Skip to content

Liberalism

Metadata

Highlights

On the other hand, however, disdaining the half-measures and timidity or fear of those who restricted themselves to accepting it as a necessary ‘evil’, Calhoun declared slavery to be ‘a positive good’ that civilization could not possibly renounce. — location: 74 ^ref-61772

Locke was ‘the last major philosopher to seek a justification for absolute and perpetual slavery’. — location: 111 ^ref-46904

in connection with George Washington: ‘He was one of us—a slaveholder and a planter.’ — location: 123 ^ref-24880

female slaves. When one of the latter died, following a mysterious pregnancy and subsequent abortion, he recorded in his diary the painful financial loss suffered: ‘fully one thousand dollars—the hard labor of a year’. — location: 129 ^ref-49022

while evincing unease at hereditary, racial slavery, demanded a sort of penal slavery for those who, regardless of their skin colour, were guilty of vagrancy. Was Hutcheson a liberal? — location: 158 ^ref-33666

In Mill’s view, ‘any means’ were licit for those who took on the task of educating ‘savage tribes’; ‘slavery’ was sometimes a mandatory stage for inducing them to work and making them useful to civilization and progress — location: 185 ^ref-34982

Is demanding ‘absolute obedience’, for an indeterminate period of time, from the overwhelming majority of humanity compatible with the liberal profession of faith? Or is it synonymous with ‘soi-disant’ liberalism? — location: 192 ^ref-41093

In polemicizing against one another, the two branches the liberal party had divided into adopted the ideology and rhetoric that had presided over the self-celebration of the English nation in its entirety, as the sworn enemy of political slavery. — location: 241 ^ref-51024

You Americans make a great Clamour upon every little imaginary infringement of what you take to be your Liberties; and yet there are no People upon Earth such Enemies to Liberty, such absolute Tyrants, where you have the Opportunity, as you yourselves are. — location: 250 ^ref-57689

The self-styled champions of liberty branded taxation imposed without their explicit consent as synonymous with despotism and slavery. But they had no scruples about exercising the most absolute and arbitrary power over their slaves. — location: 252 ^ref-15522

‘the most clamorous advocates for liberty were uniformly the harshest and worst masters of slaves’. — location: 259 ^ref-46063

It affords a curious spectacle to observe, that the same people who talk in a high strain of political liberty, and who consider the privilege of imposing their own taxes as one of the inalienable rights of mankind, should make no scruple of reducing a great proportion of their fellow-creatures into circumstances by which they are not only deprived of property, but almost of every species of right. Fortune perhaps never produced a situation more calculated to ridicule a liberal hypothesis, — location: 263 ^ref-49233

to a ‘free government’ controlled by slaveowners, he preferred a ‘despotic government’ capable of erasing the infamy of slavery, he made explicit reference to America. — location: 269 ^ref-21894

The accused reacted in their turn by upbraiding England for its hypocrisy: it boasted of its virtue and love of liberty, but who promoted and continued to promote the slave trade? And who was it that transported and sold slaves? — location: 277 ^ref-57906

Virginia played a central role in the American Revolution. Forty per cent of the country’s slaves were to be found there, — location: 289 ^ref-17511

dull as all men are from slavery, must they not a little suspect the offer of freedom from that very nation which has sold them to their present masters?’ — location: 302 ^ref-41030

first, Joshua Gee, acknowledged that ‘[a]ll this great increase in our treasure proceeds chiefly from the labour of negroes in the plantations’. — location: 318 ^ref-44973

‘The Negroe Trade and the natural Consequences resulting from it, may be justly esteemed an inexhaustible Fund of Wealth and Naval Power to this Nation’; they were ‘the first principle and foundation of all the rest, the main spring of the machine which sets every wheel in motion’. — location: 321 ^ref-22411

The exchange of accusations between rebel colonists and the mother country—that is, between two branches of the party that had hitherto proudly celebrated itself as the party of liberty—was a mutual, pitiless demystification. — location: 327 ^ref-26109

‘We … the boasted Patrons of Liberty, and the professed Advocates for the natural Rights of Mankind, engage deeper in this murderous inhuman Traffic than any Nation whatever.’ — location: 335 ^ref-61511

‘the Advocates for Republicanism, and for the supposed Equality of Mankind, ought to have been foremost in suggesting some such humane System for abolishing the worst of all the Species of Slavery’. — location: 337 ^ref-63743

‘a bourgeois oligarchy that had broken decisively with the aristocratic landholding ethos’ was dominant. — location: 350 ^ref-34496

these enlightened, tolerant, liberal bourgeois who embarked on colonial expansion; and in this historical period the slave trade was an integral part of it: — location: 352 ^ref-7137

Until the mid-seventeenth century, the country where the prologue to the successive liberal revolutions occurred—namely, Holland—had a ‘hold’ on the trade in slaves: — location: 362 ^ref-44713

The first country to embark on the liberal road is one that exhibited an especially tenacious attachment to the institution of slavery. It appears that colonists of Dutch origin offered the most determined resistance to the first abolitionist measures, — location: 377 ^ref-61669

As regards Holland itself, in 1791 the States-General formally declared that the slave trade was essential to the development of the colonies’ prosperity and commerce. — location: 380 ^ref-36132

Holland only abolished slavery in its colonies in 1863, when the secessionist and slaveholding Confederacy of the southern United States was going down to defeat. — location: 383 ^ref-24041

they appealed to Locke, for whom (as we shall see) the natives of the New World approximated to ‘wild beasts’. — location: 388 ^ref-6906

Crown proclamation of 1763 that sought to halt or contain expansion west of the Allegany Mountains. — location: 398 ^ref-57735

Jonathan Boucher) — location: 422 ^ref-62346

it was precisely the now victorious colonists who ‘were preparing to cut the throats of the Indians’. — location: 424 ^ref-65096

the Puritans had initiated a massacre of the Indians, assimilated to ‘Canaanites and Amalekites’—that is, stocks marked out by the Old Testament for erasure from the face of the earth. This was ‘one of the darkest pages in English colonial history’, which was followed by the even more repugnant one written during the American Revolution, — location: 429 ^ref-24943

‘by an order which, we believe, has no parallel in the annals of any civilized nation, [Congress] commands the complete destruction of those people as a nation … including women and children’. — location: 432 ^ref-32427

a situation that ‘will oblige us now to pursue them to extermination, or drive them to new seats beyond our reach’. The — location: 436 ^ref-8230

There is no doubt that, along with black enslavement and the black slave trade, the rise of the two liberal countries either side of the Atlantic involved a process of systematic expropriation and practical genocide first of the Irish and then of the Indians. — location: 450 ^ref-19049

Banjuwangi, a province of Java, numbered over 80,000 inhabitants in 1750 and only 18,000 in 1811. That is peaceful commerce! — location: 460 ^ref-56023

processes of enslavement and practical genocide were closely intertwined. — location: 462 ^ref-6679

Liberal Holland immediately engaged in overseas expansion and slave-trading, — location: 473 ^ref-12508

Banned in intra-European conflicts, slavery by right of war continued to be a reality — location: 505 ^ref-18565

the liberal English philosopher was concerned with the white colonists’ expansionist march as secretary (in 1673–74) of the Council of Trade and Plantations. — location: 525 ^ref-48327

When he sought to challenge the march of civilization, violently opposing exploitation through labour of the uncultivated land occupied by him, the Indian, along with any other criminal, could be equated with ‘one of those wild savage beasts with whom men can have no society nor security’, and who ‘therefore may be destroyed as a lion or a tiger’. Locke never tired of insisting on the right possessed by any man to destroy those reduced to the level of ‘beasts of prey’, ‘savage beasts’; to the level of ‘a savage ravenous beast that is dangerous to his being’. — location: 539 ^ref-50692

unregistered priests were branded with a red-hot iron, when they were not punished with more severe penalties or death. — location: 550 ^ref-3169

Locke seems to have had no objections of any kind to the ruthless repression suffered by the Irish, whose fate calls to mind that reserved for Indians across the Atlantic. — location: 558 ^ref-32793

On the basis of the principles of self-government, each individual state has the right to regulate it as it sees fit, while every state’s obligation to return fugitive slaves is a moral obligation to guarantee a legitimate property-owner the services that ‘may be due’. — location: 572 ^ref-2169

although regarded as legitimate in all three cases, the institution of slavery was theorized and affirmed without the least reticence solely by the Dutch author, whose life straddled the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In Locke, by contrast, at least in the case of the Two Treatises of Government, which were written and published on the eve and at the end of the Glorious Revolution, legitimation of slavery tends to occur exclusively between the lines of the discourse celebrating English liberty. The reticence reaches its peak in the documents that consecrate the foundation of the United States as the most glorious chapter in the history of liberty. — location: 583 ^ref-50946

When it came to the relationship with the Indians, things were different: Grotius, Locke and Washington all referred to them as ‘wild beasts’. — location: 588 ^ref-6544

But it remains the case that in all three liberal revolutions the demand for liberty and justification of the enslavement, as well as the decimation (or destruction), of barbarians, were closely intertwined. — location: 591 ^ref-39560

can the habitual representation of the liberal tradition—namely, that it is characterized by the love of liberty as such—be regarded as valid? — location: 595 ^ref-18680

‘What is well-known, precisely because it is well-known, is not known. In the knowledge process, the commonest way to mislead oneself and others is to assume that something is well-known and to accept it as such’. — location: 597 ^ref-60737

the paradoxical tangle we have encountered while historically reconstructing the origins of liberalism is disturbing. We can therefore understand the tendency to repression. After all, that was the gesture, in their own day, of Locke and, especially, the rebel American colonists, who liked to draw a more or less thick veil of silence over the institution of slavery. — location: 600 ^ref-63305

The American forgets that negroes are men; he has no moral relationship with them; for him they are simply objects of profit … and such is the excess of his stupid contempt for this unhappy species that, when back in Europe, he is indignant to see them dressed like men and placed alongside him. — location: 611 ^ref-28314

The extremely powerful empire of public opinion … now offers its support to those in France and England who attack black slavery and pursue its abolition. The most odious interpretations are reserved for those who dare to hold a contrary opinion. — location: 625 ^ref-25668

from the start of the debate on the new constitutional order (pointed out another witness), people ‘had been ashamed to use the term “Slaves” & had substituted a description’. — location: 647 ^ref-59580

the viewpoint of the rebel colonists, who retained a clear conscience as champions of the cause of liberty, repressing the macroscopic fact of slavery by means of their ingenious euphemisms: what takes the place of such euphemisms is now the ‘historicist’ explanation. — location: 654 ^ref-1068

Jean Bodin — location: 660 ^ref-41421

Bodin concluded that ‘those who profess all these three religions only partially observe the law of God with regard to slaves’, as if the prohibition of this horrible institution only applied to blood relations, not humanity as a whole. If a distinction among the three monotheistic religions could be made, it was to the advantage of Islam, which had proved capable of expanding thanks to a courageous policy of emancipation. — location: 663 ^ref-26072

being given the choice between good and evil, inclines for the most part to do that which is forbidden and chooses the evil, defying the laws of God and of nature. So much is such a one under the domination of his corrupt imagination, that he takes his own will for the law. There is no sort of impiety or wickedness which in this way has not come to be accounted virtuous and good. — location: 671 ^ref-63515

‘Europe was freed of slavery after about 1250’, but ‘we see it today newly restored’. — location: 697 ^ref-59090

While Locke, champion of the struggle against absolute monarchy, justified the white master’s absolute power over the black slave, a theorist of monarchical absolutism—Bodin—condemned such power. — location: 703 ^ref-9333

it is misleading to start out from the presupposition of a homogeneous historical time unmarked by fractures and flowing in unilinear fashion. — location: 706 ^ref-55483

Among them there was ‘nothing savage or barbarous’; the fact was that ‘every man calls barbarous anything he is not accustomed to’. People took their own country as a model: ‘There we always find the perfect religion, the perfect polity, the most developed and perfect way of doing anything!’ — location: 709 ^ref-58637

called for ‘mak[ing] slaves of all those who are unable to provide for their own subsistence’,139 Bodin also condemned slavery for ‘vagrants and idlers’.140 According to the observation of a great historian, it was in ‘the period between 1660 and 1760’ (the decades of the rise of the liberal movement) that an attitude of unprecedented harshness spread in England towards wage-labourers and the unemployed, ‘which has no modern parallel except in the behaviour of the less reputable of white colonists towards coloured labour’. — location: 717 ^ref-23883

Bodin. He primarily attributed the return of slavery in the world to the ‘greed of merchants’, and then added: ‘If the princes do not set things in good order, it will soon be full of slaves. — location: 723 ^ref-19411

Not only was slavery not a residue of the past and backwardness, but the remedy for it was to be sought not in the new political and social forces (liberal in orientation), but, on the contrary, in monarchical power. — location: 725 ^ref-14692

the institution of slavery was felt to be in contradiction not with the new social and political forces, but with a power that was pre-modern in origin. — location: 730 ^ref-12306

Recourse to vulgar historicism to ‘explain’ or repress the surprising tangle of freedom and oppression that characterizes the three liberal revolutions we have referred to is fruitless. The paradox persists and awaits a genuine, less comforting explanation. — location: 740 ^ref-27583

Slavery is not something that persisted despite the success of the three liberal revolutions. On the contrary, it experienced its maximum development following that success: — location: 902 ^ref-5562

Contributing decisively to the rise of an institution synonymous with the absolute power of man over man was the liberal world. — location: 905 ^ref-57601

slavery in its most radical form triumphed in the golden age of liberalism and at the heart of the liberal world. — location: 938 ^ref-4938

the rise of liberalism and the spread of racial chattel slavery are the product of a twin birth which, as we shall see, has rather unique characteristics. — location: 943 ^ref-53566

‘these people of the southern colonies are more much more strongly … attached to liberty, than those to the northward’. — location: 951 ^ref-6314

no nations in the world have been more jealous of their liberties than those amongst whom the institution of slavery existed’. — location: 954 ^ref-57576

‘the Champions for American Republicanism’ were simultaneously the promoters of the ‘absurd Tyranny’ they exercised over their slaves: this was ‘a republican Tyranny, the worst of all Tyrannies’. — location: 956 ^ref-33692

Why should we be surprised that those demanding, or in the forefront of the demand for, self-government and ‘freedom’ from central political power were the major slave-owners? — location: 960 ^ref-10553

The wealth and leisure it enjoyed, and the culture it thus managed to acquire, reinforced the proud self-consciousness of a class that became ever more intolerant of the abuses of power, the intrusions, the interference and the constraints of political power or religious authority. Shaking off these constraints, the planter and slave-owner developed a liberal spirit and a liberal mentality. — location: 964 ^ref-55087

there were even cases of masters denounced to the Inquisition for their failure to respect the rights of their slaves. — location: 971 ^ref-1568

the assertion of self-government by civil society hegemonized by slaveholders involved the definitive liquidation of traditional forms of ‘interference’ by political and religious authority. — location: 981 ^ref-49444

The conquest of self-government by civil society hegemonized by large-scale property involved an even more drastic deterioration in the condition of the indigenous population. — location: 987 ^ref-49028

The end of the control exercised by the London government swept away the last obstacles to the expansionistic march of the white colonists. — location: 988 ^ref-33319

labour as such was subsumed under the category of ‘service’ (servitus) or ‘subjection’ (subjectio). — location: 1019 ^ref-2347

of the ‘apprentices [apprenticii] in England’, it was to be noted that they ‘come nearest to the State of Slavery, during their Apprenticeship’—that is to say, to the condition of slaves proper. — location: 1026 ^ref-57001

‘a free man makes himself a servant to another’. As we can see, labour as such continues to be subsumed under the category of service. In fact, the contract introduces the wage-labourer ‘into the family of his master, and under the ordinary discipline thereof’. — location: 1032 ^ref-23476

Locke endlessly stressed that the master exercises over the slave an ‘absolute dominion’ and ‘absolute power’, a ‘legislative power of life and death’, an ‘arbitrary power’ encompassing ‘life’ itself. — location: 1043 ^ref-29937

Sometimes freed by their masters, blacks slaves were long subjected to a condition not markedly dissimilar from that of indentured servants—that is, temporary white semi-slaves on a contractual basis. And it is this ambiguity that finds expression in the text of Grotius, who can hence also apply the category of contract to servitus perfecta. In Locke, by contrast, we can read the development which chattel slavery and racial slavery began to undergo from the late seventeenth century. — location: 1052 ^ref-59344

once again, the element of novelty emerges. Although rejecting an abolitionist interpretation of Christianity, Grotius repeatedly appealed to Christian literature to underscore the common humanity of servant and master, both of them subject to the Father in Heaven, and hence in a relationship with each another that was in some sense one of fraternity.32 The Second Treatise of Government is concerned, instead, to make it clear that the principle of equality applies exclusively to ‘creatures of the same species and rank’, — location: 1062 ^ref-23353

The Old Testament line of demarcation between Hebrews and gentiles is configured in Locke as the line of demarcation between whites and blacks: servants of European origin are not subject to ‘perfect slavery’, which is intended for blacks and repressed to the colonies. — location: 1079 ^ref-59647

‘If I had to defend the right we had of making Negroes slaves, here is what I would say: The peoples of Europe, having exterminated those of America, had to make slaves of those of Africa in order to use them to clear so much land.’ — location: 1085 ^ref-16662

Somersett’s counsel eloquently proclaimed: ‘The air of England is too pure for a slave to breathe.’ — location: 1165 ^ref-47291

this view was wrong in the colonists’ view, because it confounded and assimilated free Englishmen, prison rabble and people of colour. In this way, lamented James Otis, a prominent supporter of the liberal revolution underway, one forgot that the colonies had been founded not ‘with a compound mixture of English, Indian and Negro, but with freeborn British white subjects’. — location: 1192 ^ref-51034

Washington, who warned that the American colonists felt ‘as miserably oppressed as our own blacks’. — location: 1195 ^ref-9058

Having repeated that the American colonists could boast a lineage not less noble and deserving of liberty than the metropolitan English, John Adams exclaimed with reference to the rulers in London: ‘We won’t be their Negroes’! — location: 1196 ^ref-12458

apart even from the problem of representation, the spatial delimitation of the community of the free was perceived as an intolerable exclusion. — location: 1199 ^ref-46488

While in London the zone of civilization was distinguished from the zone of barbarism, the sacred space from the profane, primarily by opposing the metropolis to the colonies, the American colonists were led to identify the boundary line principally in ethnic identity and skin colour. On the basis of the 1790 Naturalization Act, only whites could become citizens of the United States. — location: 1201 ^ref-462

The condition of the black slave deteriorated by virtue of no longer being, as in colonial America, one of several systems of unfree labour. — location: 1209 ^ref-7249

the tendential social rise of poor whites coincided with the consummate de-humanization of black slaves. — location: 1213 ^ref-17949

‘the prejudice of race appears to be stronger in the states that have abolished slavery than in those where it still exists; and nowhere is it so intolerant as in those states where servitude has never been known.’ — location: 1230 ^ref-59230

The despotism exercised over slaves was bound to affect, in one way or another, the population of colour as a whole. — location: 1237 ^ref-24707

There thus emerged a country characterized by ‘a fixed and direct tie between slave ownership and political power’, — location: 1251 ^ref-39987

the spectre of despotic interference with private property by political power ended up arrogantly breaking in through the window as the taxation required to induce owners willingly to surrender their slaves, — location: 1266 ^ref-19669

the spatial delimitation of the community of the free, which is the principle on which late-eighteenth-century liberal England was based, seems to be on the point of transmuting into a racial delimitation. — location: 1287 ^ref-23507

In Latin America the population of mixed blood, which had formed following the fusion of the Spaniards with the natives, would easily be able to accommodate the blacks. — location: 1296 ^ref-64703

racial delimitation of the community would then give way to a territorial delimitation. The end of slavery would, at the same time, entail the end of the presence of blacks in the land of liberty. — location: 1298 ^ref-60552

what clashed during the Civil War were the causes not of liberty and slavery, but precisely two different delimitations of the community of the free: the opposed parties accused one another of not knowing how, or not wanting, to delimit the community of the free effectively. — location: 1304 ^ref-12515

The transition from the spatial delimitation to the racial delimitation of the community of the free henceforth made it impossible to repress the reality of slavery. — location: 1317 ^ref-31250

With the lifting of this taboo, the legitimation of slavery lost the timidity that had previously characterized it, assuming a defiant tone. — location: 1323 ^ref-59975

Having been a necessary evil, slavery became (in the words of Calhoun with which we are familiar) a ‘positive good’. It made no sense to try to repress it as something to be ashamed of; in reality, it was the very foundation of civilization. — location: 1323 ^ref-26748

This sounds very much like the basis for the reality of contemporary American Empire

while the abolitionists adopted the arguments used during the American War of Independence by the British and the loyalists in their polemic against the South, the theorists of the South used arguments deployed by the rebel colonists. — location: 1328 ^ref-4531

just as pre-revolutionary and revolutionary America had done, so too the South protested against the tendential exclusion, of which it felt itself the victim, from the authentic community of the free. It was now no longer the American colonies in their entirety, but the southern states that considered themselves assimilated to the ‘modern Barbary’ mentioned by Blackstone. — location: 1335 ^ref-16944

The authors of the denunciation of black slavery were responsible for a white slavery that was certainly no better than the one they condemned so vehemently. — location: 1348 ^ref-42184

it pointed out how much slavery survived in an industrial society notionally based on ‘free’ labour. — location: 1352 ^ref-41981

T]he greatest slave dealer on earth’, the country ‘more responsible than any other … for the extent of that form of servitude’ in the American continent, then engaged in waving the banner of abolitionism, with a view to attracting the lucrative production of tobacco, cotton, sugar and coffee to its colonies and ruining potential competitors. — location: 1361 ^ref-21564

Arraigned once again was Britain, which lauded itself for having abolished slavery in its colonies. In reality, the ‘temporary slaves’ from Asia who had taken the place of the blacks, ‘if not worked to death before their terms of service expire’, subsequently died of starvation. — location: 1372 ^ref-62757

the controversy that developed on the eve and in the course of the Civil War reproduced and resumed the one that had occurred some decades earlier, during the clash between the two shores of the Atlantic. — location: 1375 ^ref-40943

four interventions, which share a liberal profession of faith, but with orientations that are fairly diverse as regards black slavery. — location: 1396 ^ref-574

‘the menial and low offices’ were reserved for blacks, so that love of liberty and the ‘republican spirit’, peculiar to free, white citizens, flourished with a purity and vigour unknown in the rest of the United States, and had a precedent only in classical antiquity. — location: 1410 ^ref-64517

Dew appealed to Burke and his thesis that, where slavery flourished, the spirit of liberty developed more abundantly. — location: 1412 ^ref-14496

if they mixed with the blacks, the whites ‘would become so deteriorated that their states would probably be reconquered and regained by the aborigines’. — location: 1419 ^ref-5820

On the occasion first of the Somersett case, then of the American Revolution and finally of the Civil War, the liberal world appeared profoundly divided over the problem of slavery. — location: 1424 ^ref-12293

From the assertion of the principle of the ‘uselessness of slavery among ourselves’ to the condemnation of slavery as such — location: 1426 ^ref-29532

going beyond the merely formal meaning of the term, conservatism is to be understood as an uncritical attachment to a pre-modern, pre-industrial society, characterized by the cult of clod of earth and bell tower, such a category could hardly account for Calhoun’s positions. — location: 1459 ^ref-55292

in 1812, during the war with Britain, accused the latter of being an instrument of ‘Satan’ because it had compelled America to abandon the ‘paradise’ of agriculture and engage in ‘manufacturing’, — location: 1466 ^ref-4204

For Fitzhugh, as was demonstrated by the examples of classical antiquity and confirmed by the reality of the modern world, work was inseparable from slavery, so that in one form or another ‘slavery, black or white, was right and necessary’. — location: 1489 ^ref-16043

‘whether established by law, or by law abrogated, [slavery] exists very extensively in this world, in and out of the West Indies; and … you cannot abolish slavery by act of parliament, but can only abolish the name of it, which is very little!’ — location: 1494 ^ref-60186

following the defeat of the South, the emancipation of black slaves and amendments to the US Constitution to that effect, a transition was made from asserting the principle of the ‘uselessness of slavery among ourselves’ in Europe and the ‘free states’ of the northern United States to general condemnation, on both sides of the Atlantic, of slavery as — location: 1501 ^ref-61483

liberalism as a whole now broke with slavery in the strict sense—with hereditary, racial slavery. — location: 1508 ^ref-4613

First the rebel colonists during the American Revolution, and then the South of the United States during the conflict that pitted it against the North, accused their opponents of hypocrisy. — location: 1629 ^ref-22983

it remained the case that in Scotland workers in coalmines and salt works were obliged to wear a collar on which the name of their master was inscribed. — location: 1642 ^ref-54694

it was to be hoped that parliament would intervene to remedy the situation, finally sanctioning ‘the freedom of the labouring people’ in Scottish mines and salt works. — location: 1645 ^ref-36259

Smith included menial servants, together with slaves proper, in the master’s extended family. — location: 1660 ^ref-37292

the slave’s obligation to provide service ‘for life’ with a rather eloquent argument: fundamentally, it was the same relationship that the apprentice had with his master, except that in the latter case there was a time limit (seven years and sometimes more). — location: 1669 ^ref-22555

‘[f]or most of human history the expression “free labor” was an oxymoron.’ — location: 1672 ^ref-14668

in order to escape the ‘Poor Law Bastilles’ (as they were popularly renamed), ‘inmates of work houses often deliberately make themselves guilty of any crime whatsoever in order to go to prison’. — location: 1693 ^ref-40036

‘many indigents preferred to die of hunger and illness’ rather than subject themselves to a workhouse. — location: 1695 ^ref-46481

the 1834 law that shut up anyone requiring assistance in a workhouse in a sense vindicates Calhoun and those who pointed to slavery as the only possible solution to the problem of poverty. — location: 1698 ^ref-39537

the fatal contradiction in the rules hitherto in force, which allowed the poor person to enjoy a minimum of assistance for continuing a normal life: ‘The labourer is to be a free agent, but without the hazards of free agency; to be free from the coercion, but to enjoy the assured existence of the slave.’ — location: 1699 ^ref-16233

‘It is obvious that we must make assistance unpleasant, we must separate families, make the workhouse a prison and render our charity repugnant.’ — location: 1731 ^ref-8296

De Tocqueville referred to it, significantly, in the context of his analysis of the ‘prison system’. Who were the inmates? The answer was clear: ‘The indigent who cannot earn their living by honest work, and those who do not want to.’ — location: 1734 ^ref-15649

the poor person thus confined ‘regards himself as unfortunate, not culpable; he challenges society’s right violently to force him to do fruitless work and to deal with him against his will’. — location: 1744 ^ref-44439

What other master is there that can reduce his workmen, if idle, to a situation next to starving, without suffering them to go elsewhere? What other master is there, whose men can never get drunk unless he chooses that they should do so? and who, so far from being able to raise their wages by combination, are obliged to take whatever pittance he thinks it most for his interest to allow? — location: 1757 ^ref-15357

Thanks to this gigantic concentration-camp universe, where people would be interned without having committed any crime and without any control by the judiciary, it would be possible to perform the miracle of transforming the ‘dross’ that was the ‘refuse of the population’ into money. — location: 1765 ^ref-20987

rigorous discipline was required, which must be thoroughly internalized by the detainees in the workhouse: — location: 1769 ^ref-48486

Franklin, discomfited by his English interlocutors mocking the flag of liberty waved by colonists who were often slave-owners, replied by highlighting, among other things, the persistence in England of slave-like relations even within the armed forces. — location: 1776 ^ref-4917

like Franklin before him, we have Calhoun denouncing ‘the slavery of impressed seamen’. — location: 1783 ^ref-2962

the ‘absolute power of life and death’ wielded by officers over their subordinates. — location: 1810 ^ref-23093

The mortality rate of soldiers en route to India was comparable to that affecting black slaves during their deportation from one side of the Atlantic to the other. — location: 1813 ^ref-9596

’tis Poverty makes Men Soldiers, and drives Crowds into the Armies’.45 At the end of the century, Townsend reiterated that ‘distress and poverty’ alone could impel ‘the lower classes of the people to encounter all the horrors which await them — location: 1818 ^ref-1214

From 1688 to 1820, the number of crimes carrying the death penalty increased from 50 to between 200 and 250, and they were almost always crimes against property. — location: 1831 ^ref-17595

In legitimizing the colonists’ appropriation of land left uncultivated by the Indians, the Second Treatise of Government simultaneously adopted a clear position in favour of enclosure in England. — location: 1840 ^ref-48006

private property as such and, over and above it, liberty were in danger. Thus, what legitimized the pickpocket’s killing or execution is the same liberal pathos that had presided over the condemnation of monarchical despotism as the source of political slavery. — location: 1854 ^ref-51356

‘there is probably no other country in the world in which so many and so great a variety of human actions are punishable with loss of life as in England’. — location: 1866 ^ref-48742

Not infrequently, those sentenced to death (or even a long prison term) saw their sentence commuted to deportation to the colonies. — location: 1874 ^ref-15792

The theory of the colonial war as just war (on the part of Europeans) and the theory of penal slavery legitimized and galvanized the deportation, respectively, of the black slaves and white semi-slaves required by colonial development. — location: 1887 ^ref-19483

On the eve of the American Revolution, in Maryland alone there were 20,000 servants of criminal origin. — location: 1889 ^ref-466

it was no longer possible to declare oneself in favour of an institution whose substantially slave-like character was acknowledged. — location: 1924 ^ref-53637

It is more accurate to say that, at the point when the contract is drawn up, far from being impeded in his liberty, he exercises it in the way most opportune to him. Any convention is an exchange in which each likes what he receives more than what he gives up. — location: 1926 ^ref-50387

69 Sieyès seems to propose a kind of code for regulating this white semi-slavery, — location: 1937 ^ref-59555

If, in the proto-liberal theory and practice of the time, the wage-labourer was (as we shall soon see) the instrumentum vocale Burke mentions, or the ‘bipedal machine’ referred to by Sieyès, his children were ultimately res nullius, destined to be used at the first opportunity precisely in their capacity as work tools and machines. Locke explicitly declared that poor children, who were to be sent to work from the age of three, must ‘be taken off their [parents’] hands’. — location: 1947 ^ref-59059

‘what they can get Honestly is not sufficient to keep them’. Yet ‘the Peace of the Society’ required that the guilty be hanged. — location: 1990 ^ref-7401

Impunity’. It would be a serious thing if overly scrupulous judges prioritized their ‘Conscience’ over the ‘Advantage to a Nation’. — location: 1993 ^ref-20068

in the poorest districts, opium consumption was spreading, and was becoming a means of feeding or a substitute for it. It was sometimes given to infants, who ‘ “shrank up into little old men”, or “wizened like little monkeys” — location: 2009 ^ref-2108

Simply by virtue of not confining themselves to the vertical, subaltern relationship with their superiors, but seeking to develop horizontal relations with one another, servants were to be considered culpable of unacceptable subversion: they were ‘daily incroaching upon Masters and Mistresses, and endeavouring to be more upon the Level with them’; — location: 2026 ^ref-19192

‘[w]e have no acts of parliament against combining to lower the price of work; but many against combining to raise it.’ — location: 2033 ^ref-10708

‘[t]he masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily … Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate’, or ‘to sink the wages of labour even below this rate’. — location: 2034 ^ref-55967

even were masters and workers to be treated identically in legislative terms, the former would always enjoy an advantageous situation. — location: 2037 ^ref-11946

They are desperate, and act with the folly and extravagance of desperate men, who must either starve, or frighten their masters into an immediate compliance with their demands. — location: 2040 ^ref-26133

‘the horrendous expedient of sending spies to incite ignorant minds and suggest rebellion to them, so as then to be able to denounce them’. — location: 2054 ^ref-23417

Locke repeatedly called on people not to lose sight of ‘the public good’, ‘the good of the nation’, ‘the public weal’, or ‘the preservation of the whole’, ‘the whole commonwealth’. — location: 2063 ^ref-20409

even to entertain projects tending towards such improvement was synonymous not only with abstract utopianism, but also and above all with dangerous subversion. — location: 2067 ^ref-45795

‘To make the society … happy … it is requisite that great numbers … should be ignorant as well as poor’; ‘the surest wealth consists in a multitude of laborious poor’. — location: 2073 ^ref-30831

‘In poor nations the people are comfortable, in rich nations they are generally poor.’ — location: 2078 ^ref-19231

Why was the proposition, in its various forms, that society’s happiness and wealth depended on the hardship and deprivation of the poor, who formed a large majority of the population, not perceived as contradictory? — location: 2079 ^ref-54211

The poor were the servile caste required by society; they were the subterranean foundation of the social edifice, those whom Nietzsche defined as ‘the blind moles of culture’. With society and civilization, the poor and the moles continued to have a relationship of estrangement. — location: 2086 ^ref-1794

When you look around you, how dare you talk to us before the world of Slavery? … If you are really humane, philanthropic, and charitable, here are objects for you. Relieve them. Emancipate them. Raise them from the condition of brutes, to the level of human beings—of American slaves, at least. — location: 2094 ^ref-27734

’Tis not to be expected, that a Man, who drudges on, all his Life, in a laborious Trade, should be more knowing in the variety of Things done in the World, than a Pack-horse, who is driven constantly forwards and backwards, in a narrow Lane, and dirty Road, only to Market, should be skilled in the Geography of the Country. — location: 2103 ^ref-41649

‘No Creatures submit contentedly to their Equals, and should a Horse know as much as a Man, I should not desire to be his Rider.’ — location: 2113 ^ref-4572

In Locke’s view, ‘a day-labourer [is] no more capable of reasoning than almost a perfect natural [i.e., an ignorant aborigine]’: neither had yet reached the level of ‘rational creatures and Christians’. — location: 2135 ^ref-31666

Not only is it very difficult to define the condition of white servants in Europe as free, but the image of them transmitted by the liberal thought of the time is not much different from the image of the black slave in the southern United States. — location: 2153 ^ref-54819

the condition of the poor that, even in their capacity as witnesses, they were locked up in prison until the legal proceedings were over. — location: 2289 ^ref-64121

two young Irishmen ‘detained for a whole year while waiting for the judges to deign to hear their deposition’. — location: 2291 ^ref-12045

they ‘have provided everything for the convenience of the wealthy and virtually nothing for the protection of the poor’, of whose liberty ‘they dispose cheaply’. — location: 2294 ^ref-6135

in all the free States no white man is the equal of the white man of the slave States.’ — location: 2305 ^ref-2743

modern or liberal liberty has been described and celebrated as the undisturbed enjoyment of private property. — location: 2322 ^ref-29464

in the case of violation of such rules, to be struck in the first instance were white property-owners, who thus saw their negative liberty seriously restricted. — location: 2337 ^ref-63200

the US Supreme Court conceded that the ban on ‘the intermarriage of the two races’ might, ‘in a technical sense’, breach freedom of contract, but extricated itself from an awkward situation by adding that the right of any individual state to legislate in this area was ‘universally recognized’. — location: 2342 ^ref-44340

The absolute power exercised over black slaves ended up having negative and even dramatic consequences for whites. — location: 2348 ^ref-10986

alternative: either to suffer exile from Virginia with his de facto family; or to agree to the child being a slave together with the mother. — location: 2357 ^ref-42559

a society that in fact exercised such severe duress over its privileged members, partly legal and partly social, as to choke even the most natural feelings. — location: 2360 ^ref-22969

in enslaving ‘their children and their children’s children’, white people were in fact ‘enslaving themselves’. — location: 2361 ^ref-6236

it was permissible for an owner to flog and beat his female slave to the point of killing her—property right was sacred; but so strong was the control exercised by the class of property-owners and the community of the free over their individual members that only by exposing himself to risks of various kinds could he have sexual relations with her. — location: 2367 ^ref-20527

the master heard them very clearly: he sobbed loudly, because his slave was dear to him. But he was powerless, and the most he could do was to see to it that the torture was not prolonged any further. — location: 2383 ^ref-21072

It was the white man who was required to punish his runaways, prevent assemblages of slaves, enforce the curfews, sit on the special courts, and ride the patrols. — location: 2390 ^ref-38541

because, in addition to being chattels, black slaves were also the enemy within, abolitionists were immediately suspected of treason, thus becoming the target of a series of more or less harsh repressive measures depending on the gravity of the impending danger. — location: 2406 ^ref-65101

There is a strong party averse to violent men and violent measures, but they are frightened into submission—afraid even to exchange opinions with others who think like them, lest they should be betrayed. — location: 2421 ^ref-15715

the terroristic power wielded by slave-owners over their blacks also ended up affecting, on a lasting basis, members and fractions of the dominant race and class. — location: 2428 ^ref-26792

  1. The excluded and the struggle for recognition — location: 4331 ^ref-1960

While US society affords the example of the most extensive liberty, this country’s prisons offer a spectacle of utter despotism. The citizens subject to the law are protected by it; they cease to be free only when they become felons. — location: 4560 ^ref-42735

The sphere of politics and ‘political laws’ was so narrowly defined as to exclude not only material living conditions and relations of dependency in factories, but even the censitary discrimination that pervaded the administration of justice in the United States. — location: 4568 ^ref-29728

on the one hand political economy was merged with theology, while on the other it tended to take its place, in the sense that ‘science’ was now called on to sanction and sanctify existing social relations. — location: 4587 ^ref-3707

now the despotism identified and denounced was not this reality, but attempts by political power to change or alleviate it. — location: 4640 ^ref-21219

dismissed as an expression of socialism and despotism was any legislative measure to alleviate the misery of the ‘lower classes’ through rent controls. — location: 4647 ^ref-20072

whom, with their statist pathos, radicalism, Jacobinism and socialism were in a line of continuity with the statism, ‘administrative centralization’ and ‘paternal government’ of the ancien régime. — location: 4872 ^ref-61972

The demand for economic and social rights and the transition from paternalistic liberalism to social-Darwinist liberalism — location: 4995 ^ref-30489

Socialism’s mistake primarily consisted in its claim ‘to save individuals from any of the difficulties or hardships of the struggle for existence and the competition of life by the intervention of “the state”‘.144 Anti-statism and Social Darwinism went hand in hand. — location: 5038 ^ref-64487

We can understand why social Darwinism established itself above all in Britain, the United States and Germany. At the end of the nineteenth century, these were three countries on the crest of a wave of economic development and international influence and prestige. — location: 5064 ^ref-43259

de Tocqueville was careful in this instance not to speak of ‘war’. That was a category which could only be applied to armed conflicts in Europe and between civilized peoples. It somehow implied recognition of the enemy, which was something denied Arabs and Indians alike. — location: 5523 ^ref-48914

The idea of human equality could not be extended to embrace ‘semi-civilized peoples’ located outside the West: — location: 5635 ^ref-63024

Opposed to anything vulgar and plebeian, ‘liberal’ tended to be synonymous with aristocratic. — location: 5790 ^ref-40041

find in Washington a celebration of patrons of the ‘liberal arts’, contrasted with ‘mechanics’, with immigrants of a modest social condition from Europe. — location: 5797 ^ref-25718

of John Adams. For a well-ordered liberty to be achieved, it could not be ‘mechanics’ and the ‘common people’, ‘without any knowledge in liberal arts or sciences’, who exercised power. Instead, it must be those who had ‘received a liberal education, an ordinary degree of erudition in liberal arts and sciences’; and they were the ‘well-born and wealthy’. — location: 5799 ^ref-13860

France, too, the liberal party, which was in the process of being formed, defined itself during the polemic against the absolute monarchy but also, and possibly above all, against the popular masses and their vulgarity. — location: 5803 ^ref-43109

who announced the ‘disbandment of factions’—i.e. of popular and plebeian agitation—and the triumph of ‘conservative, tutelary, liberal ideas’ — location: 5808 ^ref-48518

Synonymous with ‘aristocratic’ in Burke, ‘liberal’ was now synonymous with ‘conservative’ (and tutelary). — location: 5816 ^ref-17875

the cause of liberalism found expression in ‘respectable people’ (honnêtes gens), — location: 5818 ^ref-63626

it was the property-owning classes, proud of their non-servile condition and spirit, who tended to define themselves as liberals. — location: 5821 ^ref-51749

For de Tocqueville, as we shall see, anyone who wanted to endow the ideal of liberty with a social content was ‘made for serving’! — location: 5828 ^ref-36963

a movement and party that intended to rally persons furnished with a ‘liberal education’ and genuinely free, or people who had the privilege of being free, the ‘chosen race’ (as Burke put it), the ‘nation in whose veins the blood of liberty circulates’. — location: 5839 ^ref-10757

‘freemen’ is a ‘collective notion’—a sign of distinction that applies to the ‘well-born’ and them alone. — location: 5842 ^ref-48072

  1. The community of the free and its dictatorship over peoples unworthy of liberty — location: 5889 ^ref-61602

far from being perceived as a contradiction, the theorization and practice of slavery at the expense of the excluded further strengthened the proud self-consciousness of the community of the free, who lauded themselves for their immunity from the servile spirit attributed to the barbarians subjugated by them. — location: 5891 ^ref-63058

The Constitution held up as a model consecrated the birth of the first racial state, while the self-government extolled here guaranteed southern slave-owners legitimate enjoyment of their property without interference by the federal government. — location: 5899 ^ref-30833

with the onset of a state of emergency, the powers granted to the federal authorities ‘ought to exist without limitation’ and without ‘constitutional shackles’. — location: 5969 ^ref-24831

The unwarranted political emancipation of the popular classes involved the dis-emancipation of the only classes qualified to run the country. — location: 6027 ^ref-33411

To abolish the institution of slavery, to which representative bodies hegemonized by slave-owners proved stubbornly attached, Smith looked to ‘despotism’, — location: 6032 ^ref-21486

Lincoln declared: ‘Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier-boy who deserts, while I must not touch a hair of a wily agitator who induces him to desert?’ — location: 6037 ^ref-30122

An integral part of the self-celebration of the community of the free (and the liberal tradition) was the opposition between intransigent, unconditional guardianship of the liberty it assigned itself and the inclination to despotism reprehended in opponents. — location: 6056 ^ref-10191

three theories of dictatorship emerge: the dictatorship of civilized peoples over barbarians in the colonies; the dictatorship that suppresses popular subversion in the metropolis; and the dictatorship which, in a situation of stalemate, imposes the requisite reforms from above. — location: 6058 ^ref-23945

Marx applied this perspective to the social revolution as well as the national revolution. In both cases a dictatorship is envisaged that emerges in the wake of a popular revolution from below. But for de Tocqueville (and the liberal tradition as a whole), it was precisely ‘revolutionary dictatorship’ from below that was ‘most hostile to liberty’. — location: 6062 ^ref-52064

What had occurred in the intervening years to provoke such a ruinous descent and consequent confinement to the grey border area between civilization and barbarism? — location: 6079 ^ref-57974

original’: ‘socialism is our natural disease’. And socialism was synonymous with abstraction, but also with something worse. The French were ‘afraid of isolation’ and harboured a ‘desire to be in the crowd’; they felt themselves members of a ‘nation that marches to the same step in perfect alignment’; they regarded liberty as ‘the least important of their possessions, and thus are always ready to offer it up with reason at moments of danger’. — location: 6098 ^ref-46496

‘what at first seemed a genuine love of liberty proves to have been merely hatred of a tyrant. But what a nation with a real instinct for freedom cannot endure is the feeling of not being its own master.’ — location: 6111 ^ref-28041

‘peoples made to be free’ and ‘nations best made for servitude’. — location: 6116 ^ref-47590

its least educated and most unruly elements’.82 A disdainful warning was issued to the latter, intent on pursuing ‘material benefits’ and incapable of appreciating liberty in and for itself: — location: 6120 ^ref-4449

The ‘lofty aspiration’ to liberty was a thing that some men are capable of feeling, while others are not: — location: 6127 ^ref-11164

de Tocqueville had seen the spectre of socialism lurking across the Alps and had not hesitated to conclude that the Italians ‘have likewise shown themselves unworthy of liberty’. — location: 6133 ^ref-2578

de Tocqueville’s tendency in explaining the impending civil war is clear: he assigned responsibility for it to the growing presence of ethnic groups traditionally lacking in the political and moral qualities attributed to Anglo-Americans. — location: 6277 ^ref-42345

the self-proclamation of the community of the free felt the need to resort to genealogical myths that endowed this distinguishing gesture with a foundation. — location: 6303 ^ref-13476

In 1902 Arthur MacArthur, military governor of the Philippines, demanded the United States’ right to dominion on the grounds that it belonged to the ‘magnificent Aryan people’.142 — location: 6400 ^ref-50768

Intent on destroying a society whose pillars were Christianity and the landed aristocracy was an alliance between subversive intellectuals gathered in ‘the revolution society’ and ‘the pulpit of the Old Jewry’, or the ‘gentlemen of the Old Jewry’, — location: 6436 ^ref-49270

What encouraged such a theory was the tendency, widespread in the liberal culture of the time, to repress the objectivity of politico-social conflict. — location: 6501 ^ref-61901

Had it not been for the occult Jewish leadership, ‘the uncalled for outbreak would not have ravaged Europe.’ Not objective social needs, but ‘the fiery energy and teeming resources of the children of Israel maintained for a long time the unnecessary and useless struggle’.168 — location: 6502 ^ref-16285

In this mythology of the conspiracy, one element was especially significant and pregnant with consequences. The actor in the black, abolitionist plot, the anti-slavery militant, tended to be delineated in accordance with the model generally used to stigmatize the Jew: ‘Essentially weak and cowardly, he would pose no threat in a fair and open fight’; but this was where deception, intrigue and, precisely, conspiracy came in. — location: 6514 ^ref-14138

Will anyone go so far as to claim that two peoples must necessarily live in peace with one another just because they have similar political institutions? That all the causes of ambition, rivalry, jealousy, all the bad memories have been abolished? Free institutions render these feelings even more vital. — location: 6753 ^ref-20442

Confronting one another in a total war, which required the mobilization of culture as well as armies, were antagonists who had previously congratulated one another on being members, or even especially influential members, of the community of the free— — location: 6871 ^ref-19292

‘in virtually all of Europe, the canons of August 1914 literally and metaphorically buried liberty in the name of country’. — location: 7122 ^ref-30011

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. — location: 7135 ^ref-60017

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, — location: 7157 ^ref-31482

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. — location: 7164 ^ref-52051

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. — location: 7167 ^ref-56157

In the South a climate of terror reigned over citizens suspected of harbouring abolitionist ideas. — location: 7189 ^ref-5633

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. — location: 7202 ^ref-22019

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. — location: 7253 ^ref-43093

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. — location: 7286 ^ref-56645

1537 Pope Paul III declared that the sacraments must be forbidden to colonists who, denying the humanity of Indians, reduced them to slavery. — location: 7287 ^ref-5209

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. — location: 7295 ^ref-8999

one hand, the polemic against central government arrogance and interference; on the other, the demand for complete freedom vis-à-vis ‘savages’. — location: 7298 ^ref-47873

Contemporary America's refusal to be subject to war crimes/the Hague comes to mind

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. — location: 7299 ^ref-45565

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: — location: 7311 ^ref-57492

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. — location: 7316 ^ref-38981

In 1860–61, when a newly elected Republican administration promised to prohibit the further westward expansion of slavery, the response from most white Southerners was another revolution for political autonomy. — location: 7324 ^ref-25765

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. — location: 7326 ^ref-23878

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. — location: 7330 ^ref-35792

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. — location: 7336 ^ref-16934

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, — location: 7339 ^ref-23012

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’. — location: 7346 ^ref-18640

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. — location: 7363 ^ref-49580

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. — location: 7387 ^ref-18032

The slaves’ ability to derive justifications for rebellion from the dominant culture itself led property-owners to regard even religious education with suspicion. — location: 7400 ^ref-30118

By rigorously delimiting the sacred space, liberalism radically widened the gulf separating it from the profane space. — location: 7402 ^ref-15684

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. — location: 7424 ^ref-63809

‘In the Crusades the Catholic Church enacted the principle of Islamism: extermination.’ — location: 7430 ^ref-64749

not only Islam was stigmatized as synonymous with barbarism. European high culture had long regarded China with curiosity and interest. — location: 7432 ^ref-61480

the boundaries between civilization and barbarism and made them fluid. — location: 7465 ^ref-27718

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. — location: 7473 ^ref-59430

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. — location: 7540 ^ref-21884

the Glorious Revolution emerged as ‘a parliamentary coup d’état for [the] transformation of [communal property] into private property’. — location: 7553 ^ref-41913

the advent of constitutional monarchy in England was a further intensification of the dictatorship exercised by English property-owners over Ireland. — location: 7563 ^ref-19442

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. — location: 7581 ^ref-59872

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. — location: 7583 ^ref-19126

the property barrier proved much weaker because the race barrier was much more rigid. — location: 7596 ^ref-59051

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. — location: 7597 ^ref-40139

Was political emancipation more advanced in the North American republic, which saw slavery flourish in these years and which a little earlier had extended that institution to the Texas taken from Mexico? Or was political emancipation more advanced precisely in Mexico and those Latin American countries that had abolished the institution of slavery some decades before? — location: 7600 ^ref-59720

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. — location: 7605 ^ref-13265

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. — location: 7615 ^ref-17493

If we regard the country born from the War of Independence against England and long led by slave-owners as liberal, it is hard to see why such recognition should be denied to the Confederacy. — location: 7625 ^ref-12461

The principle of racial equality became a constitutive element in liberal identity only from the mid-twentieth century onwards. — location: 7632 ^ref-18219

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. — location: 7817 ^ref-23470

it could now indeed be said that ‘the white savages of Europe are overrunning the dark savages everywhere’. — location: 7940 ^ref-52976

  1. From the nineteenth to the twentieth century — location: 7995 ^ref-63621

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’. — location: 8040 ^ref-40882

‘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.’ — location: 8047 ^ref-20616

Having disappeared together with Hitler’s Germany, eugenic measures continued to survive for some time in the United States. — location: 8053 ^ref-23956

‘the greatest genocide in human history’. — location: 8064 ^ref-54965

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 — location: 8082 ^ref-27184

even a conflict completely internal to the community of the free provoked an ideological violence that might well bring to mind the twentieth century. — location: 8087 ^ref-50511

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. — location: 8093 ^ref-25352

the exclusion clauses were not overcome painlessly, but through violent upheavals of a sometimes quite unprecedented violence. The abolition of slavery in the wake of the Civil War cost the United States more victims than both world wars combined. — location: 8101 ^ref-8631

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. — location: 8105 ^ref-45487

This phase of dis-emancipation, which developed in a society that continued to define itself as liberal, lasted almost a century. — location: 8114 ^ref-54673

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. — location: 8115 ^ref-33176

‘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.’ — location: 8121 ^ref-64368

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. — location: 8126 ^ref-14752

Demonstrating an extraordinary flexibility, it constantly sought to react and rise to the challenges of the time. — location: 8141 ^ref-59296

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. — location: 8143 ^ref-991

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. — location: 8148 ^ref-5832

for centuries the liberal market was a site of exclusion, de-humanization and even terror. — location: 8156 ^ref-53360

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. — location: 8162 ^ref-9138

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. — location: 8169 ^ref-21309

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. — location: 8172 ^ref-62247