CHAPTER NINE

Our history of liberalism ends with the outbreak of the First World War, when (according to Weber) even in countries with the most stable liberal tradition the state was assigned ‘ “legitimate” power over the life, death and liberty’ of individuals, and ‘unlimited disposition over all the economic goods accessible to it’.¹ Indeed, as Furet puts it, ‘in virtually all of Europe, the canons of August 1914 literally and metaphorically buried liberty in the name of country’.² It is appropriate to take a look back from this watershed.

Following the prelude of the revolt against Philip II’s absolutism by the Netherlands, liberalism asserted itself in two counties so positioned that they were sheltered from the threats to which continental European states were exposed. It should be added that, not by chance, the Glorious Revolution succeeded England’s victory first over Spain and then over France, while the American colonists’ revolt only began with the defeat of France in the Seven Years’ War. Thus, the two liberal revolutions both presupposed a clear improvement in the geopolitical situation.

As regards continental Europe, we can distinguish two phases: after the defeat of Turkey at the gates of Vienna in 1683 and the fading of the Ottoman threat, criticism of absolutism became widespread. The second phase was the so-called hundred years’ peace, which extended from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the outbreak of the First World War. This was the period when liberalism also asserted itself at a concrete political level. And just as the institutions that emerged from the 1789 revolution did not survive the war which engulfed revolutionary France, from 1914 the liberal institutions that had flourished in continental Europe during the hundred years’ peace experienced a dramatic crisis. Taken as a whole, as well as enjoying a more or less high degree of peace and geopolitical security, the liberal countries had another characteristic in common: in the period under investigation here, they had marked possibilities of defusing politico-social conflict in the metropolis through colonial expansion, whether continentally or overseas.

Citing this picture, already problematic enough in itself, a contemporary British liberal scholar elevates it into ‘the historical paradigm of a liberal civilization’.⁴ In reality, a couple of pages later, Taylor himself observes that ‘[s]ome 50 million Africans and 250 million Indians were involved, without consultation, in a war of which they understood nothing’.⁵ But let us ignore the colonies, and even Ireland, which formed part of the United Kingdom and experienced such political and military oppression from the London government that it was (again in Taylor’s words) the protagonist of ‘the only national rebellion in any European country during the First World War—an ironical comment on the British claim to be fighting for freedom’ and to represent the cause of liberty.⁶

As for England specifically, I do not know if Cobden ‘noticed’ the state that inspected his mail, but it was certainly on its guard against a citizen who was unquestionably ‘sensible and law-abiding’, but whose fault was to be suspected of Chartist sympathies.⁷ And the state even more readily ‘noticed’ the Chartism and the working-class movement in general, which faced repeated suspension of habeas corpus and recourse to the use of agents provocateurs who elicited horror not only in the liberal Constant, but also in a ‘statist’ like Hegel.⁸ In the England of the time, ‘a whole subclass of informers, police narks and thief-takers’ was at work.⁹ Even the contrast with the continent as regards military conscription is mistaken: this had already made its appearance some years earlier in the United States during the Civil War and, in order to impose it, Lincoln, putting down violent resistance, had no hesitation in having an army corps march on New York.¹⁰ Military conscription was not a practice imposed on the liberal world from without, from the continent!

Historiography tends to shade into hagiography. I use this term in a technical sense: it involves a discourse completely focused on what, for the community of the free, was the restricted sacred space. It is enough, however briefly, to introduce the profane space (slaves in the colonies and servants in the metropolis) into the analysis, to realize the inadequate, misleading character of the categories (absolute pre-eminence of individual liberty, anti-statism, individualism) generally used to trace the history of the liberal West. Was eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain the land of religious freedom? Referring to Ireland, the liberal de Beaumont, who was de Tocqueville’s companion during his trip to America, spoke of ‘unimaginable religious oppression’. We are dealing with a people not only deprived of its ‘religious freedom’, but also forced, notwithstanding its poverty, to subsidize the wealthy Anglican Church that oppressed it with tithes. The vexations, humiliations and suffering inflicted by British ‘tyranny’ on this ‘slave people’ proved that ‘a degree of egotism and madness is present in human institutions whose limits cannot be defined’.¹¹

But let us concentrate on the metropolis. Celebrating the individualism and anti-statism attributed to the liberal tradition, Hayek pays homage to Mandeville, for whom the ‘arbitrary exertions of government power would be minimized’.¹² In truth, the author elevated into a model here was not only completely undisturbed by the spectacle of hundreds or thousands of wretches ‘daily hanged for trifles’, but invoked summary trials and an acceleration in death sentences—and demanded state intervention even in the private life of these poor people, on whom the observance of Sunday worship should be imposed from infancy (see above, Chapter 3, §8). It is clear that what held Hayek’s attention was neither the colonies nor metropolitan servants.

Things do not fall out right even if such neglect is regarded as innocuous. The experience of the British colonies in America that subsequently became the United States is particularly revealing. Servile, semi-servile and free labourpower came from across the Atlantic in ways and in accordance with rules fixed by the political authorities, which also played a decisive role in delimiting the area opened up to colonization from time to time. The slavery or marginalization and degradation imposed on blacks ended up impinging on the ‘modern liberty’ of the whites themselves—and so seriously that the wrong choice of sexual or marriage partner risked transforming the culprit into a ‘felon’, a traitor to his own country and race! The white population as a whole, and slave-owners themselves, were subject to a whole series of laws that gravely interfered in even the most intimate aspect of private life. The political authorities exercised comprehensive surveillance so that miscegenation and, above all, the potential fruit of such noxious mixing did not lead to emancipation and did not threaten the purity of the community of the free with its false presence. It was a crime to give or even merely furnish writing materials to slaves. The postal administration prevented the circulation of materials vaguely critical of the institution of slavery. In the South a climate of terror reigned over citizens suspected of harbouring abolitionist ideas.

It was not only the race issue and the dark cloud it suspended over the civil rights of the white community itself. We can take a key state in the history of the North American revolution and republic: ‘Pennsylvania was … renowned in the nineteenth century for its stringent laws against blasphemy, profanity, and desecrating the sabbath’.¹³ Independently of the prohibition of miscegenation, which remained in force beyond the mid-twentieth century, sexual freedom in the United States was restricted in ways that were largely foreign to the despised, ‘statist’ continental Europe. Here is the picture drawn in 2003 by a distinguished US newspaper:

To this we must add the constitutional amendment of 1919 that sought to prevent the production and consumption of ‘intoxicating liquors’—a further intervention in the private life of citizens with few parallels in other Western countries.

Overall, the history of the English colonies in America and then of the United States—both classical countries of the liberal tradition are thus involved to differing degrees—is better explained by the complexity of the process of constructing and protecting the sacred space, than by the categories of anti-statism and individualism.

2. The liberal revolution as a tangle of emancipation and dis-emancipation

Once the field of hagiography has been evacuated, in reconstructing the history of liberalism it is better to start with the slogan advanced by the rebel American colonists: ‘We won’t be their Negroes!’ On the one hand, the rebellion began by demanding equality, while on the other it reasserted inequality and further deepened it. The two demands were indissolubly linked: precisely because they established a marked superiority over blacks and Indians, the colonists felt themselves completely equal to gentlemen and property-owners residing in London, and demanded that such equality be recognized and consecrated at every level. The dialectic that issued in the Glorious Revolution was not very different. We have seen an exponent of English proto-liberalism demanding, in the face of interference by monarchical power, peaceful enjoyment of his own possessions and servants. Far from questioning it, ‘true liberty’ consecrated the existing relations of service (and, in the colonies, slavery) as belonging to an inviolable private sphere. The equality property-owners demanded with the sovereign, who could now be nothing but primus inter pares, went hand in hand with the reification of servants, who tended to be likened to other objects of property. That is why liberalism and racial chattel slavery emerged together in a twin birth.

At this point we should analyse as a whole the three revolutions from which we started out. Of the first, which occurred in Holland, Huizinga observed that ‘the revolt against the Spanish government was a conservative revolution and could not have been otherwise’.¹⁵ The same conclusion has been reached by other eminent historians. Philip II was concerned to ‘require that bishops be technically skilled (that is, theologians rather than sons of great lords)’ and was opposed to the nobility’s attempt to transform the Council of State into ‘an exclusively aristocratic executive body’. We can then understand that ‘large parts of the “Netherlands” nobility were suddenly afraid that the prince was not their agent, that his policies would in the short and medium run threaten their interests significantly’.¹⁶ So, on the one hand, we have Philip II, who surrounded himself with ‘secretaries who were generally from modest origins, passive instruments of his will’; on the other, ‘an oligarchic princely republic of communal cities and feudal lordships’, a ‘grand aristocracy’, a ‘feudal oligarchy’ engaged in defending ‘privileges and customs’ that consecrated its power and prestige.¹⁷ It is as if the nobles of the Netherlands, like large English property-owners and the English colonists in America subsequently, declared: ‘We don’t want to be treated as your servants!’ In its initial stages, the revolt against Philip II was not very different from the contemporaneous agitation of the Fronde in France.¹⁸ In both cases, what ignited the powder was the clash between the high nobility’s autonomist and in some sense liberal aspirations and the Crown’s centralizing tendencies—except that, in the second case, the influence of the struggle for national independence and the intervention of the popular masses in it profoundly altered the initial picture.

We have already seen the impetus given by the Glorious Revolution to the slave trade and the development of racial slavery in the colonies. The aspect of dis-emancipation also emerges with clarity in Ireland. Systematic expropriation of the natives intensified; in 1688 Catholics still owned 22 per cent of Irish land, but the figure fell to ‘14 per cent in 1703 and a mere 5 per cent in 1778’.¹⁹ And that is not all: ‘Catholics—the overwhelming majority of the Irish population—were excluded from all public offices and from the legal profession.’²⁰ In England itself, the Glorious Revolution swept away the obstacles that still stood in the way of enclosures. As Marx put it, having attained full control of power, land-owners and capitalists ‘inaugurated the new era by practising on a colossal scale the thefts of state lands which had hitherto been managed more modestly’.²¹ To the extent that rural labourers had found an ear more or less attentive to their lamentations, it was from the Stuart monarchy.²² Up to 1688, by dint of the control over them exercised from above, Justices of the Peace had some autonomy from the landed aristocracy. They subsequently lost it, becoming ‘virtual dictators of local government’ and answering only to the members of their own class who sat in parliament.²³ Finally, we must not lose sight of the incredible increase in the number of crimes against property that carried the death penalty, with the establishment of a regime of terror over the popular masses.

The dimension of dis-emancipation is even more obvious in the American Revolution. The terms in which Theodore Roosevelt celebrated it at the start of the twentieth century are revealing:

Unquestionably, the tragedy of the Indians was dramatically hastened by the foundation of the United States.²⁵ Great Britain’s interests in its transatlantic possessions were commercial rather than territorial; and, as we know, it was loyalists who had taken refuge in Canada who accused the insurgents of a systematic policy of genocide.

If Indians gained nothing from the American Revolution, what about blacks? The foundation of the United States involved the advent of a racial state and an unprecedented consolidation of racial chattel slavery. It is true that, in line with the watchword of the struggle against (political) slavery advanced during the revolt against Britain, the Northern states abolished slavery in the strict sense. But blacks did not thereby acquire freedom, confined as they were to a ‘caste’ different from that of freemen. In any event, there is a fact that provides food for thought: Britain abolished slavery in its colonies in 1834, while it survived in the United States for another three decades. Even the condition of free blacks was worse there, for example, than in Canada. In that British colony between 1850 and 1860, 20,000 blacks found refuge who had abandoned the United States, where they feared that laws on the return of fugitive slaves to their legitimate owners might furnish pretexts for the enslavement even of free blacks. But already, some decades earlier, more than a thousand black slaves had sought refuge in Canada after their delegation had been benevolently received by the local authorities with a stinging polemic against the United States: ‘Tell the Republicans on your side of the line that we royalists do not know men by their colour. Should you come to us you will be entitled to all the privileges of the rest of His Majesty’s subjects.’²⁶ Obviously, this declaration was not free from an ideological, self-serving element. But it remains the case that blacks in the US looked to Canada as the promised land of liberty.²⁷

The most significant steps in the expansion of the United States simultaneously sealed the extension of the democracy and domination, in its harshest forms, of the ‘master race’.²⁸ In 1803 Napoleon sold Louisiana. Although already in force, slavery had not yet assumed a clearly racial form. There were 20,000 half-castes, who to all intents and purposes were free and sometimes engaged in the liberal professions. They might even be very wealthy, and thus form part of the dominant elite. Transfer to the United States involved the consecration of local self-government and the power, in the final analysis, of white property-owners (French and Anglo-American). The result was a deterioration in the conditions not only of slaves—emancipation became increasingly difficult—but, above all, of freemen of colour. Their numbers diminished in absolute terms, and even more appreciably in percentage terms (their immigration was discouraged, while that of whites was encouraged). Hit by a series of discriminatory measures, freemen of colour now began to form an intermediate caste closer to slaves than freemen proper. In Louisiana, annexed to the United States, the twin birth of free representative bodies and racial chattel slavery was also seen in due course.

A new, considerable expansion of US territory occurred some decades later with the drastic amputation of Mexico. We already know about the introduction of slavery into Texas. But even more significant was the tragedy that struck the Indians in both Texas and California. Subjected to forced labour and a thinly disguised slavery, their children in effect became res nullius. Particularly desirable were young girls because, as a local paper put it, they served the dual purpose of ‘work and lust’.²⁹ But this was only one chapter in a horrific story: ‘The destruction and degradation of the California Indians is one of the sorriest blotches on the honor and intelligence of a nation. It was less a matter of war than of “sport”.’³⁰

3. The longue durée and comparativism

Viewed comparatively and from the perspective of the longue durée, the American Revolution appears as the start of a long series of attempts by white colonists to rid themselves of the obstacle represented by central power, whether ecclesiastical or monarchical. In 1537 Pope Paul III declared that the sacraments must be forbidden to colonists who, denying the humanity of Indians, reduced them to slavery. ‘Moralistic interference’ was also carried out by the Spanish and Portuguese crowns. Thus, a ‘continuing tension between slavery and Christian ideals’ made itself felt. But the colonists, for whom forced labour was an unavoidable necessity, responded by expelling the Jesuits from Brazil or provoking veritable ‘colonial insurrections’.³¹ On the other side, the first rebellions by black slaves tended to appeal to the Crown and to look to central government for a counter-weight to the despotism of local masters.³²

As for British America, the revolt that developed in Virginia a century before the American Revolution, and which was led by Nathaniel Bacon, must be borne in mind. While on the one hand targeting the privileges of the governing faction, on the other the rebels ‘demanded land, without regard to the rights or needs of the border Indians’, who in fact were exterminated in some instances.³³ The conflicts that subsequently emerged in the American Revolution are present here in nuce: on the one hand, the polemic against central government arrogance and interference; on the other, the demand for complete freedom vis-à-vis ‘savages’. And in fact, when we read in Bacon’s manifesto his denunciation of the collusion, in the course of the struggle against the champions of liberty, between the governor of Virginia and the ‘barbarous’, bloodthirsty Indians,³⁴ we are reminded of the Declaration of Independence.

We know that the French and English colonists also waved the flag of self-government, independence and imitation of the US model against the policy of emancipating slaves, for which they criticized the central political power. But events in Southern Africa are especially significant. Here, too, whether the colonies were controlled by the Dutch or British, the development of self-government by civil society went hand in hand with the emergence and consolidation of racial slavery. At the end of the eighteenth century, revolts erupted which, in the name of liberty and the struggle against despotism, denounced interference by central government and its claim to limit the right of masters to punish their slaves.³⁵ The civil society referred to was, obviously, the white community. The natives were descendants of Ham, condemned to perpetual slavery by the Old Testament, or were assimilated to the inhabitants of Canaan, doomed to destruction by the chosen people, the Boer settlers who embodied the cause of liberty and self-government.³⁶

The crucial question posed by eminent US historians in connection with the English colonists’ revolt in America is thus wholly understandable: Was the ‘movement of political emancipation by a section of the white settlers against control from England’³⁷ really a revolution? Or are we dealing with ‘a reactionary slaveholders’ rebellion’? In the case of the South at least, this was the principal aspect: ‘With the threat of British interference removed and a relatively weak central government to contend with, the road to regional power lay open before the slaveholders, who constituted the only class capable of treading it.’³⁸ A not dissimilar conclusion has been reached on the basis of an analysis of the relationship the Union as a whole had with the Indians: the American Revolution ‘had some of the character of a white settlers’ revolt against imperial policy’, which afforded relative protection to the natives.³⁹

At this point we can draw a comparison between the role played by the ‘redskin question’ in the colonists’ rebellion that issued in the American Revolution and the part the ‘negro question’ played in the sparking off the Civil War:

If this is the case, the history of the United States is characterized by two reactionary secessions (or secessions with more or less strong reactionary components), the one victorious, the other defeated. And, although defeated, the second would be situated in a line of substantial continuity with the first.

The triumphal rise of the United States created an ideological climate in which, when reconstructing the American Revolution, historians tended to identify directly and naively with the rebel colonists’ arguments. But today it is inadmissible to continue to ignore the voices of their opponents, in particular those (for example, Samuel Johnson and Josiah Tucker) who from the outset highlighted the significance of the black and Indian questions in the divisions that occurred between the two shores of the Atlantic. When the subsequent clash between the two sections of the Union loomed, claiming the legacy of the American Revolution were also, and perhaps primarily, the theorists of the South. Calhoun referred to Washington the ‘slave-owner’. An utterly instrumental attitude? It was in fact endorsed by the most radical currents in abolitionism, which had no hesitation in publicly burning a Constitution branded as intrinsically pro-slavery and hence, ultimately, satanic. In their interpretation of the American Revolution, Calhoun and Garrison in a way vindicated Johnson and Tucker. Just as the Declaration of Independence accused George III of seeking to incite black slaves against the colonists, so the Confederacy accused Lincoln of wanting to provoke a slave war in the South. In both cases the rebels criticized central political power for misunderstanding the self-government that was due to free, civilized men and for attempting to erase the boundary line between civilization and barbarism. Not by chance, the attempted secession could count on passionate support from prominent representatives of the liberal world and culture even in England. One thinks, in particular, of Lord Acton, who to the end believed he was supporting an authentic, great liberal revolution, just as the leaders of the secessionist, slaveholding South thought they were promoting an authentic, great liberal revolution (see above, Chapter 5, §9).

Further developing a comparative perspective and the optic of the longue durée, it might be observed that in the twentieth century the process of decolonization was itself accompanied by secessionist movements, initiated by colonists who sought to maintain control over the natives and colonial populations in general, waving the flag of self-government and continuing to be inspired by the model of ‘master-race democracy’—one thinks, in particular, of South Africa and Rhodesia.

However, it is precisely the optic of the longue durée and a comparative perspective that expose the reductive, misleading character of the view which conceives the American Revolution as a mere ‘reactionary rebellion’. To begin with, we are dealing with a more general problem. We find Marx defining the Glorious Revolution as a ‘parliamentary coup d’état’, thanks to which the English landed aristocracy succeeded in consolidating its domination over the unfortunate Irish (the Indians and blacks of the situation) and giving impetus to the enclosure of common land and the expulsion of the peasantry. Moreover, we must not lose sight of the other side of the coin. The conquest of self-government by civil society had a genuine revolutionary significance. Liberated from an arbitrary power, the members of the class that had assumed power granted one another liberty and respect for the rules, with the construction of the constitutional state and the advent of the liberal rule of law. The first to achieve this novel phenomenon were precisely the Glorious Revolution and the American Revolution, which therefore cannot be put on the same level as subsequent historical movements inspired by them. In other words, the tangle of emancipation and dis-emancipation that characterized the Glorious Revolution and the American Revolution subsequently saw the second aspect prevail ever more markedly.

At its inception, liberalism expressed the self-consciousness of a class of owners of slaves or servants that was being formed as the capitalist system began to emerge and establish itself, thanks in part to those ruthless practices of expropriation and oppression implemented in the metropolis, and especially the colonies, which Marx described as ‘original capitalist accumulation’.⁴¹ Against monarchical despotism and central power, this class demanded self-government and peaceful enjoyment of its property (including that in slaves and servants), under the sign of the rule of law. We can then say that this liberalism was the intellectual tradition which most rigorously circumscribed a restricted sacred space wherein the rules of the limitation of power obtained. It was an intellectual tradition characterized more by celebration of the community of free individuals that defined the sacred space than by celebration of liberty or the individual.

Not by accident, the classical countries of the liberal tradition were those where, through Puritanism, the Old Testament had the deepest impact. This already applies to the Dutch Revolution or, at least, to the Boers of Dutch origin, who identified themselves with the ‘chosen people’.⁴² And it applies a fortiori to England. Especially from the Reformation, the English regarded themselves as the new Israel, ‘the people chosen by the Almighty for a special and at the same time a universal mission’.⁴³ This ideology and missionary consciousness were diffused, in accentuated form, across the Atlantic. It is enough to think of Jefferson, who suggested that the US coat of arms should represent the children of Israel guided by a ray of light.⁴⁴ Once again the distinction between sacred space and profane space is seen in all its radicalism.

In the Old Testament beloved of the dominant elite, which liked to identify with the chosen people that conquered Canaan and destroyed its inhabitants, or which recruited its slaves from gentiles, two strict, drastic delimitations are operative. Anthropocentrism sharply separates from circumambient nature the human world, wherein an absolutely privileged and unique role is reserved for the ‘chosen people’. The sacred space, the tiny sacred island, is thus delimited with the utmost clarity from the infinite profane space. We might say that outside the chosen people everything tended to be reduced to deconsecrated nature, within whose orbit also came the populations condemned by Jehovah to be wiped off the face of the earth. The destruction fell upon ‘both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass’; or, in more pregnant terms, ‘all the souls’, ‘all that breathed’, ‘all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground’.⁴⁵ Within the specifically profane space, the distinction between man and nature does not seem to emerge, or does not play a prominent role.

But the exclusive restriction of the sacred space also performs an enormously positive function. Among the chosen people specific rules are in force, so that there is room for servitude but not for slavery in the strict sense. Thousands of years later, this was the viewpoint of Locke who, explicitly appealing to the Old Testament, distinguished between the servitude of wage-labourers (in the metropolis) and slavery in the colonies. And the continuity turns out to be even more striking when we bear in mind that destined for slavery were blacks, whom the theology and ideology of the time regarded as the descendants of Ham and Canaan, condemned in perpetuity by Noah, according to Genesis, to wear chains.

We thus arrive at a paradoxical result, at least with respect to the dominant ideology. The West is at once the culture which most rigorously and effectively theorizes and practises the limitation of power, and which, with the greatest success and on the largest scale, is engaged in the development of chattel slavery—an institution that involves the full deployment of the master’s power over slaves reduced to chattels and ‘nature’. And this paradox is exhibited in especially striking fashion precisely in the countries with the most established liberal tradition.

Certainly, already within Judaism the exclusivist pathos of the sacred space tended to take the form of a universalism that relied sometimes on the subjugation (or destruction) of the profane, and sometimes on its co-option. As becomes apparent above all in post-exile Judaism, the absolute transcendence of Jehovah prompted a process of de-naturalization of the sacred space/profane space dichotomy. The mobility of borders, and hence the possibility of effecting co-options within the sacred space and civilization, applies a fortiori to the Puritans and the liberal tradition, which inherited Judaism filtered through Christianity. On the other hand, the albeit partial amplification of the sacred space was a necessary response to the struggles waged by the excluded, who often derived different motifs from the Old Testament opposed to those dear to the dominant elite. They were inspired by the story of the people reduced to slavery in a foreign land who finally managed to free themselves from the Pharaoh’s domination. This was the ideology that inspired the slave revolt which broke out in 1800 in Virginia, whose leader posed as a new Moses.⁴⁶ The slaves’ ability to derive justifications for rebellion from the dominant culture itself led property-owners to regard even religious education with suspicion.

5. Delimitation of the sacred space and theorization of a planetary dictatorship

By rigorously delimiting the sacred space, liberalism radically widened the gulf separating it from the profane space. The element of regression in this is clear. A comparison will suffice to account for it.

In the most exalted texts of its culture, Europe long strove to maintain a lucid and self-critical view of itself, refusing to allow itself to be intoxicated and carried away by euphoria on account of the irresistible march begun with the discovery–conquest of America. And this approach continued to display its vitality in the Enlightenment and the culture that became part of the inheritance of French radicalism. Let us read Raynal and Diderot: ‘The conquistadores’ first steps were marked by rivers of blood … In the inebriation of their success, they took the decision to exterminate those they had robbed. Countless people vanished from the face of the earth on the arrival of these barbarians’, who took to ‘treating the brothers they had just discovered without remorse, as they treated the wild beasts of the old hemisphere’.⁴⁷ Denunciation of the extermination of the Indians was rounded off with condemnation of the trade in slaves called upon to replace them as labour.⁴⁸ In any event, it was not only in the New World that the ‘European barbarians’ stained themselves with genocide;⁴⁹ the ‘unhappy Hottentots’ likewise suffered a ‘pitiless’ massacre.⁵⁰ In addition to the colonial conquest, Louis-Sébastien Mercier drew attention to further dark pages in Europe’s history in the second half of the French eighteenth century. His utopian novel imagined a ‘singular monument’ in which ‘the nations represented … asked humanity’s pardon’ for the cruelty shown by them. Along with the genocide of the Indians, the expiatory monument recalled forced labour, or ‘the slow torture of so many unfortunates condemned to the mines’, and the subsequent black slave trade symbolized by ‘numerous mutilated slaves’. Incontestably responsible for all this were ‘the Europeans’, also charged with ‘the atrocity of the crusades’, ‘the horrible Saint Bartholomew’s night’ and the wars of religion.⁵¹

By contrast, let us now observe the way Edgar Quinet argues. In 1845, sketching in broad outline the history of the West, the French liberal historian came to the Spanish conquest of America. He could not ignore the extermination of the indigenous populations, but hit upon an explanation that was simultaneously ingenuous and reassuring. True, it had been carried out by Spain, a country that was an integral part of the West. But at the time Spain had experienced a decisive influx of the culture and religion of Islam, which was thus the actual, if indirect, executioner of the Indians.⁵² The same line of argument was adopted for other black pages in the West’s history. Had not the Inquisition had its centre in a Spain widely influenced by barbarians? And as to the crusade that destroyed the Albigensian heretics, without distinction of age and sex, was it not perhaps prepared by the prayers of the Spaniard San Domenico di Guzmán?⁵³ Via Spain, all signs pointed to Islam, at whose door could be laid even the Crusades, which precisely had as their stated target the Muslim ‘infidels’. Quinet passed judgement: ‘In the Crusades the Catholic Church enacted the principle of Islamism: extermination.’⁵⁴

But not only Islam was stigmatized as synonymous with barbarism. European high culture had long regarded China with curiosity and interest. Where were the wars of religion that had covered Europe with blood? They were prevented by a religion that shunned mystery and dogma, resolving itself into an ethics.⁵⁵ For the philosophes it was easier to recognize themselves in the mandarins than the Catholic clergy or Protestant ministers. The importance of the role played by a layer of secular intellectuals in the great Asiatic country was confirmed by the fact that the highest administrative public offices were often allocated through public competition, rather than being the monopoly (as in France) of a titled aristocracy, allied and intertwined with the clergy. In any event, in China the secular, modern principle of merit prevailed over the obscurantist principle of privilege based on birth and blood. The Enlightenment’s sympathetic attention to non-European cultures, employed as a critical mirror of Europe, became a charge in the indictment drawn up by de Tocqueville: the philosophes had turned for a ‘model’ to China, ‘[t]hat unenlightened, barbarian government which lets itself be manipulated at will by a handful of Europeans’.⁵⁶

The feudal aristocracy’s prevalence in Europe was also the prevalence of bellicose values, while China (observed Leibniz, an author already completely infused with the pathos of Enlightenment) was distinguished by its aversion to anything that ‘creates or nourishes ferocity in men’,⁵⁷ thereby constituting a reference point for philosophes engaged in criticizing the ancien régime‘s privy wars. Thus the History of the Two Indias applauded the pacific spirit exhibited by Chinese culture.⁵⁸ All this became off-key at the moment of the triumph of colonial expansionism. And so in de Tocqueville, corresponding to the celebration of war as an expression of the nation’s grandeur and an antidote to the socialist movement’s vulgar hedonism, we find an intensification of the indictment against China, also reproved for its unwarlike character. The French liberal displayed his contempt for a country whose army enjoyed ‘peacefully scraping a living’, overwhelmed as it was by the ‘general softness of ideas and desires’.⁵⁹ Fortunately, all this facilitated the conquest of China: ‘It would be difficult for me to console myself if, before dying, I did not see China opened and the eye of Europe penetrate there with its arms’.⁶⁰

Now there was nothing to be learnt from non-European civilizations. In 1835 Macaulay declared that ‘a single shelf of a good European library [is] worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia’.⁶¹ Accordingly, we can understand the indifference with which the destruction of the Summer Palace, in all its incomparable beauty, by English and French troops during the second Opium War was viewed. Expressing his indignation was Victor Hugo: ‘We Europeans are the civilized ones and for us the Chinese are barbarians. And here is what civilization has done to barbarism. In history’s eyes, one bandit will be called France, the other will be called England’.⁶² Some years later, on the occasion of the Commune, the good liberal Bagehot expressed his contempt for the behaviour of the rebels, whom he criticized for having wanted to destroy everything worth seeing and admiring in Paris, any testament to ‘culture’ and civilization.⁶³ Thus was credited the rumour, which subsequently proved unfounded, that the communards had destroyed the Louvre. But no mention was made here of the destruction of the Summer Palace in Peking, which actually occurred roughly ten years earlier, with the decisive participation of the country that for Bagehot was the privileged embodiment of the cause of liberty and civilization.

Authors like Las Casas and Montaigne had problematized the boundaries between civilization and barbarism and made them fluid. In this perspective civilization advanced through exchanges between different cultures. Developing their thinking in the years when missionaries from Christian Europe were received with respect and benevolence in China, while in France Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes and resumed persecution of the Huguenots, Bayle and Leibniz reached a radical conclusion. It was a pity that the relationship between China and European was marked by its one-sidedness; the presence of Chinese missionaries in Europe would definitely be beneficial!⁶⁴ Later, Raynal and Diderot’s History assigned a black Spartacus the task of advancing the cause of freedom, breaking the chains of slavery and putting an end to the barbarism of which Europeans were the agents. But this attempt to cast a glance at Europe, as it were, from without, recognizing the contributions of different cultures to the cause of advancing civilization, did not survive the irresistible march of colonial expansionism. Having triumphed on a planetary scale, the liberal West saw fit to identify itself permanently with the cause of civilization and liberty. On the basis of this absolute and immutable pre-eminence, we see an exclusive elite—the restricted community of the free—explicitly formulate the claim, hitherto unknown and unheard of, to exercise a planetary dictatorship over the rest of humanity.

This criticism is all the more apt if we bear in mind Washington’s characterization of the Indians as an ‘unenlightened race’ (see above, Chapter 1, §5).

So exalted was the self-consciousness of the liberal West in the nineteenth century that sometimes it did not even feel the need to confer ideological legitimacy on its wars. Unlike John Stuart Mill, de Tocqueville did not present the Opium War as a crusade for free trade and liberty as such. For the French liberal the main cause for celebration was the West’s overwhelming power, and this power was also configured as a war machine ideologically:

De Tocqueville’s attitude left de Gobineau puzzled. The first ridiculed the mythology of blood entertained by the second. There was in fact another side to the coin. Once adopted as the key to explaining universal history, racial contamination cast its fatal shadow over the West itself, which was likewise condemned to decadence. Hence for de Gobineau there was no insurmountable barrier between conquerors and colonial peoples. As for the economy, the latter would sooner or later manage to develop the textile industry (the key industry of the period) and defeat British and European competition in general.⁶⁷ Morally, there was no reason to idealize the conquerors: in Persia and the Middle East ‘their immorality and rapacity’ were manifest. If the natives ‘are rogues’, ‘in some respects they can be considered our cousins’; ‘this is how we will be tomorrow’.⁶⁸ De Tocqueville’s criticism focused precisely on this point: ‘You say that one day we shall resemble the rabble you see before you: maybe. But before this happens, we shall have been its masters.’ As we can see, from the ‘rogues’ they were in de Gobineau, the peoples of the Middle East have now been transformed into a ‘rabble’, with this fully legitimizing the domination exercised over them by European ‘masters’. It is with reference to the latter that de Tocqueville employs the more indulgent term ‘rogues’: ‘If, as I agree, they are often great rogues, at least they are rogues to whom God has given strength and power and whom He has manifestly placed, for a certain period, at the head of the human race’. Faced with this, de Gobineau’s reservations about the ‘immorality’ and ‘rapacity’ of the conquerors, and the thesis of their basic kinship with subject peoples, seemed to lose any significance. De Tocqueville continued:

De Gobineau, who regarded himself as a ‘citizen of the world’, refused to give in: ‘I take an extraordinary interest in my daily conversations with the natives, and am very far from having the bad opinion of them people are pleased to entertain in Europe’.⁷⁰ This was not a viewpoint de Tocqueville could share. We already know his opinion that the ‘last’ member of the ‘European race’ was always ‘first next to the savages’—that is, in the last analysis, next to ‘all the other races’. Of his daughter, de Gobineau remarked: ‘She has made herself a true Turkoman, save for her colour, which is that of an Abyssinian’.⁷¹ De Tocqueville did not respond to this observation, but it should not be forgotten that for him it was precisely ‘half-breeds’ who represented the most serious threat to the West’s supremacy and civilization as such (see above, Chapter 7, §4).

There is no doubt about the greater intellectual and political subtlety of de Tocqueville who, criticizing the blood myth, distanced himself from the ideology increasingly prevalent in the South of the United States, where de Gobineau’s views about the natural and eternal inequality of races met with understandable success. Yet it is to be noted that, much more so than the latter, it was the former who created an unbridgeable gulf between the West and colonial peoples. How are we to explain this fact?

Straddling the American Revolution, ‘[r]acism became an essential, an unacknowledged, ingredient of the republican ideology’—that is, of the ideology which presided over the construction of ‘master-race democracy’.⁷² In the mid-nineteenth century this regime tended to characterize the relationship between the West as a whole and colonial peoples. Certainly, in order to impart credibility to its self-proclamation, the community of the free was ever more inclined in this period to abolish slavery in the strict sense—hereditary slavery—which was in fact replaced by other forms of forced labour. But the model of a ‘master-race democracy’ remained unchanged. The gradual abolition of censitary discrimination in the metropolis gave further impetus to colonial expansion, which now in fact enjoyed the consent of the popular classes in the metropolis. These, like the poor whites in the North American republic, aspired to be co-opted into the bloc of ‘masters’. And once again what explained and legitimized the barrier dividing masters and servants was a more or less marked, and more or less crude racial ideology, which was now pervasive. This was a trend that also made its influence felt on de Tocqueville.

Having been asserted in countries (Holland, England and the United States) more involved than any others in the slave trade and colonial expansion (overseas in the case of the first two, continentally in that of the third), liberalism spread in the West at a time when it seemed destined by Providence itself to dominate the whole world and wipe out all other cultures. In these circumstances, the self-critical thinking and awareness of limits that had characterized the pre-eminent voices of European and Western culture tended to disappear. The inheritors of that tradition were French radicalism, and then Marx. The latter waxed ironic about the ‘civilizing wars’ of the colonial powers. In reality, during the Opium War, while China, ‘the semi-barbarian[,] remained faithful to the principles of the moral law’, the ‘civilized’ opposed to it the principle of free trade,⁷³ the principle so eloquently defended by Mill. But especially significant are the pages of Capital devoted to original capitalist accumulation and denunciation of ‘the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population’, and the transformation of Africa into ‘a preserve for the commercial hunting of blackskins’.⁷⁴ This was a chapter of history that was extended in the subsequent colonial expansion.

7. Oscillations and limitations of the Marxian model

Clearly distancing himself from the apologetics more dominant than ever today, Marx drew attention to the ‘conservative character of the English revolution’. While, on the one hand, it marked ‘the transition from absolute monarchy to constitutional monarchy’, and promoted the development of industry and the bourgeoisie,⁷⁵ on the other, it gave impetus to a gigantic, ruthlessly implemented expropriation of peasants. Examined closely, the Glorious Revolution emerged as ‘a parliamentary coup d’état for [the] transformation of [communal property] into private property’.⁷⁶ We thus encounter a formula that in a way evokes the tangle of emancipation and dis-emancipation I have stressed: the mention, albeit vague, of parliament’s decisive role in this event draws attention to the disappearance of the absolute monarchy, while making clear reference to the tragedy of the peasantry. Someone who distinguished himself in the ideological legitimation of the colossal expropriation and ruthless repression that struck its victims was Locke. This ‘most particular supporter of the lash for vagrants and paupers’⁷⁷ was in fact, at the same time, the ‘father’ of ‘free-thinking’,⁷⁸ the protagonist of the great ideological battle that deconsecrated absolute monarchy and stripped it of its Christian and Biblical cover. And once again, as in the Glorious Revolution, so in the liberal philosopher in whom it found theoretical expression, the tangle of emancipation and dis-emancipation reveals itself. Finally, Marx recalled that corresponding to the advent of constitutional monarchy in England was a further intensification of the dictatorship exercised by English property-owners over Ireland.

Over and above any particular country, what should especially be borne in mind are the general considerations offered by The Holy Family. With the disappearance of the ancien régime, corresponding to the dissolution of the ‘political existence’ of property was its ‘more potent existence’, which could now unfold ‘the full scale of its own existence’.⁷⁹ Or, as On the Jewish Question put it: ‘The shaking-off of the political yoke was at the same time the shaking-off of the bonds which had held in check the egoistic spirit of civil society. Political emancipation was at the same time the emancipation of civil society from politics, from even the appearance of a universal content.’⁸⁰

Marx brought out the entanglement of emancipation and dis-emancipation. The ‘more potent existence’ injected into property was also the autonomization of property in human cattle from the controls, albeit vague, of the Church and Crown, with the consequent crystallization of racial chattel slavery. And it was also the disappearance of the restrictions placed by the Crown on the expansion of the colonists, who could now proceed unhindered, without being in any way concerned with the terrible human costs inflicted on the Indians. In England, enclosure of common land was followed by the new law of 1834 which, abolishing any other form of assistance, confronted the poor with a brutal alternative: death from starvation or internment in a total institution.

However, we must not lose sight of the fact that we are not dealing with an autonomization of property as such. What corresponded to the ‘more potent existence’ of the colonists’ property was the death-agony of another form of property. It was a gigantic process of expropriation (justified and theorized by Locke and de Tocqueville alike), which unfolded at the expense not only of colonial peoples—in America or Ireland—but also of English peasants. The same reasons that led me to regard the category of ‘proprietorial individualism’ as inadequate and misleading now prompt me to seek to clarify Marx’s analysis. The process we are examining was the autonomization of the property of those who already enjoyed recognition, of those who aspired to form themselves into the community or caste of freemen. Liberated from the fetters of control by Crown and Church was not only bourgeois property, but also traditional noble property. In the England that emerged from the Glorious Revolution, the landed aristocracy consolidated its enjoyment of certain privileges (hunting, for example) and consecrated its political power in representative bodies—in the first instance, the House of Lords.

With Marx we can say that ‘[t]he political revolution is the revolution of civil society.’⁸¹ But it should be added that civil society can be hegemonized by the bourgeoisie or the landed aristocracy, or can be characterized by a compromise between these two classes. And the liberal revolution consists in this political revolution. Up to this point we can only subscribe to Marx’s analysis and admire it for its acuteness. But he continues by opposing the ‘political revolution’ to the ‘social revolution’, or ‘political emancipation’, which is the objective of the first, to ‘social emancipation’ (the end of class domination), which is the objective of the second. The limitation of this conceptual couplet is that it does not take account of the fact that for some social or ethnic groups the liberal revolution did not involve any kind of emancipation, but in fact meant the reverse. Is it really correct to define the United States of 1844 (the year On the Jewish Question was published) as ‘the country of complete political emancipation’?⁸² Certainly, the reference is to the rapid disappearance of censitary discrimination, which continued to be marked in France under the July Monarchy, and in Britain. However, what induced this differential development in the case of the North American republic was the availability of land (taken from the Indians) and the confinement of a large part of the ‘dangerous classes’ in slavery. In other words, the property barrier proved much weaker because the race barrier was much more rigid. Differently put, in the United States democracy emerged first because it emerged as a Herrenvolk democracy, as a ‘master-race democracy’, and this specific form proved so tenacious that it survived the Civil War by many decades. It is highly problematic to regard Herrenvolk democracy as complete political emancipation.

We cannot even unreservedly endorse Marx’s thesis that ‘[p]olitical emancipation is certainly a big step forward.’⁸³ We already know that the most tragic chapter in the history of the Indians began with the American Revolution, and that the period between the Glorious Revolution and the American Revolution witnessed the emergence of a racial chattel slavery of unprecedented harshness. In the case of Britain, it was Marx himself who drew attention to the far from positive consequences of the ‘coup d’état’ of 1688–89 for English peasants and the Irish population.

Even more debatable is the subsequent identification of political revolution with bourgeois revolution. The latter category is at once too narrow and too broad. As regards the first aspect, it is difficult to subsume under the category of bourgeois revolution the Glorious Revolution and the parliamentary revolt that preceded the upheavals that began in France in 1789, not to mention the struggles against monarchical absolutism, explicitly led by the liberal nobility, which developed in Switzerland and other countries. On the other hand, the category of bourgeois revolution is too broad: it subsumes both the American Revolution that sealed the advent of a racial state and the French Revolution and the San Domingo Revolution, which involved complete emancipation of black slaves.

The model proposed here is different. It equates ‘political revolution’ qua ‘revolution of civil society’, referred to by Marx, with the liberal revolution in the strict sense. Certainly, in order to be able to promote its emancipation from absolute power, civil society had to have achieved a certain level of development. Analysed in their initial phases, the revolutions that occurred in the Netherlands, England, America, France and Latin America were not very different from one another: they were all liberal revolutions. What clearly differentiated them were three factors: the varying configurations of civil society; the social, political and ideological conflicts that developed within it (one thinks in the French case of the struggle between nobility and bourgeoisie); and the irruption in the struggle of servants and slaves. With the emergence of the last factor, the struggle for the emancipation of civil society waged by the property-owning classes became entangled with the struggle waged against them by those who did not want to be regarded as objects of property and who sought to secure recognition.