How does this book differ from existing histories of liberalism, which continue to appear in growing numbers? Does it really succeed in making the innovation promised by the title? Once they have finished it, readers will be able to give their own answer. For now, the author can limit himself to a statement of intent. In formulating it, a great example can aid us. About to embark on the history of the collapse of the ancien régime in France, de Tocqueville observed of studies of the eighteenth century:
[W]e imagine we know all about the French social order of that time, for the good reason that its surface glitter holds our gaze and we are familiar not only with the life stories of its outstanding figures but also, thanks to the many brilliant critical studies now available, with the works of the great writers who adorned that age. But we have only vague, often quite wrong conceptions of the manner in which public business was transacted and institutions functioned; of the exact relations between the various classes in the social hierarchy; of the situation and sentiments of that section of the population which as yet could neither make itself heard nor seen; and, by the same token, of the ideas and mores basic to the social structure of eighteenth-century France.1
There is no reason not to apply the methodology so brilliantly indicated by de Tocqueville to the movement and society of which he was an integral and influential part. Solely because he intends to draw attention to aspects that he believes have hitherto been largely and unjustly ignored, the author refers in the book’s title to a ‘counter-history’. Otherwise, it is a history, whose subject-matter alone remains to be specified: not liberal thought in its abstract purity, but liberalism, and hence the liberal movement and liberal society, in their concrete reality. As with any other major historical movement, this involves investigating the conceptual developments, but also—and primarily—the political and social relations it found expression in, as well as the more or less contradictory link that was established between these two dimensions of social reality.
And so, in commencing the investigation, we are forced to pose a preliminary question concerning the subject whose history we intend to reconstruct: What is liberalism?
1 Alexis de Tocqueville, The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution, trans. Stuart Gilbert, London: Fontana, 1966, p. 24.