A wide-ranging, detailed, and highly critical examination of the history of liberalism. It both engages with the ideas of liberal thinkers across various eras and examines the material context in which those ideas and thinkers existed. It centres slavery and colonialism, as well as oppression/repression of poor and working people within the metropole, and not surprisingly arrives at a very different understanding of the last few centuries than liberals themselves generally do. There are a few things I’d quibble with. Not sure it always hits quite the right note in talking about how the unfreedom of enslaved Africans in the New World and of folks subjected to forced labour in Europe were different in some ways but similar in others, for instance – not that it is awful on this question, at least as far as my non-expert white-lefty-guy reading can tell, but I think I’ve seen things from Black North American scholars that capture the nuances more effectively. Also, it probably could have done more to show the diversity within liberal thought at different moments and on different topics, though I suspect that would have just complicated the writing without necessitating any fundamental change in argument. And the writing feels a little odd in places – it’s translated from Italian, so I suspect that’s an artefact of translation – but not so much I minded, and it is quite readable. Those are relatively limited concerns, though, with what is overall a useful, interesting, and important book.
Originally posted on Scott’s Goodreads.