Liberalism: A Counter-History

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 Sieys revealing the inner contradictions of an intellectual position that has exercised a formative influence on todays 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.