CHAPTER TEN

The catastrophic crisis that struck Europe and the whole planet with the outbreak of the First World War was already maturing within the liberal world. To account for it, we must take stock of the situation on the eve of 1914. Let us deal with the metropolis first. There is no doubt that the struggle for recognition had achieved important successes. True, we are still a long way from the universal assertion of the principle ‘one person, one vote’—and not only because women continued to be excluded from the enjoyment of political rights. More or less conspicuous traces of censitary discrimination still survived. But the fact remains that the vote was no longer the exclusive privilege of wealth. Also largely defeated was the attempt to reintroduce through the back window the censitary discrimination that had been shown the door, in the shape of plural votes to be granted to the more ‘intelligent’ (this was a solution entertained above all by John Stuart Mill!). Here and there the first elements of a social state began to emerge; and if this involved fairly modest results, we should bear in mind the legalization of workers’ coalitions and trade unions, determined to wrest much more substantial concessions. Even in this milieu, the long road travelled by the former instruments of labour leaps to the eye!¹

However, it must immediately be added that this was quite the reverse of a pacific development. Each of its stages was marked not only by intense struggles, but also by profound divisions in the liberal alliance. While one wing of it was open to concessions, the other proved intransigent and sought confrontation. Thus, we witness a succession of coups d’état which, prior to issuing in the establishment of an open dictatorship at any rate, could count on the support or sympathy of distinguished representatives of the liberal world. Availing itself of Sieyès’ active participation, Napoleon’s 18th Brumaire elicited the ‘enthusiasm’ of Madame de Staël, as emerges from the letter her father sent her a few days later: ‘You paint for me in lively colours the part you take in the power and glory of your hero’.² Constant too viewed the turn with confidence. Thirty years later, he recalled having on its eve been in daily contact with Sieyès, ‘the true author of the 18th Brumaire’, or the ‘main motor’ of the novelty that was already foreshadowed.³ As early as 1795, Constant had made it clear that it was necessary to go beyond Thermidor: the taxation that continued to weigh on property for the benefit of the poor, who were now turning into ‘a privileged caste’,⁴ was excessive. In fact, according to various pieces of evidence (including Madame de Staël’s), the combined effect of famine and inflation was reducing ‘the last class of society to the most wretched condition’, visiting ‘unheard of ills’⁵ on it, up to and including ‘starvation’.⁶ However, for the liberalism of the time there was no doubt: the risks run by property legitimized the coup d’état. After the homage already noted to ‘conservative, liberal, tutelary ideas’, in the days immediately afterwards the new government hastened to abolish any trace of progressive taxation. On 24 December 1799, the same day Bonaparte became First Consul, Constant entered the Tribunate. But Madame de Staël harboured the idea of an even more ambitious political career for him, in the shadow of the one who (wrote Necker to his daughter at the end of 1800) promised to be ‘the protector of all respectable’ and well-off folk, finally liberated—such was Constant and Madame de Staël’s sigh of relief—from the threat of the ‘riffraff’ (populace).⁷ The significance of the initial hopes and subsequent disappointment in liberal circles was clarified by Guizot in 1869. Acquitting the task of ‘putting an end to anarchy’, Napoleon’s ‘dictatorship’ was ‘natural, urgent’—in fact, ‘beneficial and glorious’. However, contrary to expectations, ‘this accidental, temporary regime’ transformed itself into ‘a dogmatic and permanent system of government’.⁸

A not dissimilar dialectic emerged after Louis Bonaparte’s coup d’état, greeted with ‘indecent haste’ (the phrase is Marx’s) by liberal England.⁹ This was not opportunism: once the beneficent ‘traditionary influences’ had disappeared, wrote Disraeli in 1851, what checked anarchy and dissolution was ‘the government of the sword’. Indeed, ‘the state quits the senate and takes refuge in the camp’; only thus was it possible to avoid the catastrophe of the domination of ‘secret societies’ and a ‘convention’ of the Jacobin variety.¹⁰

In the case of France, setting aside a figure like Granier de Cassagnac, who declared himself a ‘liberal’ and openly sided with Louis Napoleon,¹¹ it is worth dwelling on de Tocqueville’s participation in the various stages of the ideological and political reaction that ended up de-legitimizing and then overthrowing the Second Republic. In the French liberal’s view, it was the product of a revolution—that of February 1848—which had developed in a socialist and hence despotic spirit, and which had unfolded throughout continental Europe. In Germany and Italy, de Tocqueville desired and promoted ‘the victory of the princes’ (see above, Chapter 8, §15). But was his attitude towards France very different? As early as March, even before the working-class revolt of June, de Tocqueville thundered against ‘this ultra-democratic revolution, which has extended the right to vote beyond all the limits known even in America’.¹² While the clouds that presaged the June storm were gathering, the French liberal expressed his opinion that ‘the National Guard and the army will be without pity this time’. In order to achieve the objective of maintaining or restoring order and destroying the ‘anarchical party’, one should not hesitate to recruit into the police unscrupulous types and rabble—‘outlaws’, ‘thieves’, ‘scoundrels’ and all the ‘rejects of society’.¹³ Evoked with precision here is the politico-social formula that subsequently presided over Louis Bonaparte’s coup d’état, which was successful thanks to the support not only of the property-owning classes and traditional state apparatuses, but also of a sub-proletariat happy to perform the function of gang intimidation entrusted to it.

After the outbreak of the workers’ revolt, de Tocqueville was not only in favour of conferring emergency powers on Cavaignac, but recommended shooting on sight anyone caught ‘in a posture of defence’.¹⁴ The bloody repression of the June Days was not enough to assuage anxiety; and so we have the invocation of an ‘energetic and definitive reaction on behalf of order’,¹⁵ required to put an end to revolutionary and anarchic chaos not only in France, but in Europe as a whole. In any event, ‘France is among those who will restore order’¹⁶ and terminate the ‘follies of 1848’.¹⁷ More than a year after the desperate working-class revolt, when pitiless repression seemed to have averted the Jacobin and socialist peril for good, the French liberal believed that an iron fist was still required: it was necessary to proceed ‘as far as reaction’; ‘palliatives’ would not do; to sweep away not only the Mountain, but also ‘all the surrounding hills’, it was necessary ‘courageously to take the lead of all those who want to re-establish order, whatever their complexion’. There should be no hesitation even over ‘a heroic … remedy’.¹⁸ What is indirectly suggested is the need for emergency measures with the suspension of constitutional liberties. If as a historian he tirelessly condemned the Jacobin Terror, as a politician de Tocqueville had no hesitation invoking ‘terror’ for the purposes of suppressing ‘the demagogic party’ (see above, Chapter 8, §15).

In these years, every so often a shudder ran through the liberal self-consciousness: perhaps there was a risk of the ruthless methods used to subjugate barbarians in the colonies spreading in Europe. Although warmly applauding the pitiless energy with which the conquest of Algeria was conducted, de Tocqueville let slip a sort of exclamation: ‘God spare us ever seeing France led by an officer of the army of Africa’.¹⁹ In fact, Cavaignac, having implemented the ‘new science’ called on to liquidate Arab resistance at any cost, was subsequently the author of the bloody, ruthless repression that struck the barbarians of the metropolis, the Parisian workers who rose up demanding the right to work and life. Notwithstanding the preceding admonition, however, de Tocqueville offered him constant, unwavering support.

Later, starting with the Paris Commune, there spread throughout the liberal West a tendency to challenge not only the democratic concessions wrested by the popular masses, but also the rule of law itself. In the United States Theodore Roosevelt stated an expeditious method for putting down strikes and social conflicts: ‘The sentiment now animating a large proportion of our people can only be suppressed … by taking ten or a dozen of their leaders out, standing … them against a wall, and shooting them dead.’²⁰

These tendencies underwent further radicalization after the October Revolution. We can now fully understand the fascist coup d’état in Italy in 1922. Numerous figures who professed themselves liberals, and who in fact claimed to be restoring genuine liberalism, supported it for a more or less extended period of time. This was true of Luigi Einaudi, who saluted the return of ‘classical liberalism’. For a while Croce likewise viewed the attempt to return to ‘pure liberalism’, not to be confused with insensate ‘democratic liberalism’, with sympathy. Even in 1929, implicitly endorsing Mussolini’s condemnation of any ‘demo-liberal regime’, Antonio Salandra defined himself as an ‘old liberal of the right (without the demo)’.²¹

As we can see, a benevolent attitude towards the fascist coup d’état is not explicable solely by the severe social and political crisis of the time. Instead, at issue was cancelling, or more or less drastically reducing, the democratic concessions won from liberal society by the popular movement. While the belle époque still persisted, in 1909 Einaudi had branded progressive taxation a kind of ‘organized brigandage to steal money from others through the state’.²² Mussolini hastened to put an end to such ‘brigandage’, thereby eliciting applause from not a few liberals. In the preceding decades Pareto had, as a liberal, developed a sharp polemic against the ‘myth’ of the social state, had agreed with the positions of Spencer and Maine, and had adhered, still as a liberal, to the Liberty and Property Defence League.²³ In 1922–23 he breathed a sigh of relief at the coup d’état that finally averted threats, if not to liberty, in any event to property.

On the other hand, von Mises seemed to be referring exclusively to the state of emergency when, in 1927, he pointed to fascist squadrismo as ‘an emergency makeshift’ adequate to the task of saving ‘European civilization’.²⁴ In fact, five years earlier, having distanced himself from the democratic and even socialist contaminations liberalism had undergone in England, he had thundered against the ‘destructionism’, the ‘destructionist policy’ and ‘terrorism’ of the trade unions with their strikes.²⁵ Thanks to Mussolini, all this had ceased in Italy. The fact remains that, in a book whose very title is devoted to the celebration of liberalism, we can read an emphatic eulogy of the coup d’état which, albeit with rough and ready methods, had saved civilization: ‘The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history.’²⁶

2. The struggle for recognition by colonial peoples and threats of secession

While the struggle for recognition waged by the servants in the metropolis was constantly countered by the threat or implementation of a coup d’état, the more intransigent sectors of the liberal and bourgeois world reacted to the struggle for recognition waged by colonial peoples or peoples of colonial origin with the threat or implementation of secession. This is a dialectic we have already analysed in relation to San Domingo in the late eighteenth century and the British West Indies in the early decades of the nineteenth century. During the July Monarchy, de Tocqueville observed that the colonists, in rejecting any abolitionist project, were denying the French parliament and government ‘the right to take this great work in hand and carry it through’.²⁷

Obviously, in this context the most striking case was the secession of the South of the United States, which effected advancing liberal slogans in defence of the natural right to self-government and the peaceful enjoyment of property. The North’s military victory did not terminate the conflict. Supporters of white supremacy immediately reacted to the fleeting advent of multiracial democracy not only with the lynchings and anti-black terrorism unleashed by the Ku Klux Klan, but by resorting to guerrilla warfare and armed violence. In 1874 an appeal circulated in the South to found a White League to foil by any means attempts by Congress to make black emancipation effective: ‘our war [will be] interminable and merciless’.²⁸ In conclusion, ‘[a]s surely as the struggle between 1861 and 1865 was civil war, so was the conflict from 1865 to 1877, with all the more bitterness and hatred, but less bloodshed.’²⁹

This second stage in the Civil War ended in a substantial victory for the South. While slavery in the strict sense was not reintroduced, a regime of terroristic white supremacy was imposed. Although formally emancipated, the Afro-Americans now embarked on one of the most tragic phases in their history. It might even be said that their condition touched a ‘nadir’.³⁰ By contrast, racist ‘dogmas’ and ‘racial fundamentalism’ reached their zenith.³¹

A sequence of events with notable similarities to the American Civil War unfolded in Great Britain. Here what was at stake was the emancipation not of the blacks but of the Irish. The dominant class in Ulster reacted to the London government’s decision to introduce Home Rule for the island as had the southern US to the challenge of central power, even when democratically elected. It threatened and prepared secession, arming a militia tens of thousands strong. While the planters across the Atlantic could not tolerate the loss of the domination guaranteed to them by the possession of human cattle, the Protestant property-owners in Ireland rejected with horror the prospect of being governed at a local level by Catholic ragamuffins. In both cases the self-government demanded was the self-government that the descendants of the settlers were summoned to enjoy, and which sanctioned white supremacy or Anglo-Protestant supremacy. In both cases the secessionists proclaimed that they were the true inheritors of the American Revolution and the Glorious Revolution, respectively. And only the outbreak of the First World War blocked an impending war of secession in Britain: in Northern Ireland thousands of men armed to the hilt and organized militarily were ready to go into action.³²

3. The de-humanization of colonial peoples and ‘social cannibalism’

On the eve of the First World War, unlike that waged by the servants in the metropolis, the struggle for recognition by colonial servants or servants of colonial origin could boast very few successes. In fact, the advances made by the former on the road of emancipation were often used to widen still further the gulf that separated the dominant ‘European race’ from the rest. In the late nineteenth century, while a sign was displayed at the entrance to some public parks in the southern United States reading ‘No Dogs and Niggers Allowed’,³³ in Shanghai the French concession defended its purity by clearly drawing attention to the notice ‘No Entry for Dogs and Chinese’.³⁴ What made the comparison between colonial populations and domestic animals more credible was certain collective punishments, like that provided for by the British government in India in 1919:

It was only in 1920, after the First World War and the October Revolution, that the chapter of history involving the coolies was definitively concluded, in the wake of a movement of anti-colonial struggle which no longer intended to tolerate ‘the blot of indentured labour’ imprinted by that institution on the whole Indian race.³⁶ It is true that, having played a central role in black enslavement and the black slave trade, and then in the promotion of the semi-slavery of the coolies, the liberal West presented itself as the champion of the struggle against slavery. It was precisely with this watchword that it promoted colonial expansion. But this is how a missionary described the work the indigenous population was forced to perform in the rubber plantations of the Belgian Congo:

The imposition of forced labour was sometimes bound up with genocidal practices, while on other occasions it gave way to them. In the late nineteenth century Theodore Roosevelt issued a general warning to ‘inferior races’: should one of them attack the ‘superior’ race, the latter would be entitled to react with ‘a war of extermination’, destined ‘to put to death man, woman and child, exactly as if they were crusaders’.³⁸

In truth, there were races whose disappearance was desired regardless of their actual behaviour. Franklin greeted as a providential design the slaughter that the rum diffused by the conquerors was wreaking among the Indians. However, according to the charge formulated by loyalists who had taken refuge in Canada, the rebel colonists proceeded directly to the annihilation of entire ethnic groups (see above, Chapter 1, §5). In 1851, while the hunt for individual Indians was raging, the governor of California pronounced judgement:

The programme set out by General Sherman was unambiguous: ‘We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children. Nothing else will reach the root of the case.’ In the course of his two expeditions against the Cheyenne and the Arapaho, a colonel ordered that even the new-born should be killed and scalped: ‘Nits make lice!’⁴⁰ All this would not seem to have particularly disturbed Theodore Roosevelt: ‘I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians. But I believe nine out of every ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.’⁴¹

It should not be thought that this sinister ideology, in its variations and different gradations, caught on exclusively in the United States, where, for obvious historical reasons, the racial question was more acutely felt. Let us take a look at Europe. Lord Acton coldly observed: ‘The Red Indian is gradually retreating before the pioneer, and will perish before many generations, or dwindle away in the desert.’⁴² There were races, Disraeli in turn believed, which experienced ‘exterminat[ion] without persecution, by that irresistible law of Nature which is fatal to curs’.⁴³ In fact, this was not a completely spontaneous process, as Disraeli ended up acknowledging, when he mentioned the tragic end of the ‘Aztecs’, ‘overthrown by Cortez and a handful of Goths’, in accordance with ‘the inexorable law of nature’ that sanctioned the complete victory of ‘a superior race’ and the irrevocable defeat of ‘an inferior’.⁴⁴ More explicit was Burckhardt, for whom the ‘erasure or enslavement of the weakest races’ seemed to pertain to the ‘great economy of world history’.⁴⁵ Renan, an author who liked to situate himself among the ‘enlightened liberals’⁴⁶ (and who was appreciated by Hayek for his ‘important’ contribution to this intellectual tradition),⁴⁷ reached the same conclusion: the ‘semi-savage races’ were destined to be subjugated or exterminated by the ‘great Aryan-Semitic family’.⁴⁸

Not even the greatest figures in the liberal tradition succeeded in mounting effective resistance to this view. This applies to de Tocqueville who, while he drew a decidedly repugnant picture of the Aborigines, was a passionate cantor of the motif of the ‘empty cradle’—that is, of the deadly genealogical myth dear to colonists. And, to a lesser extent, it applies to Mill. His discourse could hardly arouse a strongly sympathetic interest in the victims. The Indians seemed to belong to the ‘community’ whose state, ‘in point of culture and development, ranges downwards to a condition very little above the highest of the beasts’. In any event, ‘[n]othing but foreign force would induce a tribe of North American Indians to submit to the restraints of a regular and civilised government.’⁴⁹ No mention is made here of the fated disappearance, still less of the destruction, of the Indians; instead, a temporary pedagogical dictatorship is theorized. However, as emerges from the stance of another distinguished exponent of English liberalism, on the occasion of bitter conflicts the dictatorship over barbarians, having been pedagogical, risked turning exterminatory. After the rebellion that challenged the British Empire in India, Macaulay wrote:

Expressing genuine dissent were unexpected representatives of the liberal tradition or figures who moved on its margins. While he interpreted the social conflict in the metropolis in a social-Darwinist register, Spencer protested against ‘the barbarous maxim’ that the strongest ‘have a lawful right to whatever territories they can conquer’. What followed the expropriation of the defeated was in fact their ‘extermination’. Paying the price were not only the ‘North American Indians’ and the ‘natives of Australia’; in India ‘whole regiments of [natives] have been put to death, for daring to disobey the tyrannical commands of their oppressors’.⁵¹ Unfortunately, ‘we have entered upon an era of social cannibalism in which the strong nations are devouring the weaker’; it could now indeed be said that ‘the white savages of Europe are overrunning the dark savages everywhere’.⁵² Certainly, Spencer pointed an accusing finger at the state ‘system of colonisation’,⁵³ at the statism that was now expanding at every level—as if this statism had not accompanied the history of the liberal West from the outset, and as if the terrible practices denounced by Spencer had not often actually been promoted in the name of the self-government and free disposal of property, and had not taken the form (to use Hobson’s phrase) of ‘private slaughter’! (See above, Chapter 7, §1).

4. The ‘final and complete solution’ of the Indian and black questions

It was precisely Hobson (an author close to the liberal circles branded ‘socialist’ by von Mises and Hayek) who effectively summed up the attitude to barbarians adopted by the West, and in the first instance the liberal West, which was in the forefront of colonial expansion in the Far West and overseas. The populations that were susceptible to ‘profitable exploitation by the superior white settlers’ survived, while the rest ‘tend[ed] to disappear’ or be destroyed.⁵⁴ In fact, from the late nineteenth century the theme of the inevitable disappearance of savages and peoples who could not be used as forced labour became an obsession. Articulating it were often authors who at the same time saluted the triumph of liberal institutions and ideas in the civilized world. In 1885 a book by a Protestant minister, Josiah Strong, enjoyed extraordinary success. His celebration of ‘liberty’, of ‘self-government’, of ‘the right of the individual to himself’, was passionate.⁵⁵ He frequently appealed to Burke, de Tocqueville, Guizot, Macaulay and Spencer. Strong and emphatic was his assertion of the primacy of the Anglo-Saxon world, which had the merit of quintessentially embodying both ‘love of liberty’ and a ‘genius for colonizing’⁵⁶ that expanded the zone of freedom. But this expansion also entailed the inexorable ‘extinction of inferior races’.⁵⁷ Albert J. Beveridge, a Republican senator and prominent US political figure, argued in similar fashion at the start of the twentieth century. The homage paid to the ‘gospel of liberty’,⁵⁸ the sons of liberty and, in particular, the United States as the country and people that were ‘leading the world to liberty’ went hand in hand with the assertion that ‘a part of the Almighty’s infinite plan [was] the disappearance of debased civilisations and decaying races before the higher civilisation of the nobler and more virile types of man’.⁵⁹

A watchword even emerged that was to assume an unambiguously genocidal meaning in the twentieth century and know tragic success. While Strong invoked ‘God’s final and complete solution of the dark problem of heathenism among many inferior peoples’,⁶⁰ in 1913 a book published in Boston evoked the ‘ultimate solution’ of the ‘negro problem’ in its title. Even in this instance, it did not involve an author foreign to the liberal world, and not only because he lived and worked in the United States, advancing ideas diffused and echoed even by influential political figures of the time. Far from regretting the ‘abhorrent practice’ of slavery, he identified with the ‘comparatively few liberal and enlightened men’ or ‘liberal intellects’ who had wanted to abolish it when deliberating the ‘splendid instrument’ that was the Constitution of the United States, ‘the guiding star of the greatest temporal power in history’.⁶¹ Nevertheless, in the land of liberty there was no room for races intellectually incapable of participating in the superior ‘Caucasic civilization and culture’.⁶² In reaching this conclusion, the author knew that he was situated in the wake of Franklin and Jefferson. Happily, nature and the law of the ‘survival of the fittest’ were already acting on their behalf: Afro-Americans were being wiped out by tuberculosis, pneumonia, venereal disease and other illnesses that confirmed the natural inferiority of this people. ‘[F]ew Negro children are born without scrofulous tendencies, rickets, blindness, or other transmitted evidence of ancestral infection’. The ‘ultimate solution’ of the ‘Negro problem’ was in sight, and it would be a happy repeat of the already accomplished final solution of the Amerindian question.⁶³ In the words of a southern senator who was on the same wavelength, ‘God’s law of evolution, the survival of the fittest, and the extinction of the unfit is operating’, and would bring about ‘a gradual whitening of the South’ and the United States as a whole⁶⁴—the touch of white already dreamt of by Franklin.

In fact, the Indians had largely been wiped off the face of the earth. In 1876, to celebrate its centenary as an independent country, the United States organized an exhibition in Philadelphia that drew the world’s attention to its extraordinary development. Along with marvels of industry and technology, sideshows exhibited ‘wild children from Borneo, a five-legged horse, and wax figures of famous Indian chiefs’.⁶⁵ In summer 1911, in a remote part of California, an Indian was discovered who could not communicate in English or Spanish. Ethnological experts subsequently verified that he was a survivor of the Yahi tribe, largely exterminated over the course of a generation. The unknown, who refused to give his name or recount the history of his destroyed family, was put in a museum, where he became an object of much amused curiosity on the part of adults and children, all the more so in that the local press drew attention to the ‘last aborigine’, the ‘wild man of California’, a ‘genuine survivor of Stone Age barbarism’. After his death, his brain was conveniently preserved for further study.⁶⁶ A great philosopher, Edmund Husserl, who was certainly liberal and democratic in orientation, observed twenty years later, alas without any critical accent, that totally foreign to Europe and the West, the Indians (or rather the surviving ones) ‘are exhibited in fairground booths’.⁶⁷

5. From the nineteenth to the twentieth century

In the years leading up to the outbreak of the second Thirty Years’ War, we witness the accumulation of a mass of explosive material. At the end of the nineteenth century, corresponding to the formation of the Liberty and Property Defence League in England was the formation of the White Leagues (and the Ku Klux Klan) in the United States. At stake was halting or reversing the two struggles for recognition with which we are familiar. Across the Atlantic the restoration of white supremacy registered its triumph as early as 1877; in Europe the Liberty and Property Defence League would have to wait until 1922 to record its first victory, in Italy. The persistent unrest of servants or ex-servants in the metropolis, and of slaves or ex-slaves in the colonies or of colonial origin, and the increasing aggressiveness of the social and political circles that felt threatened by these two agitations, were compounded by contradictions within the community of the free and of Teutonic stock (previously celebrated in its entirety as the chosen people or race of liberty), which now tended to assume an antagonistic form. Moreover, these multiple conflicts were further exacerbated by an ideological climate marked by the assertion of trends—social Darwinism, a racial interpretation of history and conspiracy theory—present from the outset in the liberal tradition, but which now met with ever weaker resistance, rendering a rational understanding and limitation of the conflict impossible. Not by chance have we heard two deadly slogans echo: the first declared that ‘race is everything’; the second invoked the ‘ultimate solution’, or the ‘final and complete solution’, of the racial question!

The degree of continuity between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has not escaped a whole series of scholars who cannot be suspected of preconceived hostility to the liberal world. While she generously overlooked the North American republic (which had had the merit of offering her refuge), Hannah Arendt explained the genesis of twentieth-century totalitarianism commencing with the colonies of the British Empire. It was here that ‘a new form of government’, ‘a more dangerous form of governing than despotism and arbitrariness’ saw the light of day,⁶⁸ and where the temptation of ‘administrative massacres’ as an instrument for maintaining domination began to emerge.⁶⁹ But especially interesting in this context is the fact that not a few US scholars, in order to explain the history of their country, have turned to the category of ‘master-race democracy’ or ‘Herrenvolk democracy’, in an eloquent linguistic admixture of English and German, and a German that in several respects refers to the history of the Third Reich.

Not only the concentration-camp universe as a whole, but also the individual total institutions of the twentieth century, began to take shape well before the end of the supposed belle époque. We may begin with deportation. The successive bloody deportations of Indians, starting with the one implemented by Jackson’s America (held up as a model of democracy by de Tocqueville), recall the ‘horrors created by the Nazi handling of subject peoples’.⁷⁰ The Indians were not the only victims of this practice. The slave trade represented ‘the largest involuntary movement of human beings in all history’.⁷¹ The deportees were subsequently forced to work in a slave plantation that bore some similarities to the concentration camp.⁷² The comparison does not seem exaggerated. Precisely in this context the process of de-humanization reached levels that were difficult to match. In Jamaica, in the liberal British Empire of the mid-eighteenth century, we find a type of punishment at work that speaks volumes: ‘a slave was forced to defecate into the offending slave’s mouth, which was then wired shut for four or five hours’.⁷³ Even his completely innocent fellow slaves were forced to participate in the de-humanization of the victim and, with him, of the ethnic group. Should all this not seem sufficiently cruel, at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, white supremacy was imposed in the United States:

Once again we encounter a process of de-humanization difficult to emulate.

First in the North and then, after the Civil War, in the South, notionally ‘free’ blacks suffered humiliation and persecution of every kind. In fact, stresses a historian in language that once again demands our attention, they became the target of veritable ‘pogroms’.⁷⁵ Carrying them out were gangs already active in the North in the 1820s and 1830s and which later, in the South, achieved consummate form in the Ku Klux Klan, an organization that seems to anticipate the ‘Blackshirts’ of Italian fascism and the ‘Brownshirts’ of German Nazism.⁷⁶ No less brutal than extra-legal violence was official justice: in the South blacks continued to be subject to a prison system so sadistic that it calls to mind ‘the prison camps of Nazi Germany’.⁷⁷

In any event, the two situations were united by the violence of racist ideology. Theodore Roosevelt can calmly be approximated to Hitler.⁷⁸ Over and above individual figures, we must not lose sight of the general picture: ‘The effort to guarantee “race purity” in the American South anticipated aspects of the official Nazi persecution of the Jews in the 1930s.’ If we bear in mind the rule whereby a single drop of impure blood was enough for someone to be excluded from the white community in the South of the United States, a conclusion dictates itself: ‘the Nazi definition of a Jew was never as stringent as “the one-drop rule” that prevailed in the categorization of Negroes in the race-purity laws of the American South.’⁷⁹

Again, two US scholars have recently referred to the ‘Nazi Connection’, or the ‘American legacy’ present in Nazism, to explain the parabola of eugenics, the ‘science’ born in liberal England and massively diffused in the other classic country of that intellectual tradition, which experienced its greatest triumphs in the Third Reich!⁸⁰ In this connection we in fact encounter a paradox. Having disappeared together with Hitler’s Germany, eugenic measures continued to survive for some time in the United States. Let us observe the situation in 1952: ‘At the present time some thirty states in the Union legally forbid “interracial marriage.” In almost all these states miscegenation is a felony; in many a crime.’ Regarded as elements of contamination were not only ‘Negroes’ but also, in this or that state, ‘Mulattoes’, ‘Indians’, ‘Mongolians’, Koreans, ‘members of the Malay race’, Chinese, or ‘[any] person of negro or Indian descent to the third generation inclusive’, or even anyone ‘having one-eighth or more negro, Japanese or Chinese blood’, or even someone with ‘one-fourth or more’ ‘Kanak [Hawaiian] blood’.⁸¹ Reporting these facts is a US scholar who feels obliged to draw a bitter conclusion in respect of ‘racism’ (and Nazism): ‘The monster that has been let loose upon the world is to a large extent of our own making, and whether we are willing to face the fact or not we are, all of us, individually and collectively, responsible for the ghastly form which he has assumed.’⁸²

Finally, genocide. An eminent scholar, Tzvetan Todorov, has defined the destruction of the Indians, whose final chapter was written in the English colonies in America and then in the United States, as ‘the greatest genocide in human history’.⁸³ As for the tragedy of the natives in America, Australia or the British colonies in general, other authors have referred, respectively, to the ‘American holocaust’ (or the ‘final solution’ of the Amerindian question), the ‘Australian holocaust’ and ‘late Victorian holocausts’.⁸⁴ Not to mention the ‘black holocaust’—the deportation and enslavement of the survivors, who numbered one in three or four—that Afro-Americans seek to draw attention to, and whose main protagonist was the liberal world. Finally, branded as the author of a tragedy to be regarded as the prototype of twentieth-century genocides, the principal official (Sir Charles Edward Trevelyan) of the British policy that led to the death from starvation of hundreds of thousands of Irish in the mid-nineteenth century has sometimes been defined as the ‘proto-Eichmann’.⁸⁵

This is not the place to proceed to a comparative history of massacres, decimations and genocides, or to discuss the pertinence of the categories employed to describe them. But one point seems to me to be settled: it is banally ideological to characterize the catastrophe of the twentieth century as a kind of new barbarian invasion that unexpectedly attacked and overwhelmed a healthy, happy society. The horror of the twentieth century casts a shadow over the liberal world even if we ignore the fate reserved for peoples of colonial origin. ‘Totalitarian society’: thus has been defined the one that swallowed up deportees from Britain in Australia.⁸⁶ And, with particular reference to the ‘development of industrial capitalism’ in England, it has been claimed that ‘the gulag is not a twentieth-century invention’.⁸⁷ The usual hagiography proves unfounded even when, in reconstructing the liberal world, we restrict ourselves to analysing the metropolis and the white community.

Let us take an author celebrated by de Tocqueville as the apex of the liberal tradition. Jefferson raised the spectre of genocide in three very different contexts. He referred to ‘extermination’ in connection with the Indians as a process that was underway in the United States, could not be stopped, and was in fact to be attributed exclusively to the British. He pointed to the ‘extermination’ of the blacks as the inevitable outcome of the utopia of constructing a multiracial society. Finally, he experienced the clash with Britain as a total war, destined to issue in the ‘extermination’ of one of the contending parties (see above, Chapter 1, §5; Chapter 5, §14; and Chapter 8, §16). As we can see, even a conflict completely internal to the community of the free provoked an ideological violence that might well bring to mind the twentieth century.

6. After the catastrophe and beyond hagiography: the enduring legacy of liberalism

The horror of the twentieth century was not something that burst into a world of peaceful coexistence suddenly and from without. At the same time, being dissatisfied with the edifying picture of the habitual hagiography and situating oneself on the firm ground of reality, with its contradictions and conflicts, does not in any way mean denying the merits and strong points of the intellectual tradition under examination. But we certainly must bid farewell once and for all to the myth of the gradual, peaceful transition, on the basis of purely internal motivations and impulses, from liberalism to democracy, or from general enjoyment of negative liberty to an ever wider recognition of political rights.

Thirdly, in addition to not being painless, the historical process that resulted in the advent of democracy was quite the reverse of unilinear. Emancipation—that is, the acquisition of rights previously not recognized or enjoyed—might well be followed by dis-emancipation—that is, deprivation of the rights whose recognition and enjoyment the excluded had won. Asserted in France in the wake of the February 1848 revolution, universal (male) suffrage was abolished two years later by the liberal bourgeoisie and was shortly afterwards reintroduced not as a result of the maturation of liberalism, but by the coup d’état of Louis Napoleon, who used it to stage the ritual of plebiscitary acclamation. In this context the most striking example is provided by the United States. The end of the Civil War inaugurated the happiest phase in the history of Afro-Americans, who now won civil and political rights and began to participate in representative bodies. But this was a kind of brief interlude in the tragedy. The 1877 compromise between the whites of the North and South involved the loss of political and, often, civil rights for blacks, as is attested by the regime of racial segregation and the savage violence of pogroms and lynching. This phase of dis-emancipation, which developed in a society that continued to define itself as liberal, lasted almost a century.

There is then a fourth reason. The process of emancipation very often had a spur completely external to the liberal world. The abolition of slavery in British colonies cannot be understood without the black revolution in San Domingo, which was viewed with horror, and often combated, by the liberal world as a whole. Around thirty years afterwards, the institution of slavery had been abolished even in the United States. But we know that the most ardent abolitionists were accused by their opponents of being influenced or infected by French and Jacobin ideas. The brief experience of multiracial democracy was followed a long phase of dis-emancipation marked by a terroristic white supremacy. When was the turning point? In December 1952 the US Justice Secretary sent the Supreme Court, which was engaged in deliberating on the issue of integration in public schools, an eloquent letter: ‘Racial discrimination furnishes grist for the Communist propaganda mills, and it raises doubt even among friendly nations as to the intensity of our devotion to the democratic faith.’ Washington, observes the American historian who has reconstructed this story, ran the risk of alienating the ‘colored races’ not only in the East and the Third World, but in the very heart of the United States. Even there communist propaganda met with considerable success in its attempt to win blacks to the ‘revolutionary cause’, making them lose ‘faith in American institutions’.⁸⁸ On close examination, first slavery and then the terrorist regime of white supremacy were thrown into crisis by the San Domingo revolt and the October Revolution, respectively. The implementation of an essential principle, if not of liberalism then of liberal democracy (in the usual sense of the term), is inconceivable without the decisive contribution of two of the chapters of history most hated by the liberal culture of the time.

The fifth and final reason is the most important. I refer to the tangle of emancipation and dis-emancipation that distinguishes the individual stages in the process of overcoming the exclusion clauses characteristic of the liberal tradition. In the United States the disappearance of censitary discrimination, and affirmation of the principle of political equality, were aided by the quantitative containment and political and social neutralization of the ‘dangerous classes’, thanks to the expropriation and deportation of Indians—which for a long time made it possible to enlarge the class of landowners—and the enslavement of blacks. In Europe extension of the suffrage in the nineteenth century proceeded in tandem with colonial expansion and the imposition of forced labour on peoples or ‘races’ deemed barbarous or childlike. This tangle sometimes presented itself in a decidedly tragic form. Subject to humiliation, discrimination and persecution of every kind in the South, Afro-Americans sought to win recognition by participating in the front line in the Union’s wars. And so in some circles homage began to be paid to the courage displayed by soldiers of colour in the Battle of Wounded Knee.⁸⁹ Thus, blacks’ hopes for emancipation took the form—were obliged to take the form—of their active participation in destroying Indians!

However, it is precisely from such historical reconstruction, remote from any apologetic, edifying tones, that the genuine merits and real strong points of liberalism emerge. Demonstrating an extraordinary flexibility, it constantly sought to react and rise to the challenges of the time. It is true that, far from being spontaneous and painless, such transformation was largely imposed from without, by political and social movements with which liberalism has repeatedly and fiercely clashed. But precisely in this resides its flexibility. Liberalism has proved capable of learning from its antagonist (the tradition of thinking that, starting with ‘radicalism’ and passing through Marx, issued in the revolutions which variously invoked him) to a far greater extent than its antagonist has proved capable of learning from it. Above all, the antagonist has proved incapable of learning what constitutes the second major strong point of liberalism. Certainly, liberalism’s learning process was quite the reverse of smooth, at least for those who wanted to overcome the exclusion clauses that run deep in this intellectual tradition. None has been as committed as it to thinking through the decisive problem of the limitation of power. However, historically, this limitation of power went hand in hand with the delimitation of a restricted sacred space: nurturing a proud, exclusivist self-consciousness, the community of the freemen inhabiting it was led to regard enslavement, or more or less explicit subjection, imposed on the great mass dispersed throughout the profane space, as legitimate. Sometimes they even arrived at decimation or annihilation. Has this dialectic on the basis of which liberalism was transformed into an ideology of domination, and even an ideology of war, wholly disappeared?

In economics, clearly distancing itself from an insipid ideology of social harmony miraculously lacking any element of contradiction, conflict and tension, liberal thought has vigorously insisted on the need for competition between individuals in the market, in order to develop social wealth and the productive forces. This is a further, major historical merit to be acknowledged. However, at this level, too, there emerged the awful exclusion clauses we are already familiar with. Far from being a site where all individuals freely meet as sellers and buyers of commodities, for centuries the liberal market was a site of exclusion, de-humanization and even terror. In the past the ancestors of today’s black citizens were commodities, not autonomous buyers and sellers. And for centuries the market functioned as an instrument of terror: even more than the lash, what imposed total obedience on the slave was the threat of being sold, like a commodity exchanged on the market, separately from other family members.⁹⁰ For a long time indentured white servants were also bought and sold on the market, and thus condemned to a fate not very different from that of black slaves. And in the name of the market, workers’ coalitions were repressed and economic and social rights ignored and denied, with a consequent commodification of essential aspects of the human personality and human dignity (health, education, and so on). In extreme cases the superstitious cult of the Market sealed huge tragedies, like the one which in 1847 saw Britain condemn an enormous mass of actual (Irish) individuals to death from starvation. Is all this a definitively concluded chapter of history? Moreover, has liberalism definitively left behind it the dialectic of emancipation and dis-emancipation, with the dangers of regression and restoration implicit in it? Or is this dialectic still alive and well, thanks to the malleability peculiar to this current of thought?

Yet however difficult such an operation might be for those committed to overcoming liberalism’s exclusion clauses, to take up the legacy of this intellectual tradition is an absolutely unavoidable task. On the other hand, liberalism’s merits are too significant and too evident for it to be necessary to credit it with other, completely imaginary ones. Among the latter is the alleged spontaneous capacity for self-correction often attributed to it. If one starts out from such a presupposition, the tragedy of peoples subjected to slavery or semi-slavery, or deported, decimated and destroyed, becomes utterly inexplicable. This was a tragedy which, far from being impeded or prevented by the liberal world, developed in close connection with it. Unfounded on a historiographical level, the habitual hagiography is also an insult to the memory of the victims. Only in opposition to the pervasive repressions and transfigurations is the book now ending presented as a ‘counter-history’: bidding farewell to hagiography is the precondition for landing on the firm ground of history.