Near the start of her fascinating new book The Lost History of Liberalism, Helena Rosenblatt dryly observes that “available histories of liberalism are seldom helpful” (2). The point is well taken: the historiography of liberalism—largely written as intellectual history—is not particularly coherent, and has only sporadically adopted sound historical methodology. The genre emerged relatively late. The proliferation of the language of liberalism in the nineteenth century, not least in party politics, did not produce theoretically informed historical accounts of particular note. A historiography of liberalism really only developed in response to the perceived “crisis of liberalism” of the early twentieth century. Guido de Ruggiero's 1925 The History of European Liberalism was written in a Hegelian idealist tradition, according to which liberalism was an “organic development of freedom coinciding with the organization of human society and its progressively higher and more spiritual forms.”Footnote ¹ Coming from a different direction was Harold Laski's The Rise of European Liberalism: An Essay in Interpretation, published in 1936. Laski's liberalism was as much a “habit of mind” as a set of doctrines, with a complex history making both “clarity difficult” and “precision unattainable.” An essentialized understanding of liberalism was nevertheless still at work. Laski's liberalism was that the individualist, utilitarian mode of thought necessary to an emerging capitalist society. “The liberal creed, in a word,” he wrote, “is a doctrine woven from the texture of bourgeois need.”Footnote ²

Others mobilized still more superficial definitions of liberalism, conflating it with representative democracy, for instance. The interwar crisis atmosphere framed much of this literature. Liberalism was a tradition under assault, and those who wrote about it did so with a profound sense of identification. This investment offered little clarity. Idealist, materialist, and constitutional definitions collided or combined with theoretical abandon. In 1935, an American Philosophical Association symposium on the “crisis of liberalism” could not settle on a single definition. Max Lerner characterized liberalism as the “most disputed term of our generation.”Footnote ³ Surveys of the public during this era found a general approval of liberalism, but an inability to define it, or to recapitulate “historic liberal dogmas.” Regretting this fact in 1949, the editor of the Nation defined liberalism as a “timeless mission” from “Bentham to Roosevelt” to “secure for each member of society the greatest degree of freedom and welfare compatible with the freedom and welfare of all.”Footnote ⁴ Pronouncements of this kind did little to sharpen historical understanding.

Histories of liberalism, in short, first emerged during a period when geopolitical concern about liberalism ran strongly, but the theoretical precision of the tradition was minimally defined. These histories were marred either by philosophical essentialism or a captivity to the nomenclature of workaday politics. It would be wrong, however, to say that these early histories had no shelf life. Ruggiero's Hegelian interpretation of liberalism, for instance, anticipated themes of Francis Fukuyama's neoliberal mythmaking, most notably his The End of History and the Last Man (1992). Laski's socialist interpretation informed the influential work of his student C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (1962). The quasi-Marxist reading of liberalism offered by Laski and Macpherson, which strongly associated it with capitalist political economy, remained historiographically dominant into the 1980s.Footnote ⁵ In 1977, J. G. A. Pocock had this “obsession” with “propertied individualism” in mind when he condemned the habit of viewing premodern figure such as Locke through the prism of liberalism.Footnote ⁶

The Laski-Macpherson interpretative school was an anti-myth constructed by critics of liberalism. Its main rival emitted from a different antiliberal perspective, which had developed in interwar Germany. Defining liberalism not strictly as a political economy but as a constitutional proceduralism combined with an exaggerated regard for individual rights, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss developed rival histories of liberalism as a tale of declension. Their histories, shaped partly by Strauss's famous critique of Schmitt, located the origins of liberalism within the new natural law thinking of the seventeenth century, and particularly within the thought of Hobbes and Locke. The early modern obsession with rights, and with the creation of a monopolistic sovereignty out of the surrender of rights, struck both men as the watershed moment. Hobbes became, for each, the first recognizable “liberal” thinker by theorizing an absolute sovereignty representing the collected rights and will wills of atomized subjects. This sovereignty was nevertheless susceptible to conscientious resistance by individual subjects. Strauss found the origin of liberalism in Hobbes's willingness to allow resistance when subjects, according to their private judgment, felt their lives endangered by sovereignty. Schmitt instead blamed Hobbes for allowing subjects an interior right of private religious conscience. Both accounts, oriented around the category of conscience rather than property, have enjoyed latter-day influence.Footnote ⁷ Its fascist implications notwithstanding, Schmitt's liberalization of Hobbes based on his ambiguous account of religious conscience has been particularly influential. It informed, not least, Reinhart Koselleck's important Critique and Crisis.Footnote ⁸

Midcentury philosophical histories of liberalism exerted uneven and often unacknowledged influence over later efforts, which were often produced by political theorists. One might suggest, for instance, that the early John Rawls developed his theories in light of a liberalism of “possessive individualism,” while the later Rawls—challenged by communitarian critics—understood liberalism as a moral tradition emerging from the conscientious individualism of the Reformation era. In any case, Rawls's somewhat crude historical mythmaking about liberalism, which positioned his own thought within the “social contract” tradition, has been influential.Footnote ⁹ Its main rival has been the neorepublican theory of Philip Pettit and Quentin Skinner. They construe liberalism as an impoverished “noninterference” account of liberty, which has supplanted a more robust “nondomination” account deriving from ancient and early modern republicanism.Footnote ¹⁰ A great swath of postwar historiography has taken its cue from this supposed rivalry of republicanism (variously defined) against an individualistic and interest-oriented protoliberalism.Footnote ¹¹

In the present context nothing more than this brief sketch of the twentieth-century historiography of liberalism can be offered. It is the primary weakness of Helena Rosenblatt's otherwise very fine book that, regarding this subject, she offers even less. The Lost History of Liberalism is one of the few recent efforts to bring a rigorous historical method to a subject that is bedeviled—as suggested above—by philosophically engaged, essentialized, and transhistorical definitions of liberalism. In many ways the book is a success. But to the extent that Rosenblatt's foils are twentieth-century mythologies of liberalism and the anachronistic distortions that proliferate within them, her decision to write a history of liberalism largely limited to the long nineteenth century limits the scope of her findings. In this sense Rosenblatt offers a counternarrative to conventional narratives that she does not fully explain. Her book is a historiographical intervention into a silent historiography; it would have been greatly enriched had it extended into the twentieth century, and thus intervened into debates and context that are, as the book now stands, only faintly suggested.

To be sure, The Lost History of Liberalism provides a great deal of rich and unfamiliar history, and will be an essential study of liberalism during its first century. Even well-versed historians of political thought will learn a great deal from it. Historically inclined political theorists will learn still more. Rosenblatt has shaken off the grip of canonical accounts of “classic” nineteenth-century liberalism, and has traced the language of liberalism within a remarkable variety of unfamiliar settings and texts. She is likely to succeed in her aspiration to “reset and stimulate the debate on the history of liberalism” during what she perceives to be a second era of liberal crisis (277).

The achievements of the Lost History can be attributed to Rosenblatt's quite conservative historical methodology. The book's epigraph is a passage of Lucien Febvre: “It is never a waste of time to study the history of a word.”Footnote ¹² She offers “a word history of liberalism” (3), an etymological approach at times adopted by her mentor, Melvin Richter, in conscious imitation of the German Begriffsgeschichte associated with Koselleck.Footnote ¹³ Her method also bears some similarity to the ubiquitous “Cambridge School” method of linguistic contextualization. Though Rosenblatt says little of Dunn, Skinner, Pocock, and the other methodologists of that school, their presence looms. Like theirs—and perhaps resulting in similar limitations—her intellectual history is somewhat reductively construed as a history of political thought. And Rosenblatt accommodates a founding claim of the Cambridge School: namely, that early modern figures such as Hobbes and Locke should not be coopted into fanciful narratives of liberal modernity. By limiting her own project to the nineteenth century, Rosenblatt conforms to this prescription. She would not displease the conservative revisionist historian J. C. D. Clark, who once opined that “to attempt to write the history of liberalism before the 1820s” was “akin to attempting to write the history of the eighteenth-century motor car.”Footnote ¹⁴ Among recent work, Rosenblatt's book most closely approximates Duncan Bell's 2014 contextualist essay, “What Is Liberalism?,” where he defined liberalism “as the sum of the arguments that have been classified as liberal, and recognized as such by other self-proclaimed liberals, over time and space.”Footnote ¹⁵

Rosenblatt's subject is likewise the circulation of terms “liberalism” or “liberal” largely after the initial coinage of the former term. This limits her, despite her title, to the period after the French Revolution. For less justifiable reasons her account essentially ends with the close of the nineteenth century, with only the final twenty pages of her book venturing into the early decades of the twentieth. Her method certainly does not require the latter truncation, a point further discussed below. At the front end, Rosenblatt cannot afford to be quite as strict seeking liberalism as an “ism.” She offers a short account of what she considers the relevant medieval and early modern valences of the word “liberality,” and she presents this as the “prehistory of liberalism.” Given the varied contexts in which the general terms “liberality” or “liberal” were used across these many centuries, it is not clear that building a prehistory for liberalism around such hopelessly promiscuous terms can escape the methodological sin that is Rosenblatt's chief foil: namely, quasi-mythological, transhistorical accounts of a liberalism defined by “unit ideas” (such as possessive individualism, or rights). Running through two thousand years in thirty pages, Rosenblatt is necessarily partial in historicizing the idea of “liberality.” She thus risks constructing her own “unit” definition, and falling into the fallacy of prolepsis. A liberal, she argues, “from the time of Cicero to that of Lafayette,” meant being a free-born gentleman with the character and education (in “liberal arts”) necessary for civic virtue. This entailed a certain generosity in giving, but also—in Christian contexts—“love, compassion, and especially charity” (10–11).

Of this understanding of the virtue of liberality across millennia, Rosenblatt writes ambiguously: “If ever there was a liberal tradition this was it” (19). The particular accents of her account of premodern liberality set up several of her central interpretations of later periods, as we shall see. But to emphasize the character-building, virtuous, gentlemanly connotations of the premodern terms “liberal” or “liberality” is to offer only a partial account. Most notably, in these early contexts liberal could also mean “free,” “unobstructed,” “unconstrained,” or even “loose.” In these senses a ship might have “liberal” (unconstrained) passage through a channel, or a charter might have a “liberal” (loose) construction.

Rosenblatt's preferred prehistory for later liberalism emphasizes character building, probity, and moral flourishing in a civic context. Foregrounding the word's alternative valences of “unobstructed” or “free” would provide a different sort of prehistory. Indeed, one might map these alternate renditions of “liberality” onto traditional schema of either rival republican and liberal traditions, or positive and negative liberty. No doubt Rosenblatt's account of “liberality” tells us something significant. But by foregrounding morally and civically oriented liberalism (rather than an individualistic, interest-oriented one) she begs the chief question. Rosenblatt has convincingly excavated aspects of the longue durée meaning of the term “liberal” that, though overlooked by late moderns, retained significance among the originators of political liberalism. The question is whether she has reduced the term somewhat to enable her own interpretive preferences when she reaches later portions of her account.

Rosenblatt's brief narrative of the eighteenth century, written in the light of this Ciceronian reading of “liberality,” further illustrates this partiality. She concedes that liberality was slowly and imperfectly democratized, detached (at times) from its ancient aristocratic associations and opened to the polite, civil middle orders. She also acknowledges that the American republic spawned the idea of a “liberal constitution,” or a “generous and free constitution of a people who legislated themselves” (36). Her account, however, continues to emphasize Ciceronian notions of liberality, such that “a liberal constitution” was primarily distinguished by its constituency of “liberal citizens—in other words, men who were freedom-loving, generous, and civil-minded, and who understood their connectedness to others and duties to the common good” (40).

Importantly, and convincingly, Rosenblatt emphasizes another significant eighteenth-century innovation, which she appropriately traces to Locke: the linkage of “liberality and the idea of religious toleration.” Locke himself did not describe his own rational and tolerationist religion as liberal, but the later dissenting tradition adopted the term. Thus did Samuel Wright characterize civil and religious liberty as “liberal things,” and Richard Price describe toleration of diverse “modes of worship” and “systems of faith” as a “liberal sentiment.” By the 1770s, Rosenblatt tells us, “liberal” could denote freedom from bias and bigotry, or a tolerant open-mindedness. George Washington, in public letters to both Catholics and Jews written in 1790, used the term “liberal” to characterize liberty of conscience (28–29). Rosenblatt, whose earlier studies of Rousseau and Constant closely investigated the intersection of political and religious thought, is sure-footed on this topic. She might, however, have gone significantly further in linking Locke's thought to this strain of Enlightened “liberal” thinking. Though Locke did not use the term, “liberal” was specifically used to characterize his theories of conscience and toleration. The Unitarian Thomas Belsham found Locke's “liberal” sentiments in his opposition to the legal privileges enjoyed by the Church of England.Footnote ¹⁶ Another eighteenth-century commentator located Locke's “liberal mind” in his theory of the church as “separate and distinct from the commonwealth.”Footnote ¹⁷ Yet another associated the “liberal views” of Locke with Congregationalism and the “ecclesial liberty to judge and act for ourselves.”Footnote ¹⁸ Perhaps most tellingly, Locke's contemporaneous critic John Edwards accused Locke of a “more liberal” Hobbism: where Hobbes had authorized sovereigns to make religious creeds, Locke had authorized “every Subject” to “make what Catalogue of Fundamentals he pleases.”Footnote ¹⁹

Though she is alive to the importance of “liberal Christianity” within the history of liberalism, Rosenblatt is eager to fix the liberal tradition largely within the post–French Revolutionary period. She also seeks to sideline a conventional historiography of liberalism that (in her mind) overrates Anglophone political thinkers. Though theological liberalism is important to her history, she renders it a Continental phenomenon. Rosenblatt thus minimizes the extent to which tolerationist politics directly linked Locke to the developing language of liberalism, not just in the backward projections of moderns such as Schmitt and Rawls, but in the contemporary discourse that is the object of her research.

Rosenblatt nevertheless provides at least the rough outlines of this theological strain of liberalism as it developed in Britain. More problematically, she consistently sidelines the important context of eighteenth-century British political economy as a site where the definition of modern political liberalism was honed. She very briefly acknowledges Adam Smith, but distances his advocacy of free trade, markets, interest, and the division of labor from liberalism. Smith, she argues, used the term “liberal” in a distinctly old-fashioned sense, to describe generosity, benevolence, reciprocity, and other virtues of the civically minded gentleman (34). Smith certainly did use the term in that way, particularly in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1749). But in the Wealth of Nations he also wrote of the “liberal reward of labour” to characterize the free rise in wages in open labor markets. He wrote of banks “liberally” providing loans of capital within the “free competition” of a market economy. He repeatedly used the phrase “liberal, moderate, or scanty” to characterize costs and profits in markets, and wrote of corn markets being more or less “liberally supplied.” Most tellingly, he wrote repeatedly of the benefits of a “liberal system of free exportation and free importation.” Rosenblatt quotes this last phrase, but works hard to suggest that Smith predominantly understood liberality in the age-old way, to mark individual character, benevolence, and a communal generosity. Smith's own language, however, and even more the language that later came to characterize his political economy, suggests that she exaggerates this point. Smith often used the term “liberal” to mean simply “free” or “unconstrained.” Those meanings—rather than a morally thick understanding of “liberality”—informed his “liberal system.”

Duncan Bell, who has influenced Rosenblatt, is wrong to write: “While the term ‘liberal’ had long been used in English to denote assorted aristocratic dispositions, mores, and pursuits, it only assumed a specifically political meaning in the early nineteenth century.”Footnote ²⁰ The American economist Daniel B. Klein has charted a sharp upward spike in English usage of “liberal” in explicitly political contexts dating from around the year 1770. After that point, “liberal policy,” “liberal plans,” “liberal principles,” and so forth become common phrases.Footnote ²¹ Two preeminent thinkers popularizing such usages were Smith and his colleague, the Scottish historian William Robertson. In Robertson's famed history of the reign of Charles V, alongside traditional uses of the word “liberal,” are found suggestive references to “liberal sentiments concerning the rights of the people,” a “liberal and equal form of government,” liberal “ideas of liberty,” liberal amelioration of slaves, and even liberal “personal rights of individuals.”Footnote ²² In his History of America, Robertson described “liberal” policies of both free religious conscience and free trade.Footnote ²³ Robertson praised Wealth of Nations for checking “illiberalism” by offering “a Political or Commercial Code to all Europe, which must be often consulted by men both of Practice and Speculation.” All of this emerged within the context of the Scottish Enlightenment, reflecting the new economic and social theory of that milieu. It was an Anglophone political idiom that considerably predated the French Revolution, and thus should have complicated Rosenblatt's narrative.

In sum, across her account of premodern and Enlightenment uses of the word “liberal,” Rosenblatt favors ethically freighted and communally oriented valences of the term over those that suggest mere freedom of a value-neutral or self-regulating kind. All of this sets up a similarly colored narrative of nineteenth-century liberalism proper. In addition to sidelining British and American thought in favor of French and German, Rosenblatt's major revisionist thesis is that late moderns have, for ideological reasons, miscast early or “classic” liberalism as a species of individualist libertarianism favoring free-market economics and the moral neutrality of the state. Sustaining this argument drives her away from a British liberalism of utility and political economy, and toward a liberalism emerging from French republican contexts.

But Rosenblatt's claim that the French Revolution fully invented liberalism is overstated, and sustained by exaggerated evidentiary claims. It is not true, for instance, that Richard Price coined the word “liberalize” in urging Britain to imitate the French Revolution. Burke used the word first. There are many English uses of the word that predate Price's paean to the French, including thematically significant calls to “liberalize” religious sentiments or the church, or to “liberalize” trading monopolies (45).Footnote ²⁴ Rosenblatt again overlooks evidence of Anglophone contributions to the language of liberalism, and stints usages that implied a neutral liberty rather than liberality or benevolence. That said, she sustains with a great deal of evidence the inherently plausible claim that the French Revolution fundamentally reshaped continental discourse about liberalism. As will surprise no one familiar with her work, the trailblazers in her account are Benjamin Constant and Madame de Staël. Their collaboration produced “liberal principles” as an effort to stave off extremism (left or right) after the Jacobin terror and during the Napoleonic counterrevolution. Rosenblatt concedes, perhaps too casually, that this Constantian liberalism entailed constitutionalism, egalitarianism, and the protection of individual rights (52). She prefers, however, to emphasize those aspects of the thought of Constant and de Staël that do not accord with mythologies of “classic” market- and rights-oriented liberalism. Her heroes emerge as scourges of egoism, champions of public virtue, and foes of an unbridled, populist (and potentially authoritarian) democracy. The priorities of ancient, elite “liberality” persisted in their project, informing their effort to foster a public morality that could temper liberty. The cornerstone for this politics, in Rosenblatt's account, was “liberal Protestantism,” entailing an intense hostility to Catholicism.Footnote ²⁵

In the chapters that follow, Rosenblatt expertly traces the language of liberalism through the post-Revolutionary years; the upheavals of 1830 and 1848; the authoritarian reformist regimes of Napoleon III and Bismarck; the rise of “liberal” parties in Sweden, Spain, France, and Britain; the anti-Catholic crusades of Germany's Kulturkampf and the laïcité of France's Third Republic. These core chapters—centrally focused on Germany and France—are the strength of The Lost History. Rosenblatt knows this terrain well, and she unearths striking source material. A full account is not possible here, but her interpretive line follows from her reading of Constant. She demonstrates that “liberalism” was usually coined as a pejorative by reactionaries; that it often eschewed inalienable “natural rights”; that its policy preferences were eclectic. Rosenblatt is particularly invested in the claim that neither free trade nor hostility to the state were consensus positions within nineteenth-century liberalism (though a libertarian strain of this kind certainly existed, particularly in Britain and France). She casts these propositions as anachronistic misreadings implicit in the mythology of “classic” liberalism. She construes many liberals as open to robust statism and gradualist forms of socialism, and she thus does not see the “new liberalism” of the early twentieth century as a significant departure. In her account, nineteenth-century liberals took the communal and civically oriented “liberal” values that dominated from ancient times through the Enlightenment, and updated them for a more democratic, mass society. There is obviously something to this, but it is not—notably—the way that liberalism was understood by an observer as influential as Hegel, as he surveyed the history of the French Revolution. Hegel characterized “liberalism” as “the atomistic principle, that which insists on the sway of individual wills; maintaining that all government should emanate from their express power, and have their express sanction.”Footnote ²⁶ Nevertheless, Rosenblatt does an admirable job revealing the sheer diversity of liberal views on individualism, the state, and the common good.

If Rosenblatt will not construe nineteenth-century liberals as rights-obsessed libertarians, she is equally unwilling to cast them as advocates of a Rawlsian moral neutrality. Her most persistent and interesting interpretation links nineteenth-century liberalism to liberal forms of religion, chiefly Protestantism but also reformed Judaism and marginal varieties of Catholicism. The Constantian project of a liberal civil religion proved, she argues, durably attractive to liberals throughout the century. Roman Catholicism looms throughout as the mortal enemy of her heroes. Rosenblatt is at her best in tracing the shape of this grand religious polemical war, which becomes almost constitutive of the liberal tradition itself in her book. This does not always make for comfortable reading, and Rosenblatt at times flinches from naming what often appears to have been rank bigotry. Her convincing (if implicit) argument that both Bismarck's Kulturkampf and the most repressive of the French secularization laws are better construed as forms of authoritarian liberalism (rather that as reactionary or illiberal) should perhaps give her more pause than it seems to. Nevertheless, in what is her most important revisionist interpretation, Rosenblatt suggests that it is misleading to construe the religious politics of nineteenth-century liberalism around such familiar Rawlsian/Lockean categories as toleration, neutrality, pluralism, conscience, and free association. The actual religious politics of the era often veered in more “perfectionist” directions, seeking to rationalize religion rather than liberate it, in the interest of constructing a purely civic morality. This project could be intolerant and coercive. Rosenblatt explains (and perhaps tries to justify) this by minutely documenting the intense antipathy of Rome to liberalism, or “Americanism.” But it may be that the logic of justification works equally well in reverse. The project of a de-Christianized civil religion, after all, was inherited from the French Revolution and posed a mortal threat to orthodoxy long before the composition of the Syllabus of Errors. Rosenblatt might at times offer a more subtle reading of this dialectic and the polemics that accompanied it.Footnote ²⁷ She exhibits a consistent sympathy with efforts to liberalize and rationalize public religion, even if these efforts generally proved, to borrow the title of another study of the phenomenon, both politically and spiritually “stillborn.”Footnote ²⁸ Rosenblatt's accounts of liberalism's ecclesiastical critics at times become one-sided caricatures. She generously quotes fiery passages from anti-liberal or anti-socialist papal encyclicals (many of which in fact targeted Freemasonry), but ignores Rerum Novarum (1891), the founding text of modern Catholic social teaching. Leo III's rather subtle encyclical Libertas (1877), which defended individual freedom conditioned by natural law and realized in a corporatist society of orders, is rendered a ranting defense of the alliance of throne and altar (214).

Rosenblatt's liberalism finally emerges as a quasi-perfectionist project seeking to render mass societies fit for a measured liberty. The tradition was foundationally conditioned by its roots in liberal Protestantism and in French republicanism, both of which encouraged it to accommodate a communally oriented politics and forms of civil religion. This liberalism advocated freedom and (gradually) expanding equality, but it was not obsessively individualist or rights oriented. It did not reliably prefer free-market economics over state intervention, or even socialism. It was “principled, moral, and communitarian” (69).

There is much to be said for these conclusions. Rosenblatt sustains them with some eye-opening evidence. Her account of the pamphlet wars of the twenties and thirties to explicitly define liberalism is fascinating. She insightfully explains the role of German liberal theology in shaping high liberalism. She excavates the obscure texts, political groupings, and religious organizations that worked to define and defend liberalism in its first decades of maturity. Her book contains a striking account of late nineteenth-century liberalism in America, where it informed militant clubs and newspapers advancing “free-thinking,” “’freelove’, and atheism” with a rhetorical fervor that might give Richard Dawkins pause. All of this brings to life a chaotic world of aggressive political and social agitation often ignored in more decorous accounts of the liberal tradition.

But Rosenblatt's conclusions can appear no less reductionist than the conventional wisdom she seeks to overturn. At times they are belied by her own evidence. Even as she seeks to minimize it, for instance, she documents a healthy strain of free-market absolutism among some French liberal theorists of midcentury (80–83, 105–8). Her suggestion that nineteenth-century liberals were regularly open to socialism is not really sustained by her narrative of French politics during those decades, or by the ambiguous fact that utopian socialists such as Robert Owen described themselves (with revealing tendentiousness) as “true liberals.” Engels was blasting away at the “sham humanity” of liberalism only a few decades after Constant, in her account, launched the tradition (103).

At other times, Rosenblatt's communal and statist understanding of liberalism relies for its cogency on her efforts to prefer French and German contexts over a British one. Excavating continental sources is the great strength of her book, but the stinting of British influence is at times implausible, and not just in her account of the eighteenth century. In a remarkable omission, for instance, Rosenblatt says hardly a word about Jeremy Bentham's liberal reformism. Indeed the broader utilitarian tradition is ignored in The Lost History, though it inspired some of the Continental liberalism Rosenblatt favors. The Spanish jurist and reformer Toribio Núñez Sessé, for instance, translated and corresponded with Bentham, who considered him both a “disciple” and a champion of Continental “liberalism.”Footnote ²⁹ Rosenblatt likewise discusses John Stuart Mill but not James. The former appeals to her because he developed an appreciation for socialism, which accords with her argument that liberalism only sporadically championed laissez faire political economy. But consider this passage from James Mill, written for the Encyclopedia Britannica in the 1820s:

Here the elder Mill canonized a “liberal system” emerging from Hobbes and Locke but culminating in Smithean-Ricardian political economy and Benthamite utilitarianism.Footnote ³⁰ A comprehensive history of nineteenth-century liberalism needs to account for this branch of the tradition better than Rosenblatt does.

Rosenblatt says nothing of David Ricardo, who in 1816 wrote of the benefits of a “liberal system” of “unrestricted trade” and free labor. In 1820 Ricardo contrasted liberal policies to the “mercantile system,” and in 1821 he attributed “liberal principles” to the “political economists” Mill, Robert Torrens, Malthus, and himself.Footnote ³¹ To be sure, Ricardo corresponded with Jean-Baptiste Say, and he praised the “defense of liberal institutions” found in de Staël's Considérations sur les principaux événements de la révolution française (1818).Footnote ³² But his own liberalism was clearly rooted in British political economy and—like Bentham—he surely exerted more influence over continental liberalism than it exerted over him.

Rosenblatt notes Constant's early education in Scotland only in passing, but this indicates a different flow of influence than her anecdotal suggestion that the Edinburgh Review was “instructed” by Constant's later French writings. Constant rather claimed that it was he who had adopted “Scottish politics” (71).Footnote ³³ And while Rosenblatt does excellent work excavating a German tradition of liberal thought, she does not fully grapple with the fact that Germans themselves often understood liberalism as a particularly British phenomenon.Footnote ³⁴

One of the downsides of Rosenblatt's etymological method is that it limits the range of her source material to discourses where the language of liberalism was explicitly used in a political sense. Ethical or philosophical movements of theoretical importance to self-described liberals, but in which the labels “liberal” or “liberalism” did not significantly figure, are ignored. This probably explains why she has nothing significant to say about utilitarianism (though, as suggested above, utilitarians such as Bentham and James Mill did in fact contribute to the definition of political liberalism, and so should have come into her sights). Rosenblatt's method also leaves Kant out of the frame, as he did not deploy the term “liberal” in any politically significant context. But the aforementioned Spanish liberal Toribio Núñez Sessé was an important translator and popularizer of Kant's thought, as was the liberal French theorist Charles de Villers. Rosenblatt discusses Villers's friendship with de Staël and his appreciation of liberal Protestantism, but neglects his role as a conduit of Kantian thought into France. Given Kant's importance within this formative period of liberal thought, and his preeminence within later liberalism, Rosenblatt's omission of him appears as a serious shortcoming of a conservative methodology that in other respects pays real dividends.

Though her aim is “not to attack or defend” liberalism, Rosenblatt urges her readers to “reconnect with the resources of their liberal tradition to recover, understand, and embrace its core values” (2, 227). Her book seems constructed to defuse some critiques of liberalism, and to dismiss others. Left communitarian critics of liberal political economy, if they are so inclined, can extract from the book a nineteenth-century liberal tradition amenable to their redistributionist political aspirations. Rosenblatt spills a great deal of ink assuring readers that there was no liberal consensus in favor of free trade and market economics. More conservative communitarians, on the other hand, will find much in The Lost History that confirms their worst fears about the incompatibility of liberalism and traditional religion. That Rosenblatt does not take this latter concern particularly seriously is suggested by her chiding of Pierre Manent for supposedly merely offering “a now two-hundred-year-old Catholic critique repackaged.” Likewise, criticizing the supposed reduction of postwar liberalism to a right-obsessed alternative to totalitarianism, Rosenblatt condescendingly attributes this development to “Catholic propagandists” (277, 270).

But it is a credit to the honesty of her scholarship that Rosenblatt's findings do not always advance these apparent political priorities. Among the weaker features of The Lost History of Liberalism is its effort to marginalize Smithean political economy from the mainstream of the liberal tradition (partly by minimizing British influence over that tradition). Among the book's most compelling features, by contrast, is its demonstration that hostility to orthodox Christianity, and particularly Catholicism, was a persistent quality of a nineteenth-century liberalism that was often more “perfectionist” than we remember. Rosenblatt thus winds up only half defeating Marx's objections to liberalism, while largely vindicating those of Niebuhr.

As suggested at the start of this review, the most intriguing arguments of The Lost History of Liberalism are, unfortunately, the least well developed. They are historiographical in nature, and largely offered in a brief epilogue. There Rosenblatt argues that “an Anglo-American liberal tradition based so centrally on individual rights was a construction of the middle of the twentieth century, if not even later” (267).Footnote ³⁵ She attributes this downsizing of liberalism's reformist aspirations to the Cold War fears of anticommunists and Christians. Borrowing from the work of Samuel Moyn and James Chappel, she presents both the creation of a “totalitarian” foil for liberalism and its new emphasis on natural or human rights, as coping strategies.Footnote ³⁶ Isaiah Berlin's antiutopian, conservative model of positive and negative liberty functions similarly. So too did the revival of “neoliberal” political economy, which fashioned a heritage for itself in so-called classic liberalism. John Rawls, his redistributionist policy preferences notwithstanding, did little to check this reconfiguration of liberalism into a calculus of “individual rights and interests,” the spiritless and cautious “ideological ‘other’ of totalitarianism” (271).

These intriguing arguments, though they are clearly crucial to how Rosenblatt understands her project, are scarcely developed. To some extent the chronology of this revisionist account of the origins of “classic liberalism” is challenged by her own book, which fascinatingly details a much earlier process (1880s–90s) whereby “classic” laissez faire liberalism was negatively defined by interventionist German liberals and British “new” liberals (220–28). Her revisionism might also be challenged by the criticism developed above, which suggests that a rights- and interest-oriented political economy was indeed more central to the early liberal tradition than Rosenblatt concedes, and was not the mere wishful projection of Milton Friedman. But certainly she has a case to make. A more extensive exploration of the twentieth-century historiography of liberalism, both explicit and implied in various theoretical traditions, would have served her book well. The various histories of liberalism that we live with today are often embedded within, and thus serve, normative political theories such as those of Strauss or Schmitt, Pettit or Rawls. Understanding those accounts—and fully grasping the significance of a “lost history” that might challenge them—requires that they also be contextualized to their political moment. Rosenblatt's book makes only modest efforts in this direction. She has written a definitive conceptual and political history of continential liberalism across the long nineteenth century. But Rosenblatt's Lost History only partly transcends a historiography that often exists as a cacophonous clash of normatively invested mythologies.