Liberalism : a counter-history / Domenico Losurdo

What is liberalism? -- Liberalism and racial slavery: a unique twin birth -- White servants between metropolis and colonies: proto-liberal society -- Were eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England and America liberal? -- The Revolution in France and San Domingo, the crisis of the English and American models, and the formation of radicalism on either side of the Atlantic -- The struggle for recognition by the instruments of labour in the metropolis and the reaction of the community of the free -- The West and the barbarians: a 'master-race democracy' on a planetary scale -- Self-consciousness, false consciousness, and conflicts in the community of the free -- Sacred space and profane space in the history of liberalism -LIberalism and the catastrophe of the twentieth century.

One of Europe's leading intellectual historians deconstructs liberalism's dark side. In this definitive historical investigation, Italian author and philosopher Domenico Losurdo argues that from the outset liberalism, as a philosophical position and ideology, has been bound up with the most illiberal of policies: slavery, colonialism, genocide, racism and snobbery. Narrating an intellectual history running from the eighteenth through to the twentieth centuries, Losurdo examines the thought of preeminent liberal writers such as Locke, Burke, Tocqueville, Constant, Bentham, and Sieyès, revealing the inner contradictions of an intellectual position that has exercised a formative influence on today's politics. Among the dominant strains of liberalism, he discerns the counter-currents of more radical positions, lost in the constitution of the modern world order.

Translated from the Italian to English