This book is, the author tells us, an essay in conceptual history, what Reinhard Kosellek called Begriffsgeschichte. Since liberalism is a term with a relatively short and contested history, the word whose history is at stake is the adjective liberal. That is why this history begins with Cicero, whose textbook on gentlemanly behavior, De Officiis, discusses liberality at some length.

Helena Rosenblatt divides her history into eight fairly brief chapters, each with up to a dozen vignettes of people or topics. The first chapter covers the longest historical sweep, taking us from Cicero through medieval and Renaissance views on liberality and on to Lafayette at the dawn of the French Revolution. Chapter 2 is really the hinge; it covers the period from 1789 to 1830, and focuses on the ideas of Benjamin Constant and Mme de Stael, emphasizing the extent to which their defense of a liberal society and political system rested on a concern for the character of the citizenry. This opens a running theme of the whole book, which is the claim that central to liberalism is an essentially moral concern with the public spirit, self-control, and capacity for sacrifice of the members of a liberal society. Chapter 4, indeed, is wholly devoted to the question of character, and reminds the reader that in the battles between the Catholic Church and European liberalism, it was the church that was invariably the aggressor.

Chapters 3 and 5 tackle the great anxiety for liberals, the extent to which political mass democracy is consistent with a liberal society. Chapter 3 focuses on the years of the Restoration when the Bourbon monarchy regained power, and lost it again in a dozen years of overreaching reaction. Chapter 5, by contrast, concentrates on the fear of Caesarism, not of the rebellious lower classes. The autocrats on whom Rosenblatt focuses are Louis Napoleon and Otto von Bismarck, the latter, of course, the nemesis of the former. She also tackles two liberal leaders who were often accused of overreaching—Lincoln and Gladstone. Chapter 6 discusses what to most anglophone readers will be new territory, the French conflict over secular education at the beginning of the twentieth century. This leads directly onto more familiar territory: Chapter 7 analyzes the rise of so-called new liberalism, which was sometimes a liberal form of socialism, while Chapter 8 focuses on the route by which liberalism in one or another version became the common sense of progressive American politics.

An “epilogue,” as it does so often, serves as both a summary and an introduction to the main themes of the book. Rosenblatt is, like many of us, much taken with Duncan Bell’s thought that liberalism in the form in which it is usually discussed in the political theory literature is an artifact of a particular post–World War II political constellation. The narrative of the book stops in the 1930s, but that epilogue picks up the story in the American 1940s and 1950s, when Arthur Schlesinger’s The Vital Center responded to the charge, absurd as it seems in hindsight, that liberalism paved the way for totalitarianism. A version of the same charge had made F. A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom a best-seller several years earlier: The reformist liberalism of Franklyn D. Roosevelt or John Dewey was the first step on the slippery slope to the totalitarian abyss.

The answer was to embrace a less ambitious liberalism, one that concentrated on the defense of individual rights, and was hesitant to employ the power of government even for good causes, in case society was inadvertently turned into a militarized, or bureaucratized camp. Rosenblatt links Isaiah Berlin’s Two Concepts of Liberty (1958) to this pattern of thought: Negative liberty was true liberal liberty, while positive liberty opens the door to totalitarianism. The culmination of this view was John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971), a work that rested on the thought that we are essentially self-interested, rational creatures and concerned above all to protect ourselves from the ideologically motivated coercive actions of others, whence the emphasis on the idea that the state ought to be neutral as between different conceptions of the good life. But this is exactly to lose sight of the true history of liberalism, to which individual virtue, public spirit, and a concern for the common good are central. Hence, the title of the book, The Lost History of Liberalism.

This is an easy book to like; it is clear, consecutive, and well written. It will also open the eyes of many readers to aspects of the history of liberal ideas and institutions they had not encountered before. The difficult history of liberal ideas in Germany, for instance, is briefly but lucidly treated, and undermines the familiar view that what there was in Germany before 1945 was not a liberal tradition but an illiberal tradition. The focus on the history of liberalism in France is not unexpected, but serves as a useful correction to the idea that liberalism is essentially English or Anglo-American. Above all, the continuous emphasis on the way liberals fretted about the question of character gives the book both a consistent narrative thread and a framework quite different from the more common structure of a search for the pedigree of the rights that contemporary liberal states reckon to protect.

There are one or two things that may occur to readers, however. One is just what makes this a conceptual history, and in particular a history of the word, or concept, liberal. A captious reader might complain that the focus on what happens to the concept really lasts only through the first chapter. Thereafter, we have a very readable history of ideas of a conventional kind, but little attempt to pause to ask whether the concept has changed, and if so, how. A related anxiety is that it is not entirely obvious that a focus on the term “liberal” illuminates the history of “liberalism.” Here is where Duncan Bell’s views should have caused Rosenblatt more anxiety than they seem to have done. Liberalism seems intrinsically political in its scope; liberal primarily embraces aspects of individual character, as well as social, political, and economic arrangements. But someone may be liberal in the sense of generous without it following that they are “a” liberal. A roaring Tory who enjoys company may be a liberal host and a political reactionary. By the same token, a liberal teetotaler of whom there were many in nineteenth-century Britain, was likely to be less liberal as a host but impeccably liberal in politics. Rosenblatt knows all this; she does not suggest that Cicero was a liberal, but then it is less obvious why Cicero on liberality is the right place to begin.

One wonders, too, whether a rather different conceptual history would have emerged if the concept chosen had been liberty rather than liberal. Rosenblatt is, after all, one of the world’s foremost scholars on Benjamin Constant; she starts here from Cicero on liberality, but what if she had begun with Athenian notions of liberty—which Constant thought were “modern” in a way that Spartan notions were not? One might, then, think that her belief that it is only the critics of liberalism who trace its origins to Hobbes needs some modification. It is, after all, Hobbes who produces what is, in essence, the negative conception of liberty.

Still, these are minor quibbles. The insistence that liberalism is not committed to the view that human beings are narrowly concerned with their own interests to the exclusion of any concern for the common good is well taken. The idea that the essence of liberalism is state neutrality would have come as a surprise not only to Constant and Tocqueville but also Mill, Hobhouse, and John Dewey among a host of others. It is good to be reminded of this.