There are those words whose effects are so powerful that many using them are unaware they are standing before an idealized reflection of themselves. Undoubtedly, the word Liberalism falls into this category. Everyone using it thinks they know what it means, but if you take a closer look, you realize you’re dealing with a Protean entity that eludes understanding precisely to the extent that you try to grasp it. Historian Helena Rosenblatt, who had previously studied 18th- and 19th- century French thinkers, such as Rousseau and Benjamin Constant, but also the Parisian Salon of Madame de Staël, was asked by her publisher to write a history of Liberalism. Upon embarking on this task, she discovered the concept was not as evident as it seemed, and to elude becoming lost in the labyrinth of grand ideas, she did something highly unusual: namely, she looked into the word itself and found that Liberalism didn’t appear on the political scene until 1813. Tracing its conceptual origins back to Cicero, she found that liberalitas refers to a free Roman citizen’s civic virtue of behaving liberally toward one another by giving and receiving to promote the common good. But because this points not only to a class-based privilege but also to a gender–based one, she notes with wonderful self-irony that when applied to women, it meant something entirely different: »Being a liberal woman wasn’t something women aspired to.«

What emerges from our conversation is that Liberalism is a Protean entity whose meaning has fluctuated radically over the centuries. From Roman civic duty to the Enlightenment’s tolerance to today’s polarized debates—each era has produced its own liberal precursors. And while today’s discourses, in their rhetorical exuberance, are quick to proclaim a post-Liberal Age, The Lost History of Liberalism serves as a kind of admonition, or rather, a reminder of just how much we owe to this desire for freedom.

Helena Rosenblatt is a Swedish historian specializing in intellectual history. She is currently a Distinguished Professor of History at the Graduate Center, CUNY, and a member of the Board of Editors for both the Tocqueville Review and Global Intellectual History Review. Dr. Rosenblatt is currently researching and writing a biography on the life of Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein.

Helena Rosenblatt has published

Related Content