger at France, was ‘the Celtic spirit of being swayed by masses’ and hence surrendering to political, religious and literary ‘centralization’. Absent there was ‘the original Teutonic spirit of individual independence’, which exhibited itself with particular vigour in the ‘Anglican race’.⁹⁸

8. ‘Disease’ as a symptom of racial degeneration

From ‘disease’ we have passed to ‘race’. Were these two interpretations of politico-social conflict compatible? Burke, who denounced the outbreak of ‘disease’ across the Channel, celebrated the ‘nation in whose veins the blood of freedom circulates’, the ‘chosen race of the sons of England’. It was a ‘nation’ and a ‘race’ possibly less vulnerable than others to the pathological manifestations raging in France. In other words, the question is whether the servile, herd spirit and inability to enjoy a regular, orderly liberty were a passing disturbance in the personality of a civilized people or possessed an ethnic origin that was yet to be identified.

In the United States, from the mid-nineteenth century the threat represented by the immigration of yellow skins—the coolies—was added to the traditional peril of miscegenation with blacks. The coastal region of the Pacific, warned Lieber, risked being ‘mongolized’ by Chinese, whose proliferation resembled that of ‘mice’.⁹⁹ Spencer was even more drastic. Large-scale settlement by the Chinese (or Japanese) in America would result in catastrophe: ‘they must either, if they remain unmixed, form a subject race in the position, if not of slaves, yet of a class approximating to slaves; or if they mix they must form a bad hybrid.’ The upshot would be individuals with a ‘chaotic constitution’ internally, as was sadly demonstrated by ‘the Eurasians in India, and the half-breeds in America’.¹⁰⁰

Hitherto we have been dealing with populations of colonial or semi-colonial origin, and hence extraneous to the West. And Lieber and Spencer’s agreement with legislation that prohibited non-whites from access to the land of liberty is not surprising. Although an enthusiastic expansionist, the former declared himself opposed to the annexation of any territory that involved a further incorporation of peoples of colour. But, as his biographer observes, he went further. He feared that an influx of immigrants from southern Europe belonging to the ‘Latin Race’ might also cause a ‘dilution of American blood’.¹⁰¹ Later, likewise focusing on the United States, another distinguished representative of liberalism—Lecky—drew attention to the effect of ‘the contamination of the immigrant vote’, since immigrants were often ‘revolutionary elements’.¹⁰²

These are concerns that were powerfully echoed by de Tocqueville. As the storm clouds gathered over the North American republic that would shortly lead to the Civil War, the French liberal posed an anxious question: How was the fading of the ‘practical good sense’ that had hitherto spared the transatlantic republic the catastrophe of France and continental Europe to be explained? What had provoked the crisis was the ‘rapid introduction into the United States of men alien to the English race’, who for that very reason caused America to run ‘the greatest danger’.¹⁰³ Its inhabitants were now no longer so ‘united by … common opinions’ as to render a bloody division inconceivable, as Democracy in America had believed.¹⁰⁴ De Tocqueville warned his US friends and interlocutors that ‘however great your capacity for assimilation, it is very difficult for so many foreign bodies to be digested’ with such rapidity as to avoid their disturbing ‘the economy and the health of your social body’.¹⁰⁵ The looming civil war was put down to the new immigrants from southern or eastern Europe: they were configured as a pathogenic element, attacking from without a social organism that was in itself healthy. In the face of such a danger, de Tocqueville tirelessly warned his transatlantic friends and interlocutors:

And again: ‘What frightens me is the prodigious number of foreigners that makes of you a new people’.¹⁰⁶

The waves of migration condemned here obviously involved the North of the United States. Did they lead to the emergence of radical abolitionism? In that case, de Tocqueville’s position would not be very different from that of the theorists of the South. They branded as fundamentally alien to America, and ultimately reducible to radicalism of a European (and French and Jacobin) variety, the positions of those who, to abolish slavery, did not even shrink at the prospect of a bloody conflict. At all events, de Tocqueville’s tendency in explaining the impending civil war is clear: he assigned responsibility for it to the growing presence of ethnic groups traditionally lacking in the political and moral qualities attributed to Anglo-Americans.

This type of explanation obviously proves impossible when dealing with an ethnically homogenous country. Or should we assume that such homogeneity is merely apparent? To this question de Gobineau replied decisively in the affirmative. But let us observe his starting-point. He fully shared the pitiless psychopathological diagnosis of the French people made by de Tocqueville. It was necessary to register the raging of an age-old disease in France that rendered the functioning of ‘free institutions’ impossible and which, in the name of ‘public utility’ or the ‘monstrosity’ that was alleged ‘social right’, constantly promoted ‘the absorption of private rights into single state right’. We are dealing with ‘a people for whom absolute centralization is the height of good government’.¹⁰⁷ As we can see, the same ideological themes and even the same language we have heard in de Tocqueville, Lieber and Mill recur.

But there was in fact something new. The disease now had a specific ethnic base. The carriers of it in France and the rest of the world were non-Aryans. Given the importance of such an innovation, it is an exaggeration to claim that de Gobineau was ‘not so far removed from Alexis de Tocqueville, at one time his mentor and superior, as might be supposed’.¹⁰⁸ On the other hand, there is no doubt they moved in a cultural and political circle with not a few points of contact and commonality. On close epistolary and intellectual terms, de Tocqueville and Lieber were in full agreement in their diagnosis of the disease raging in France and which, as a result of waves of migration, also risked having a harmful impact on the United States. Advancing further down the road of interpreting history in an ethnic key, Lieber counterposed to the herd and servile spirit of the ‘Celts’ the jealous sense of individuality peculiar to the ‘Teutons’. The latter were the vanguard of the West, or the ‘western Caucasian portion of humanity’. Perhaps, concluded Lieber, for brevity’s sake one could speak of ‘cis-Caucasians’, while the phrase ‘Japhetics’ had the drawback of being too broad.¹⁰⁹ As we can see, we are on the threshold of the Aryan mythology: ‘Japhetics’ were the descendants of Japheth, by contrast with the progeny of Sem (‘Semites’) and Ham (‘Hamites’). And the American liberal expressed reservations about the category of Japhetics or Aryans solely because it referred to the mythical deeds of a people that had started out from India—in other words, a region foreign to the West. Hence the distance from de Gobineau was not great, even if the latter preferred to speak of Aryans, rather than employing what he regarded as the less rigorous categories of ‘Japhetics, Caucasians and Indo-Germans’.¹¹⁰

9. De Gobineau, liberalism and the genealogical myths of the community of the free

From the outset, the self-proclamation of the community of the free felt the need to resort to genealogical myths that endowed this distinguishing gesture with a foundation. Montesquieu pointed to ‘the forests’ inhabited by ‘the Germans’ as the birthplace of free, representative government.¹¹¹ The origin was not accidental: if slavery was at home among ‘the peoples of the south’ (see above, Chapter 2, §4), by contrast ‘the peoples of the north have and will always have a spirit of independence and liberty that the peoples of the south do not’.¹¹² Indeed, ‘the peoples of the north’, who had demonstrated ‘remarkable wisdom against the Roman power’ they ultimately destroyed, were also distinguished by ‘good sense’, courage, ‘generous sentiment’, and ‘the strength of spirit necessary to guide one’s own conduct’.¹¹³ The ‘northern nations’ were referred to in England by Sidney and Hume, who celebrated as ‘extremely free’ the ‘government of the Germans, and that of all the northern nations’, which was established on the ‘ruins of Rome’ and its ‘military despotism’.¹¹⁴ Again, for the Mill of 1861, the French were excluded from the community of the free because they were ‘essentially a southern people’, stamped by ‘the double education of despotism and Catholicism’.¹¹⁵ Burke instead preferred to glory in descent from ‘our Gothic ancestors’, as well as in belonging to the English ‘chosen race’ of liberty, while Lieber worked ‘Teutonic’ ancestors into the coat of arms of the United States and the Anglican race.

At the end of the nineteenth century, the Teutonic genealogical myth met with great success. Notwithstanding the stabilization achieved with the Third Republic, the memory of the Paris Commune and of the interminable revolutionary cycle behind it influenced France’s image. The scourge of brigandage in the south, and the geographical location (not properly Nordic) especially of its southern regions, affected the image of Italy. The Second Reich, by contrast, seemed to stand unproblematically alongside England and the United States in enjoying representative bodies, a liberal order and economic development. These were the three countries now celebrated as the vanguard of the community of the free, or as the peoples who best embodied the cause of liberty. In England, as early as 1860 Lord Robert Cecil—future Marquis of Salisbury and prime minister—contrasted ‘the people of a southern climate’ with those of ‘Teutonic parentage’;¹¹⁶ and in 1889 Joseph Chamberlain (the colonial secretary) officially called on the United States and Germany to form a ‘Teutonic’ alliance with his country.¹¹⁷ This was a position shared across the Atlantic by Alfred T. Mahan, the great theorist of geopolitics, who likewise declared for the unity of the ‘Teutonic family’, of peoples belonging to the same Germanic ‘stock’. Mahan was on excellent terms with Theodore Roosevelt who, going still further in his celebration of ‘German’ and ‘Teutonic’ peoples, hymned the ‘war-like prowess of the stalwart sons of Odin’.¹¹⁸ This ideological climate prompted a reinterpretation of the category of Anglo-Saxons, which now tended to include Germany—the starting-point for the great adventure of the emigration of the descendants of liberty, praiseworthy for having rebelled against first Roman despotism and then Papal despotism.

10. Disraeli, de Gobineau and ‘race’ as the ‘key of history’

The cultural and political universe to which de Gobineau belonged is becoming clear. With him, the approach chosen by de Tocqueville to explain the crisis in the United States became a key to understanding universal history. Why did ‘liberal institutions’ in the North American republic exhibit a vitality unimaginable in Latin America? Because in the latter Europeans had mixed with the defeated natives. And as for Europe, why had France suffered a catastrophe unknown to England? Because the mixing of races had been much more radical in the former than the latter, ‘that of all the countries of Europe where modifications of blood have been slowest and hitherto least varied’.¹¹⁹ And why was an unprecedented crisis impending in the United States? De Gobineau’s answer was substantially identical to de Tocqueville’s: as a result of massive waves of migration that were heterogeneous in origin, the original Anglo-Saxon element was on the point of losing its identity.¹²⁰

It is true that in de Gobineau the anthropological explanation underwent such a naturalistic rigidification as to prompt de Tocqueville to ironize about the decisive role of ‘blood’.¹²¹ Must we then regard the author of the Essay on the Inequality of Human Races as foreign to the liberal tradition? In reality, even if we ignore the South of the United States, where the theory and practice reigned whereby a single drop of black blood was enough to exclude a person from the community of the free (and the enjoyment of political and civil rights), in Europe itself and, what is more, in the other classic country of the liberal tradition, voices echoed that were not very different from that just heard. Declaring himself in favour of a legal ban on miscegenation, Spencer stressed: ‘It is not at root a question of social philosophy. It is at root a question of biology. There is abundant proof, alike furnished by the inter-marriages of human races and by the inter-breeding of animals’.¹²²

But in this context the figure of Disraeli assumes particular prominence. The positions he adopted were clear: race was ‘the key of history’.¹²³ It made no sense to speak of ‘progress’ and ‘reaction’: in reality, ‘[a]ll is race’;¹²⁴ ‘[a]ll is race; there is no other truth.’¹²⁵ Only thus could it be understood how, although fairly small in numbers, the Spanish conquistadores (or ‘Goths’, as Disraeli preferred to call them) had managed to triumph in America and the English in China.¹²⁶ And that was how the constant ravages devastating France were to be explained: we were witnessing ‘the great revolt of the Celts’, or the ancient ‘conquered races’, against ‘the northern and western races’, who had assimilated ‘the Semitic principle’ (the Old and New Testaments) and embodied civilization.¹²⁷ The principal and primary aspect of these processes was not culture: the ‘greatness’ of a race ‘results from its organisation’.¹²⁸ This was a physiological fact, and it was therefore necessary to ‘study physiology’, ¹²⁹ so as to be able to orientate oneself correctly in the conflicts of the historical and political world: ‘Language and religion do not make a race—there is only one thing which makes a race, and that is blood.’¹³⁰

On the basis of this blood mythology, Disraeli too insisted on the superiority of the ‘pure races of the Caucasus’, to which the Jewish race belonged.¹³¹ It was a purity to be jealously guarded: ‘that pernicious doctrine of modern times, the natural equality of man’, the doctrine of ‘cosmopolitan fraternity’ which led to mixing and contamination, was condemned out of hand; if really implemented, it ‘would deteriorate the great races and destroy all the genius of the world’.¹³²

Despite the partial difference of idiom, we are not removed from the ideological universe of de Gobineau. The latter, who celebrated the Aryans in the first instance for their liberal and individualistic ‘traditions’,¹³³ not by chance dedicated his book ‘to His Majesty George V, King of Hanover’. Along with England, de Gobineau took the other classical country of the liberal tradition, the United States, as his model. It was an ‘essentially practical land’, as had been confirmed by the fact that, without allowing themselves to be fettered by the abstractions rampant in France, even the ‘abolitionist papers had acknowledged the correctness’ of the thesis of the natural inequality of races.¹³⁴ The celebration of racial purity was the celebration primarily of the ‘Anglo-Saxons’, the branch of the ‘Aryan family’ that more than any other had resisted the general bastardization.¹³⁵

There is no reason to include Disraeli in the liberal tradition while excluding the author of the Essay on the Inequality of Human Races, all the less so given that the latter drew considerable inspiration from the English writer and statesman.¹³⁶ If de Gobineau ceased to be a liberal, it was when, now discouraged, he ended up accommodating, in de Tocqueville’s harsh but accurate judgement, to the ‘government of the sabre, and even of the baton’—that is, to the dictatorship of Napoleon III.¹³⁷ But it should not be forgotten that in these same years Disraeli believed the ‘government of the sword’ and the ‘military camp’ inevitable and legitimate, for France and continental Europe (see below, Chapter 10, §1). In any event, as a theorist of race, admirer and collaborator of de Tocqueville, and follower of Disraeli, the author, disgusted by the French revolutionary cycle and statism, and filled with admiration for the Anglo-Saxon world and the ‘liberal traditions of the Aryans’, fitted into the milieu of liberalism without difficulty.

The fact that the Aryan mythology was explicitly present in other exponents of this intellectual tradition should not be overlooked. Here is how Lecky came to the defence of Ireland, from which he originated: while they were Celts, the Irish were nevertheless part of ‘the great Aryan race’.¹³⁸ Spencer reached the same conclusion in the course of his visit to the United States: ‘descendants of the immigrant Irish lose their Celtic aspect, and become Americanised’; they had fused with the other ‘varieties of the Aryan race’ and, in this instance, the admixture had proved beneficial.¹³⁹ Things stood differently in the case of France. What explained its defeat in the war with Prussia and the raging of the Paris Commune was ‘race’, which seemed to have remained stubbornly Celtic (unlike Lecky, Spencer considered the Celts wholly alien to the Aryan race).¹⁴⁰ To the authors we have just cited might be added Renan, who also regarded himself as a liberal, was ‘in regular contact’ with de Gobineau,¹⁴¹ and was a no less passionate cantor (as we shall see) of the excellence of the Aryan race and, more generally, the ‘Aryan–Semitic races’. Finally, it should be noted that across the Atlantic the Aryan mythology was prominent, and in fact so widespread as to go beyond the circle of ideologies. In 1902 Arthur MacArthur, military governor of the Philippines, demanded the United States’ right to dominion on the grounds that it belonged to the ‘magnificent Aryan people’.¹⁴²

11. The repression of conflict, the search for the pathogenic element, and conspiracy theory

Even if he rejected the facile Aryan solution, this did not make de Tocqueville any less obsessed than de Gobineau with the problem of identifying the pathogenic element attacking a social organism that was healthy in itself. After 1848 there was no doubt: the carrier of the ‘revolutionary disease’, the ‘permanent disease’, the ‘virus of a new and unknown kind’, which raged incessantly in France, was a ‘new race’ (race nouvelle): ‘we are always dealing with the same men, even if the circumstances vary’.¹⁴³ It is to be added that this ‘virus’ or ‘race’ was spreading alarmingly throughout the world. Having made their appearance in France, these ‘[r]evolutionaries of a hitherto unknown breed came on the scene … They were the first of a new race of men who subsequently prospered and proliferated in all parts of the civilized world, everywhere retaining the same characteristics.’¹⁴⁴

What once again leaps to the eye is the transition from ‘disease’ or ‘virus’ to ‘race’. Likewise in Constant, ‘cold in their delirium’, subversive intellectuals, those ‘jugglers of sedition’ (jongleurs de sédition), never tired of undermining not just a particular society, but ‘the very foundations of the social order’. They were ‘beings of an unknown species’ (êtres d’une espèce inconnue) and in fact formed a ‘new race’ (race nouvelle), a ‘detestable race’ (déstestable race).¹⁴⁵ In a crescendo, an anthropological type of explanation tends to become a racial type of explanation—the transition from the category of espèce to that of race is symptomatic. At this point the idea of a radical solution emerges. One could only hope for the ‘eradication’ of this ‘detestable race’ composed of pathogenic agents:¹⁴⁶ such was the precondition for restoring the health and safety of society.

The term ‘race’ does not possess a genuinely ethnic connotation in either Constant or de Tocqueville. Yet its recurrence is a symptom of a tendency to racialize the intellectuals who were carriers of the virus of subversion. Burke went significantly further. In addition to a clearly defined social stratum (non-property-owning intellectuals, who were not connected with the land and lacked roots), the ideological ‘intoxication’ of which radicalism was culpable¹⁴⁷ pertained to a social bloc that began to exhibit an ethnic dimension. What explained the catastrophe of the French Revolution was an alliance between two significantly different social strata: on the one hand, ‘political men of letters’ and, on the other, the ‘new monied interest’. The reasons for this alliance, at first sight so strange, were readily understandable. To begin with, the two parties shared a hatred of Christianity: ‘[t]he literary cabal had some years ago formed something like a regular plan for the destruction of the Christian religion.’¹⁴⁸ But if the irreligiousness and atheism of intellectuals influenced by the Enlightenment were well-known, one should not lose sight of the fact that the ‘Jews in Change-alley’, already alien to Christianity for religious and ideological reasons, also had a material interest in undermining or destroying it: they were hoping for ‘a mortgage on the revenues belonging to the see of Canterbury’.¹⁴⁹

The attack on the Church was also an attack on ‘the landed property of ecclesiastical corporations’, on landed property as such. The revolutionaries’ programme was sinister: ‘Is the house of lords to be voted useless? Is episcopacy to be abolished? Are the church lands to be sold to Jews and jobbers[?]’¹⁵⁰ Intent on destroying a society whose pillars were Christianity and the landed aristocracy was an alliance between subversive intellectuals gathered in ‘the revolution society’ and ‘the pulpit of the Old Jewry’, or the ‘gentlemen of the Old Jewry’, engaged in distorting the real meaning of the Glorious Revolution and spreading ‘the spurious revolution principles of the Old Jewry’.¹⁵¹ As we can see, Burke did not tire of stressing the role of the Jews. These two components of the revolutionary bloc were linked by multiple affinities. Over and above hatred of the Church and the agrarian, Christian nobility, an important role was also played by their fundamental foreignness to the nation. The intellectual stratum was itself stateless, because intellectuals displayed ‘attachment to their country’ only to the extent that it conduced to their ‘fleeting projects’.¹⁵²

But whence did subversion draw its shock force? To overthrow the existing order, intellectuals and usurers were insufficient. In reality, an integral, albeit subaltern, part of the subversive attack was ‘the Tavern’, the inebriated, bloodthirsty rabble. How was the unnatural union repeatedly denounced by Burke as the social bloc between ‘Old Jewry’ and ‘the London Tavern’ formed and sealed?¹⁵³ Who enrolled the most desperate in the retinue and service of the wealthiest, and in fact of the most parasitic, repugnant wealth—the wealth which, rather than being based on the land and love of the land, pertained exclusively to speculation and usury? It was the intellectuals—more precisely, rootless intellectuals of humble origin. It was ‘feathered scoundrels’ [gueux plumées],¹⁵⁴ wretches like the scoundrels of the Tavern whom they were constantly inciting. Wanting in religion, faith and genuine ideals, they called on the scoundrels, of whom they were an integral part, to rise up against wealth, but only against the most respectable wealth—landed wealth—while financial (and Jewish) wealth was spared. In France these intellectuals ‘pretended to a great zeal for the poor … They became a sort of demagogues. They served as a link to unite, in favour of one object, obnoxious wealth to restless and desperate poverty.’¹⁵⁵ In their turn, the Jews were perfectly content to support the French rabble’s attacks on monarchy and aristocracy, on the pillars of Christianity. The revolutionary atrocities seemed to Burke ‘Theban and Thracian orgies, acted in France, and applauded only in the Old Jewry’.¹⁵⁶

The contours of the subversive social bloc were now clear. Thanks to the work of plebeian, subversive intellectuals, here were the propertyless in the retinue of the usurers, the Tavern in the service of Old Jewry, or ‘Jewish brokers contending with each other who could best remedy with fraudulent circulation and depreciated paper the wretchedness and ruin brought on their country by their degenerate councils’.¹⁵⁷ The Jews were ultimately at the head of the variegated social bloc of subversion. It was enough to observe the development of the revolution in France: ‘The next generation of the nobility will resemble the artificers and clowns, and money-jobbers, usurers, and Jews, who will be always their fellows, sometimes their masters.’¹⁵⁸ Levelling and homogenizing everything, the French Revolution ended up making a single ‘difference’ prevail, that constituted by ‘money’,¹⁵⁹ and hence sanctioning the predominance of finance (largely controlled by Jews). If remedial action was not promptly taken, a ‘general earthquake’ threatened to flatten the social order and civilization.¹⁶⁰

Unquestionably, we are dealing with the first organic theory of revolution as a Jewish conspiracy. The Reflections and the denunciation of the infamous role of Old Jewry date from 1790. Only later did Abbé Barruel set himself to work. Exiled in England, he was received with honour by Burke, who warmly greeted him and the work that was taking shape: ‘The whole of the wonderful narrative is supported by documents and proofs with almost juridical regularity and exactness.’¹⁶¹

In addition to chronological priority, another, more important characteristic highlights the novelty and perilousness of the conspiracy theory in Burke. While the Reflections also referred to the disturbing role of Enlightenment ‘confederacies’,¹⁶² it was now no longer a question of pointing a finger at this or that sect or at freemasonry, as did Barruel, and exposing the role of Jews therein. Foremost among the charges against the latter was not hostility towards the dominant religion or throne and altar, as in the traditional Christian polemic. Burke, who was himself a mason,¹⁶³ aimed to explain a new politico-social conflict that was destined to last a long time. In the British Whig’s view, we have on the one hand the countryside, as the site embodying the natural order of society and the values of attachment to the land, and a national community cemented (as we know) by a ‘relation in blood’; on the other, the city as the site of rootlessness and stateless subversion, jointly promoted by Jewish finance, abstract, revolutionary intellectuals and the rabble. For the first time, the Jews were accused of simultaneously operating through rapacious, parasitic finance and a plebeian movement inspired by blind, destructive fury.

This motif reappeared in the liberal tradition after another major revolutionary upheaval. On the outbreak of the European revolutions of 1848, Disraeli immediately put them down to the ‘manoeuvres’ of ‘secret associations’, which were ‘always vigilant and always prepared’ to take ‘society by surprise’ and ‘strik[e] at property and Christ’.¹⁶⁴ Some years later, the English statesman of Jewish origin drew up a more sophisticated, highly surprising balance-sheet. On account of ‘their accumulated wealth’, attachment to their religious tradition and proud racial self-consciousness, Jews tended to be hostile to ‘the doctrine of the equality of man’ and ‘conservative’.¹⁶⁵ However, although shaking off oppression, they were not averse to the most unscrupulous operations and alliances: ‘you find the once loyal Hebrew invariably arrayed in the same ranks as the leveller and the latitudinarian’.¹⁶⁶ There then spread the ‘destructive principle’ and ‘insurrection … against tradition and aristocracy, against religion and property’. Fuelling all of this was an unexpected ethnic and social group: the destruction of Christianity, ‘the natural equality of man and the abrogation of property, are proclaimed by the secret societies who form provisional governments, and men of Jewish race are found at the head of every one of them’. There was no doubt: ‘If the reader throws his eye over the provisional governments of Germany, and Italy, and even of France, formed at that period, he will recognise everywhere the Jewish element.’ Thus, ‘[t]he people of God co-operate with atheists; the most skilful accumulators of property ally themselves with communists; the peculiar and chosen race touch the hand of all the scum and low castes of Europe!’¹⁶⁷

It is not difficult to hear in this discourse an echo of the resentment of the Jew at humiliations and persecution suffered. But it remains the case that we are once again dealing with a new conspiracy theory destined to enjoy fatal success in the twentieth century. What encouraged such a theory was the tendency, widespread in the liberal culture of the time, to repress the objectivity of politico-social conflict. The picture Disraeli paints of the great revolutionary wave of 1848 is eloquent. Had it not been for the occult Jewish leadership, ‘the uncalled for outbreak would not have ravaged Europe.’ Not objective social needs, but ‘the fiery energy and teeming resources of the children of Israel maintained for a long time the unnecessary and useless struggle’.¹⁶⁸

Finally, still within the ambit of the liberal tradition, the cry of alarm at ‘conspiracy’ also resounded during another great revolutionary upheaval. When Napoleonic France’s attempt to reintroduce slavery into San Domingo was defeated by the fierce resistance of the ex-slaves, Malouet warned against the ‘universal plot of the blacks’ who, with the complicity of the abolitionists, aspired to dominate and massacre the whites.¹⁶⁹ Obviously, this theme was widely diffused in the South of the United States. Obsession with ‘conspiracy’ runs deep in the history of that country and both the contending alliances, in different forms, were constantly concerned to uncover and fight it. For example, in the years leading up to the Civil War, while the South denounced the North’s ‘abolitionist conspiracy’, the latter endlessly warned against the plot that aimed to impose slaveholding power at a federal level. For this reason, reference has been made to a widespread ‘paranoid style’ in connection with the history of the North American republic.¹⁷⁰

In this mythology of the conspiracy, one element was especially significant and pregnant with consequences. The actor in the black, abolitionist plot, the anti-slavery militant, tended to be delineated in accordance with the model generally used to stigmatize the Jew: ‘Essentially weak and cowardly, he would pose no threat in a fair and open fight’; but this was where deception, intrigue and, precisely, conspiracy came in.¹⁷¹

12. The conflict of the two liberalisms, and mutual accusations of betrayal

In confronting the challenges represented by the struggle for recognition waged by the excluded, obviously the community of the free did not always react as one. On more than a few occasions, there were internal clashes and divisions. In broad terms, we can distinguish two tendencies. One fraction more or less stubbornly identified with the positions of the representatives of English proto-liberalism, who equated ‘true liberty’ with untrammelled control by the master over his family, as well as his servants and his goods. By contrast, another fraction sought to come to terms with the idea of liberty originally mobilized by servants, who refused to let themselves be assimilated to the master’s belongings and pursued emancipation through intervention by political power on their behalf, be it existing political power or that formed in the wake of a revolution from below. The struggles waged by servants aggravated the sense of unease in some sections of the community of the free, who soon sought to acquire a good conscience by repressing slavery to the colonies and changing or masking the politico-social relations that most blatantly gave the lie to their proclaimed attachment to the cause of liberty.

The entanglement of, and clash between, these two different ideas of liberty, and of the politico-social subjects who appealed to them, explains the especially complex and tortuous character of the first English revolution and the French Revolution as such. Not even the United States was spared this conflict. In fact, it flared up there in the most violent and bloody way during the Civil War, in a clash between, on the one hand, the idea of liberty understood as self-government by the dominant class and race and, on the other, the idea of liberty that experienced increasing disquiet because of the persistence of the institution of slavery. Defeated militarily, in slightly different form, as a regime of terroristic white supremacy, the idea of liberty dear to the South ended up achieving a political success in the United States that lasted beyond the mid-twentieth century.

The two liberalisms we are referring to are to be construed in an ideal-typical sense: within the same author, it is possible to register fluctuation from one to the other. In condemning as contrary to liberty coalitions composed of ‘desperate men’, who sought to escape death from starvation, Smith clearly identified liberty with the self-government of civil society hegemonized by the very wealthy. On the other hand, in calling for a ‘despotic government’ to abolish slavery, he was embracing a different theoretical paradigm, which identified liberty with the abolition of oppressive relations existing within civil society itself. And the great economist adhered to this second paradigm when he observed that in eastern Europe ‘serfdom’ continued to exist in ‘Bohemia, Hungary, and these countries where the sovereign is elective and consequently never could have great authority’, and thus was not in a position to foil the resistance of feudal lords.¹⁷²

This is an observation which, albeit to a lesser extent, also applies to de Tocqueville. When he condemned the reduction of the working day in factories to twelve hours as an expression of despotism, he clearly identified liberty with the self-government of civil society hegemonized by the bourgeoisie. But on other occasions the French liberal argued differently. In a letter of 1840 to an American correspondent, he observed:

Rather than the locus of liberty, here self-government is the condition for the perpetuation of the evil of slavery. Only a strong government would be able to abolish it. More concerned about the stability of the United States than the freedom of blacks, de Tocqueville, unlike Smith, did not go so far as to come out in favour of a ‘despotic government’. But in the case of Ireland, the same French liberal harboured the idea of a temporary dictatorship that would put an end to the terrible ills visited on the native population by the self-government of Anglo-Irish, Protestant property-owners.

Although convinced that ‘public education is salutary, above all in free countries’, Constant was firmly opposed to the introduction of compulsory schooling, since he considered unacceptable any form of ‘restriction’ that violated the ‘rights of individuals’, including ‘those of fathers over their children’. True, poverty meant that in poor families children were taken out of school and put to work early. Yet it was necessary to renounce any restrictions and wait for poverty to fade away.¹⁷⁴ On the basis of this logic, in addition to rejecting compulsory schooling, Constant did not even entertain the hypothesis of state intervention against the scourge of child labour. Some decades later, by contrast, declaring himself in favour of compulsory schooling, Mill argued against the ‘misplaced notions of liberty’ of parents and added: ‘The State … is bound to maintain a vigilant control over his [the individual’s] exercise of any power which it allows him to possess over others.’¹⁷⁵ In this different judgement, we see the transition from one theoretical paradigm to another; and the transition was also the result of the struggle of those who were excluded from liberty construed simply as self-government by civil society.

Reacting to the protests and challenge of the working-class movement, it was liberal England that regulated working hours and conditions in factories, abolishing or tempering the most odious aspects of what Marx and Engels branded as employers’ ‘despotism’. This aroused the protests of not a few liberal representatives and English capitalists themselves, who (observed Capital) ‘denounced the factory inspector as a species of revolutionary commissioner reminiscent of the [Jacobin] Convention’.¹⁷⁶ Similarly, Bismarck made a profession of liberalism and thundered against the ‘Royal Prussian Court Jacobin’, who claimed to interfere in the relationship between masters and servants and hence to ride roughshod over the principle of self-government by civil society, hegemonized in this instance by feudal property and not an aristocratic—bourgeois coalition, as in the British case. And it was precisely the Prussian–German statesman who distinguished between two types of liberalism in this connection. The first was characterized by ‘repugnance at the power of bureaucracy’, on the basis of ‘liberal caste sentiments’ widely diffused among the Junkers and nobility of pre-revolutionary Prussia; the second, utterly odious in Bismarck’s view, was ‘Rhineland–French liberalism’, or the ‘liberalism of civil servants’ (Geheimratsliberalismus), inclined to incisive anti-feudal reforms from above, which inspired an oppressive, suffocating state bureaucracy with its ‘tendency … to levelling and centralization’ and even ‘bureaucratic omnipotence’ (geheimrätliche Allgewalt).¹⁷⁷

It is interesting to note that a similar distinction occurs in the young Marx. The Rheinische Zeitung edited by him defined itself as a ‘liberal paper’, but was careful to specify that its liberalism was not in any way to be confused with ‘vulgar liberalism’ (gewöhnlicher Liberalismus). While the latter saw ‘all good on the part of representative bodies and all evil on the part of government’, the Rheinische Zeitung, by contrast, was characterized by its attempt to analyse relations of domination and oppression in their concrete form, without hesitating in particular circumstances to underline ‘the general wisdom of the government against the private egotism of representative bodies’ (often monopolized by feudal strata and a narrow-minded, short-sighted big bourgeoisie). Contrary to ‘vulgar liberalism’, far from fighting ‘bureaucracy one-sidedly’, the Rheinische Zeitung had no difficulty acknowledging the merits of its struggle against the ‘romantic’ or ‘romantic–feudal’ current.¹⁷⁸ Despite the contrasting value judgements, in both Bismarck and Marx we witness a distinction between a liberalism inclined to consecrate the self-government of a civil society hegemonized by the feudal aristocracy or grand bourgeoisie, and a liberalism ready to intervene in the relations of domination and oppression that manifest themselves within civil society itself.

When they are located in this historical and theoretical context, we can understand two significant turns that occurred in the course of the liberal tradition. We know that, initially, the liberal/servile dichotomy had a strong social and ethnic connotation. This connotation tended to weaken as the struggle for recognition intensified and the concessions that the community of the free was forced to make became more significant. We can then understand the attempt by some sections of the liberal movement to differentiate between political liberalism and economic liberalism, and thus distance themselves from those (economic-liberal) sections which, crying scandal at any state intervention in the socio-economic sphere, refused to question the relations of domination and oppression present within civil society, within the ‘private sphere’.

On the other hand, with every significant concession that the community of the free (or its most advanced sectors) found itself obliged to make to the excluded, engaged in the struggle for recognition, there were denunciations of ‘betrayal’ from the most intransigent sectors, with a consequent laceration and division of the liberal movement. Clearly distancing himself from those who refused to follow him in the crusade against the French Revolution, in 1791 Burke, in the name of loyalty to the ‘Old Whigs’, authors of the Glorious Revolution, broke with the ‘new Whigs’, guilty of having derived ideas and ideals ‘from a French die, unknown to the impress of our fathers in the constitution’.¹⁷⁹ In this case, at the heart of the conflict was the idea of representation, which the French revolutionaries and their followers on British soil, in the name of the imaginary, ‘pretended rights of man’, interpreted in a merely quantitative sense, invoking the principle of calculating a majority by head, ignoring the special function of the aristocracy and trampling the healthy arrangement of society into estates underfoot.¹⁸⁰

A century or so later, the struggle for recognition was continuing to develop in new, more advanced conditions. Over and above political citizenship, the ‘multitude’, previously branded ‘swinish’, demanded the right to health, education and a minimum of free time. It succeeded in wresting more or less sizeable concessions and enjoyed support from significant representatives of liberalism. In Britain this was true above all of T. H. Green, who theorized ‘freedom in the positive sense’ in controversy with the economic liberals of his time. They condemned state regulation of working hours in factories or of female and child labour, in the name of ‘freedom of contract’ and liberty understood exclusively as non-interference by political power in the private sphere of production and labour relations.¹⁸¹ Once again, responding to the attempts at adaptation and reconciliation by some sectors of liberalism were cries of scandal from the movement’s most intransigent sections. Spencer, Acton and Henry S. Maine were among the many to denounce the ‘betrayal’.¹⁸²

Spencer particularly stood out. Those who, under the pretence of improving popular living conditions, banned the employment of children under the age of twelve, forced parents to send their children to school, subjected factory work (especially female labour) to a whole variety of regulations, and introduced compulsory insurance for illness and old age had ceased to be liberals: they had arrived at a ‘New Toryism’. In effect, they were simply inflating the state, enlarging the zone of coercion and limiting that of freedom of contract and the autonomous development of the individual.¹⁸³ As in the case of Burke with the ‘new Whigs’, so Spencer branded the ‘New Toryism’: albeit in a different idiom, what was targeted was a spurious liberalism forgetful of its own noble past; a liberalism guilty of abandoning the cause of self-government by civil society (whether aristocratic or bourgeois) and of the spontaneity of the market, giving way to the blandishments of statism.

Celebration of the spontaneity of the market, as if its historically determinate form was not the result of political action, was philosophically ingenuous enough. For centuries the market of the liberal West had involved the presence of chattel slavery and the buying and selling of indentured white servants. Even the borderline that separated commodities on the one hand, and the figure of the buyer/seller on the other, was the result of political and even military intervention, abhorred for centuries as being synonymous with artificial, violent constructivism.

Let us ignore the peculiar ‘commodities’ long represented by slaves and indentured servants. When can the market be regarded as free of external disturbance, and hence such that the parties to any exchange find themselves in a position of liberty and equality? Locke regarded the truck-system, whereby workers were paid not in money but in commodities produced by the factory they worked in, as perfectly legitimate. In agreement with him was Frederick William III, who in 1832 silenced voices raised in protest against this system with the argument that the state did not have the right to intervene in a ‘relationship of private right’, trampling over ‘civil liberty’ or arbitrarily restricting it. For Smith, by contrast, ‘the law which obliges the masters … to pay their workmen in money and not in goods is quite just and equitable. It imposes no real hardship upon the masters.’¹⁸⁴ Unlike the liberal philosopher and the Prussian monarch, the great economist was of the opinion that the truck-system violated the principle of equality between the contracting parties and therefore justified legal intervention that would have seemed intolerable to Locke.

Much later liberal authors like Lecky and others condemned state regulation of working hours as an inadmissible interference in the market sphere.¹⁸⁵ In our times, by contrast, Hayek believed that the promulgation by the state of ‘general, equal, and known rules’, of ‘general conditions’ which must be fulfilled by any contract, was not in itself a violation of the principle of liberty. But the Austro-American author, who distinguished himself by thundering against any form of statism and constructivism, would have seemed statist and constructivist to Lecky, whom Hayek regarded as a classic proponent of liberalism.¹⁸⁶

Potentially a traitor in the eyes of economic liberals of the second half of the nineteenth century, Hayek elsewhere identified and denounced the betrayal of liberalism. Although in favour of the social state and hence aligning himself with Green, Hobhouse continued to profess himself a follower of that intellectual current. Liberalism, read the title of his book, which in fact, according to Hayek, would more accurately have been entitled Socialism.¹⁸⁷ Some years earlier, von Mises had reached the same conclusion: most British ‘liberals’ were ‘so in name only. In fact, they are rather moderate socialists.’¹⁸⁸

The charges of treason against the wing of liberalism disposed to make concessions to colonial peoples were even more violent. In France, immediately after Thermidor, anyone who resisted the turn intended to re-establish if not slavery, then the regime of white supremacy in the colonies, was branded ‘African’.¹⁸⁹ In the United States of the 1820s, arguing against abolitionist tendencies, Randolph declared that the term ‘liberal’ now risked becoming synonymous with ‘black alliance’.¹⁹⁰ The polemic against the ‘black republicans’ subsequently became the guiding thread of the struggle against the abolitionist tendencies that were coagulating in Lincoln’s Republican Party, as emerges in particular from the debate which, a few years before the Civil War, pitted the future president against Senator Stephen A. Douglas.¹⁹¹ In subsequent years, Lecky was among those crying treason. The brief period of interracial and multi-ethnic democracy experienced by the South—Reconstruction—was, in his view, the triumph of the ‘negro vote’ and the disappearance of ‘the influence of property and intelligence’; it was the advent, ‘under the protection of the Northern bayonets’, of ‘a hideous orgie of anarchy, violence, unrestrained corruption, undisguised, ostentatious, insulting robbery, such as the world had scarcely ever seen’.¹⁹²

13. The community of the free as a community of peace? Policing operations and colonial wars

We have hitherto concentrated on the challenges to the community of the free that might be mounted by the barbarians in the colonies or the metropolis, and on the acute crisis situations that could arise within an individual country. But what were the relations between the various countries into which the community of the free was divided? Precisely because it was inclined to repress the genesis of the conflict and situate it outside itself, it tended to present itself as the community of peace, deaf to the sirens of war and bellicose adventures, which were a pre-modern legacy, and as wholly absorbed in the production, exchange and peaceful enjoyment of the goods that constituted civilization. George Washington expressed the hope that the development of ‘free commerce’ and civilization, ‘in such an enlightened, in such a liberal age’, would put a stop to ‘the devastations and horrors of war’, uniting humanity ‘like one great family in fraternal ties’.¹⁹³ Indeed, repeated Constant, in ‘the age of commerce’ even ‘a successful war always costs more than it brings in’: having become obsolete as a tool for acquiring wealth, war was destined to disappear; ‘the uniform tendency is towards peace’.¹⁹⁴

This ideal of perpetual peace, produced by freedom of industry and trade, was sometimes so deeply felt that it prompted harsh criticism of the realpolitik of war and conquest pursued, for example, by England. Thus authors like Cobden and Spencer, bitter critics of their country’s foreign and military policy. In the mid-nineteenth century, the former exclaimed,

Yet the self-proclamation of the community of the free as a community of peace could generate a different line of argument. However pitiless, the struggle against the ‘savage beasts’ represented (in Washington’s view) by Indians was not an act of war, but a policing operation. This applied to conflicts with those peoples or, rather, those hordes that had not yet attained the stage of civilization and peace. Against barbaric pirates it was necessary to organize an expedition that ‘would crush them into non-existence’; sooner or later, it would be necessary to ‘exterminate those nests of Miscreants’.¹⁹⁶

De Tocqueville likewise tended to liken conflict with barbarians to a policing operation. In September 1856 he expressed the fear that the clash between North and South in the United States would end up provoking ‘war in the heart of a great continent whence it has been banished for more than a century’ (see above, Chapter 5, §9). Clearly, subsumed under the category of war were neither the expeditions that had decimated and were decimating the Indians, nor the armed conflict that had involved a significant amputation of Mexican territory.

But the growing colonial expansion of Europe, and primarily of Britain, which now also encompassed a country of ancient civilization like China, made resort to the category of policing operation problematic. On the other side, recognizing the reality of war might also play a positive role at the level of domestic policy, might serve to overshadow the worsening social conflict, and counter the vulgarly hedonistic ideology in whose wake radical and socialist agitation had developed. The ideal tension that presided over war was thus positively contrasted with the pettiness of material demands advanced by popular protest movements: ‘The masses want tranquillity and earnings’, and hence peace, but the merit of war precisely lay in throwing this philistine view of life into crisis, observed Burckhardt, who in this connection quoted Heraclitus’ motto (‘war is the father of all and the king of all’).¹⁹⁷ For de Tocqueville war and ‘great events’ could form a useful antidote to ‘our mediocre democratic and bourgeois soup’, which was the breeding ground of sensualism and socialist hedonism.¹⁹⁸ Democracy in America forcefully asserted that ‘I do not wish to speak ill of war: war almost always enlarges the mind of a people and elevates their character.’¹⁹⁹

When it involved an advance by the West, and hence by the cause of liberty, war revealed its true nobility and beauty. De Tocqueville expressed himself in lyrical terms on the first Opium War (see below, Chapter 9, §6), in a letter whose addressee was the English liberal Reeve. He in turn, on the occasion of the Crimean War (which saw England allied with Bonapartist France), expressed himself no less magniloquently in the course of correspondence with the French liberal:

14. The proud self-consciousness of the community of the free and the emergence of ‘irritable patriotism’

War against barbarians in the colonies, or against countries situated on the margins of civilization, had hitherto been a subject for appreciation or celebration. At first sight, no cloud seemed to trouble the unity of the community of the free. However, after having desired the extension to the entire planet of the enlightened ‘despotism’ of civilized countries, Mill continued as follows: the gigantic ‘federation’, albeit ‘unequal’, that was the British Empire

Backward populations had an interest in becoming part of the British Empire, in order to avoid ‘being absorbed into a foreign state, and becoming a source of additional aggressive strength to some rival power’.²⁰¹

In the years of the July Monarchy, de Tocqueville had responded prematurely and indirectly to Mill’s claim to raise the British Empire to the status of unique, privileged representative of a universal cause. The English were characterized by

With the disappearance of the semblance of complete unity, rivalry emerged between the different countries that made up the community of the free—rivalry that became all the more intense as the liquidation of despotism and, more generally, the construction of a new political regime deemed more advanced reinforced the self-consciousness of the individual protagonists. This was soil wherein was rooted the celebration, dear to Burke, of the ‘nation in whose veins the blood of freedom circulates’. The most lucid exponents of liberalism were perfectly well aware of this. While it also made itself felt in the works of authors such as Constant and, above all, Spencer, in this intellectual tradition the illusion that the collapse of the ancien régime betokened the advent of perpetual peace did not play the role it had in the French Revolution and radicalism. A source of possible conflicts between the various countries, observed Hamilton, was not only the diversity of political orders and interests:

The advent of the representative regime and the transfer of power from absolute monarchy to the nation were not in themselves an antidote to war. Holland and England, the first two nations to have equipped themselves with liberal orders, had turned out to be ‘frequently engaged in war’.²⁰⁴ Hamilton felt great admiration for Britain: ‘I believe the British government forms the best model the world ever produced.’²⁰⁵ Yet on the level of international policy, Britain remained an enemy to be defeated. The American statesman rebuked Europe, which wanted ‘to plume herself as the Mistress of the World’ and tended ‘to consider the rest of mankind as created for her benefit’. This was a pretence that must be countered with force: ‘It belongs to us to vindicate the honour of the human race, and to teach that assuming brother, moderation.’ Sooner or later, the new Union would be the one ‘able to dictate the terms of the connection between the old and the new world!’²⁰⁶ Even if the enemy was generically identified as Europe and the Old World, the particular reference was to Britain which at this time (1787), following France’s defeat in the Seven Years’ War, was the only great imperial power. Jefferson was more explicit. The ‘empire for liberty’ desired by him presupposed Britain’s defeat: not only was it called upon to be the most grand and glorious ‘since the creation’, and hence to outclass the British Empire, but it also presupposed the annexation of Canada (in addition to Cuba), ‘which would be of course in the first war’.²⁰⁷

For de Tocqueville, too, shared membership of the community of the free by certain countries did not guarantee permanent relations of friendship and peace between them. In defining its foreign policy, France must not exclusively assert its ‘interest in developing the principles of liberty in the world’. Only the naive could believe that their spread meant the simultaneous disappearance of the threat of war:

In its turn, Democracy in America stressed that ‘[a]ll free nations are vainglorious’; the ‘restless and insatiable vanity of a democratic people’ was self-evident. This was confirmed, in particular, by the transatlantic republic: ‘The Americans, in their intercourse with strangers, appear impatient of the smallest censure and insatiable of praise … Their vanity is not only greedy, but restless and jealous’.²⁰⁹ We are dealing with an excessive ‘national pride’, an ‘irritable patriotism’ (patriotisme irritable), which did not tolerate criticism of any kind.²¹⁰ This was a demand for primacy that sought utter exclusivity. If a foreigner admired the ‘freedom’ enjoyed by Americans, they would react by accepting the compliment, but immediately rendering it more emphatic and more exclusive: ‘few nations are worthy of it’. If a foreigner admired their ‘purity of morals’, the American interlocutor would react by denouncing ‘the corruption that prevails in other nations’.²¹¹

When he turned to the international rivalry between the countries making up the community of the free and the West, de Tocqueville did not hesitate to speak harshly of the United States. Writing to an American interlocutor, and referring to attempts to expand southwards also made by ‘private’ adventurers (he was thinking of William Walker), the French liberal wrote:

The American interlocutor might easily have retorted by recalling de Tocqueville’s enthusiastic support for France’s policy of ‘conquest’ and ‘rapine’ in Algeria. But the key point is different. Far from damping it down, the common waving of the flag of liberty further fuelled international rivalry. After the February Revolution, de Tocqueville declared that ‘starting from 1789’ France once again donned the ‘role’ of ‘saviour’ ‘of peoples whose liberty is in danger’.²¹³ An ‘empire for liberty’ was thus evoked whose capital was Paris, and which tended to come into conflict with the ‘empire for liberty’ cherished by Jefferson.

15. De Tocqueville’s ‘irritable patriotism’

The realism with which the most lucid representatives of the liberal tradition analysed the persistence of national rivalries, despite their shared reference to the ideal of liberty, had another aspect to it: the candid, avowed chauvinism presiding over the international policy programme. This applies to de Tocqueville in particular. The principle of consent by the governed as a criterion for legitimizing political power gave impetus to national movements in Europe as well. Prima facie, it would seem that the liberal world as a whole should have felt unequivocal sympathy for them. In this case, we are dealing not with colonial peoples, but with peoples regarded as more or less civilized, who primarily came into conflict with the Habsburg Empire—that is, a power which had remained foreign to liberal development. Yet de Tocqueville proved cool, or frankly hostile. A partial explanation of this attitude can be found in the social demands that contaminated such movements and imperilled the traditional liberal delimitation of the political sphere. The Mazzinian republic established in Rome was ‘the red republic’ and against it, and ‘the anarchical party in Rome and the rest of the world’, no blows should be spared. Ideological fury impelled the French liberal to speak of his political opponents in Italy as ‘a whole category of political criminals’.²¹⁴ De Tocqueville proved harsh and even cynical about one of the protagonists of the Hungarian national revolution: rather than agitating to save ‘Kossuth’s skin’, it might happily be made into a ‘drum’.²¹⁵

Over and above rejection of radicalism, what motivated this attitude was ‘irritable patriotism’, concerns of a chauvinistic kind, as emerges in particular from de Tocqueville’s furious polemic against ‘our imbecile agents’ in Germany, who were guilty of not countering the prospect of that country’s ‘political unification’ more firmly and effectively. Certainly, ‘the population’s passion for this idea seems sincere and profound’; but ‘nothing would be more frightful for us’.²¹⁶ But did this not ride roughshod over the liberal principle of self-government and consent by the governed as a criterion of the legitimacy of any government? That was a problem de Tocqueville did not pose. He hoped for ‘the victory of the princes’ and the Prussian army to put paid to ‘excessive decentralization’ that encouraged the swarming of ‘revolutionary breeding grounds’.²¹⁷

In relation to Italy, chauvinistic concerns should have played a more modest role. Yet in September 1848, in his capacity as Foreign Minister, de Tocqueville summarized his position as follows: ‘preservation of the old territories … and real, significant changes in institutions’.²¹⁸ As we can see, there was no place for demands for national unity. And the principle of consent by the governed? Having invited the organization of ‘a Roman demonstration’ in favour of restoring the Pope’s temporal power, de Tocqueville continued as follows:

In this passage the roles of appearance and reality are reversed rapidly and inadvertently. The ‘semblance’ of a demonstration to be organized at all costs expressed the ‘hidden’ but nevertheless ‘real’ will of the Roman population, whose interpreter was the government of the occupying power. At this point it was also possible to resort to radical measures with a clear conscience:

So here we have an invitation to make arrests even on the basis of mere suspicion. Not by chance, reference is made to terror. It is a term that recurs frequently; it amounts to a veritable watchword: ‘strike the demagogic party with terror and lift the liberal party’.²²¹ But another watchword was immediately added: ‘negate the rigours of the past, although leaving terror to waft over the future’.²²² Indeed, European public opinion, which already felt ‘deep repulsion’ at France’s conduct, must not be unduly ruffled. Yet it was a question of ‘advancing and advancing with the most extreme rigour’; all the more so because the country’s honour was at stake. It found itself faced with a ‘terrible alternative’—a Hobson’s choice:

Once again, chauvinism took priority over any other concern.

16. The conflict of ideas of mission from the American Revolution to the First World War

So we can understand the recurrent divisions that opened up in the community of the free. The one that occurred in the two decades preceding the foundation of the United States is illuminating. The Seven Years’ War was also experienced and fought by the English colonists in America, and in fact primarily by them, not only as a war for the defence of English liberty, but also (as the sermons of Protestant ministers never tired of repeating) as a holy war in which it was God himself who guided and saved England–Israel from the threat represented by France. The victory achieved over the enemies of Israel was proof of the ‘favourable providential presence of God with his people’.²²⁴ A few years later, it was England’s turn to form the core of the alliance of the ‘enemies of God’, while the rebel American colonists continued to be ‘true Christians, good soldiers of Jesus Christ’, called upon to cultivate ‘a martial spirit’ and ‘the art of war’, so as to accomplish ‘the work of the Lord’.²²⁵

This was the first major conflict to convulse the community of the free, and it spans the period that extends from the American Revolution to the war of 1812–15. As the latter was coming to an end, Jefferson expressed the opinion that Great Britain was no less despotic than Napoleon. Moreover, while the latter would take ‘his tyrannies’ to the grave with him, a whole ‘nation’ was seeking to impose its absolute domination over the seas; and it was an ‘insult to the human understanding’.²²⁶ Such was his ideological fury that the American statesman ended up declaring: ‘Our enemy has indeed the consolation of Satan on removing our first parents from Paradise: from a peaceable and agricultural nation, he makes us a military and manufacturing one.’²²⁷ Having heard the news of the end of hostilities, Jefferson wrote that it was ‘an armistice only’. So radical was the antagonism not only of interests, but also of principles, that the two countries were in fact engaged in an ‘eternal war’, which would terminate or was destined to end with the ‘extermination of the one or the other party’.²²⁸

The second major conflict was the one that exploded with the American Civil War. The dialectic we have already encountered was on display once again. The fact that for decades the antagonists had regarded themselves as members of the chosen people of liberty, far from reducing the bitterness of the clash, accentuated it. Both sides were convinced that they were fighting a holy war; they appealed to Holy Scripture and half of their propaganda texts were written by ecclesiastics.²²⁹

The first major conflict survived the second, which was eclipsed at the end of the nineteenth century by the rising tide of chauvinism that invested the United States as a whole, without significant distinctions between North and South. In 1889 Kipling noted with disappointment that the 4 July celebrations in San Francisco were the occasion for official speeches against what the Americans defined as ‘our natural enemy’, represented by Great Britain ‘with her chain of fortresses across the world’.²³⁰ In reality, this antagonism too was being damped down, because a completely new international situation was maturing. More than ever engaged in colonial expansion, and increasingly taken in by the idea of the freedom mission they assigned themselves in competition with one another, between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the various national centres of the community of the free turned out to be on a collision course. This is the context in which we can situate the third major conflict in the history of liberalism. Starting with the First World War, in particular it saw ranged against one another Britain (and the United States) and Germany—the most recent and ambitious recruit to the community of the free, which at the end of the nineteenth century had likewise begun to cherish the idea of an empire for liberty, putting itself at the head of a crusade for the abolition of slavery in the colonies.²³¹

The interpretation of the third major conflict suggested here might occasion astonishment. What obstructs an understanding of this event is the negative teleology that tends to interpret German history in its entirety as a series of stages leading inexorably to the horror of the Third Reich. In reality, on the eve of the First World War Germany was not obviously less ‘democratic’ than the United States, where racial oppression raged, or than Great Britain, which completely disregarded universal male suffrage (on which elections to the Reichstag were based), and exercised imperial domination on a global scale and even in Europe itself, at the expense of Ireland. Above all, it must not be forgotten that, at the turn of the nineteenth century, even in England and America, Germany was regarded as a full member of the exclusive club of free peoples.

So the by now familiar dialectic emerges once again. Confronting one another in a total war, which required the mobilization of culture as well as armies, were antagonists who had previously congratulated one another on being members, or even especially influential members, of the community of the free—in this case, of the great Teutonic or Aryan family, united by a jealous custodianship of individual autonomy and love of self-government and liberty.