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During the pandemic, I got heavily into the "Revolutions" podcast, and I wondered about these "liberal nobles" who were always cropping up trying to push for civil rights. So I wanted to read something about the history of liberalism. The typical story is "John Locke, Adam Smith, America's founding fathers (rah rah), John Stuart Mill, etc."

But Helena Rosenblatt's "The Lost History of Liberalism" makes a really strong argument that this anglo-centric definition of liberalism is counter-historical, and liberalism as a named, coherent political ideology developed in France after the French Revolution.

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So where does that leave Locke, Smith, et al?

She argues that it's inaccurate to call them liberals because the term didn't exist then (at least with the same meaning, "liberality" meant generous) and they wouldn't have any idea what you were talking about. Basically, Anglophones retcon'd a rights-based liberalism in the late 1800s.

Personally, I think she takes the argument a bit too far. She credits Constant and de Staël for formalizing liberalism in the aftermath of the Revolution, essentially trying to save the good parts from the wreckage. But, like, Thomas Jefferson helped write the Declaration of the Rights of Man, which laid out the key principles Constant was trying to salvage, and he was most certainly influenced by Locke.

Still, I think this book is well worth reading as a corrective to the Anglo-centric, individual rights-based history of liberalism I've been exposed to in the past. There's a lot more to the story.

But then, does she still acknowledge that they represent some sort of tradition or at least chain of thinking? Maybe it should be called something besides "liberalism" but it seems odd to say that you can't name a school of thought ex post facto.

This is perhaps just getting hung up on one part of what seems to be a more substantive corrective than that, though.

She doesn't spend much time on English thinkers. The focus is on French and German thinkers who (she says) codified liberalism. The word was really rare (foreign) in English until well into the 1860s, IIRC. Anyway, it's one of the criticisms of the book e.g. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/what-they-meant-on-helen... (notably, this critic works for a libertarian think tank).

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