Around 1882, the photographer Albert Fernique photographed a group of Parisian workers gathered around trestles and benches inside a workshop. The floor is strewn with piles of wood and the ceiling beams tower above the workmen. Even so, the space is dwarfed by a massive, sculpted shoulder, draped in Roman robes, which dominates the background of the photograph; two workers watching the scene from a beam just below the roof appear to be perched on it like sparrows. The shoulder belonged to the statue, Liberty Enlightening the World—a gift to the United States from the France of the Third Republic. Work on the statue began here, in the workshop of the sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, only a year after the suppression of the Paris Commune. More people were killed in that one Bloody Week (la semaine sanglante) in 1874 than were executed in the entire Reign of Terror following the French Revolution.Footnote ¹ If the statue was supposed to symbolize liberty, this was to be an orderly liberty far removed from the license of the armed Parisian workers and their short-lived utopian government. Unlike her ancestor Marianne, immortalized by Eugène Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People, the statue does not wear the red cap that, since ancient Rome, had symbolized freedom from slavery. In the wake of the Paris Commune, the Third Republic banned the cap and sought to banish the unruly freedom it represented.

Both Annelien de Dijn and Tyler Stovall discuss Bartholdi's statue in the course of their excellent explorations of the history of freedom. In Freedom: An Unruly History, De Dijn argues that the statue's original message was an antidemocratic one. Its initiator, the liberal lawyer Édouard de Laboulaye, insisted that the statue was “not liberty with a red bonnet on her head and a pike in her hand, who runs over fallen bodies” (336). For De Dijn, the statue epitomized the transformation of freedom from popular self-rule to what, in his novella about a French Everyman magically transported to an American village, Laboulaye deemed the best form of government: “the one that administers the least” and leaves its citizens free to do things for themselves (286).

In White Freedom: The Racial History of an Idea, Stovall depicts the statue as the perfect representation of white freedom, defined as “the belief (and practice) that freedom is central to white racial identity and that only white people can or should be free” (21). Stovall traces this freedom back to the American Revolution, noting that, when Thomas Jefferson wrote the words inscribed on the stone tablet clasped by the statue, he owned more than a hundred slaves. By 1886, when the statue traveled in crates to her new home, the nation that welcomed her had abolished slavery, but was no more interested in celebrating struggles against slavery than was the nation that had conceived her. Although the original design included broken chains at the statue's feet, these were largely hidden by her flowing robes. When she was hoisted onto a pedestal, 154 feet above the ground of Bedloe island, the chains were further obscured. For Stovall, this monument to liberty represented a domesticated ideal (the white woman on a pedestal) which, in the former states of the Confederacy, was enforced by lynching and racial terror.

For both De Dijn and Stovall, the deep ambivalence of this symbol of freedom reflects tensions in the idea itself. Both books speak to our time, in which freedom has become a battleground and both authors forcefully enter this battle. For both, proclamations of freedom have served to bolster oppression as much as to resist it. Yet their different accounts of the statue reveal much about their divergent understandings of the history of freedom. For De Dijn, the contemporary idea of freedom, as possession of individual rights that demarcate a sphere in which government cannot interfere, is not only novel and distinctive in the Western history of freedom—it marks a decisive break with that history. For over two thousand years, from the “invention of freedom in ancient Greece” to the eighteenth-century revolutions in America and France, she argues, freedom meant popular self-government rather than the protection of individuals from government (1). Today's dominant conception of freedom, she argues, is not a revolutionary inheritance but a product of counterrevolution. For Stovall, the challenge is not simply to resurrect a revolutionary, modern freedom; rather, he argues that this freedom was racialized and circumscribed at its inception. The modern revolutionaries may have proclaimed human equality, but they nonetheless assumed that to be free “is to be white and to be white is to be free” (15). In what follows, I consider each book in succession, before turning to consider the relation between their accounts of contemporary ideas of freedom and the dominance of market-based models of politics and economics.

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Freedom: An Unruly History is a “‘big’ intellectual history”—one that rushes across millennia to make an equally “big” argument about the origins and the demise of democratic freedom (11). Following those, like David Armitage and Jo Guldi, who have called for historians to return to the big picture and the longue durée, De Dijn defends this approach for its capacity to reveal the novelty of today's dominant understanding of freedom.Footnote ² Aware of potential pitfalls, she contends that it is possible to avoid anachronism and mythology by focusing on the documented intentions of historical actors rather than the “inner logic of ideas” (111). Yet it is not clear that Unruly Freedom entirely avoids these pitfalls; if the book has a central protagonist, a hero even, that hero is freedom itself, or what De Dijn calls the ancient “cult of freedom” (166). This “cult” emerged in democratic Athens, she argues, then fell with the decline of ancient democracy; it had its “literal Renaissance” amongst the humanists, but declined again following the Habsburg victory at Montalcino in 1559. This “ancient cult of freedom came roaring back to life in transalpine Europe” between 1500 and 1700 (165), then found its “apogee” during the Atlantic revolutions, which she insists were democratic revolutions that sparked “a powerful backlash against democratic freedom”—paving the way for contemporary visions of freedom (183).

De Dijn's early chapters are devoted to elaborating antique freedom and tracing its influence up to the eve of the American revolution. Her story begins with Herodotus’ vivid narrative of the “clash of civilizations” between freedom-loving Greeks and submissive Persians, in which horrific tales about Persian barbarism throw Greek freedom into relief (27). Although De Dijn acknowledges that Herodotus’ account of Persian despotism is hardly reliable, she sees the circulation of such stories as evidence against the “stubborn myth” that Greeks were pawns of an all-powerful collective, unconcerned with individual liberty and personal security. On the contrary, she contends that Greeks viewed self-government as the only guarantee of personal liberty and security, which would always be threatened under despotic rule (41). De Dijn's focus is on freedom as a political relation, not on the juridical freedom that was the antonym of slavery or on the moral freedom of Stoicism. She acknowledges that women, resident aliens (metics), and, of course, slaves were excluded from such political self-government and that freedom “came into being as a legal category: to be free was the opposite of being a slave” (7). Yet slavery was surely more central to political thinking about freedom in slave societies, ancient and modern, than the demarcation between political and juridical freedom suggests.Footnote ³

This is clear in the book's second chapter, which races from the birth of the Roman Republic in 509 BCE to the late fourteenth-century CE, when most Italian city states were ruled by hereditary rulers. While it may well seem “plausible that, at some point, Romans began think of their fight for popular self-government as a fight for freedom,” their conception of freedom was thoroughly colored by the existence of slavery. Rather than Roman historians having “conveniently overlooked” the fact that slaves, like women, were “excluded from the political process,” the Roman law of persons, which defined freedom in opposition to slavery, provided the model for thinking about the free state (75). This remained true, as Quentin Skinner has argued, for Renaissance thinkers, for whom to be free meant to live in a free state, and to lose that freedom, for states as for individuals, meant to be enslaved, subjected to the will of another.Footnote ⁴ If, as De Dijn argues, “the Atlantic Revolutions can be seen as the culmination of a long tradition going all the way back to antiquity,” then slave holding was as central to that tradition as was democracy (203). This was recognized by modern defenders of slavery, who justified that “peculiar institution” in part with reference to the good authority of what the Charleston publisher and pro-slavery propagandist J. D. B. De Bow called “the Southern slave states of Greece and Rome.”Footnote ⁵

I return below to the place of slavery in the modern revolutions, but first I want to consider De Dijn's central argument that the understanding of freedom as the possession of individual rights that protect person and property from government emerged only in reaction to these revolutions. The flip side of her argument that the modern revolutionaries revived a distinctly antique model of democratic freedom is her attempt to refute the claims of scholars such as Isaac Kramnick and Joyce Appleby about a “Lockean” influence on the American revolutionaries, which was “wholly different from and indeed opposed to the classical legacy” (216).Footnote ⁶ Joining what Kramnick has called “the assault on Lockean liberalism,” De Dijn contends that the belief that the American founders understood freedom as limited government and the protection of natural rights, notably property rights, rests on a mistaken interpretation of the Lockean tradition.Footnote ⁷ Yet, at this point, where the central argument of the book is at stake, the argument becomes vague and the pitfalls of De Dijn's “big” method become apparent: the conception of freedom articulated by figures such as Locke, Spinoza and Rousseau was “quite close” to that of “the humanists and their ancient sources,” she argues (177). “There was no huge break,” as early moderns thought of freedom “much like” the ancients did, and modern freedom was thus “quite similar” to ancient freedom (178–9). Nor, from this perspective, were the differences between modern thinkers particularly significant. Not only was it “perfectly compatible with the classical, democratic conception of freedom,” but “Locke's understanding of freedom was pretty much indistinguishable from that of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's” [sic] (217).

The real stake of this argument is to defend the book's central claim by dispensing with the alternate argument, made most forcefully by C. B. Macpherson, that modern liberty and the language of natural rights expressed the “possessive individualism” of rising market societies.Footnote ⁸ This argument persists, De Dijn claims, despite having been revealed by historians to be “a myth” (173); “the emergence of natural rights thinking,” she writes, “we now know, had little to do with the rise of capitalism or modern market societies” (174). Rather, ideas of natural freedom and rights already featured in medieval political debate, she contends. And their growing popularity in the seventeenth century was a reaction to skepticism engendered by the Reformation—which made natural rights an increasingly attractive alternative to the now untenable attempt to ground authority in the appeal to biblical authority—rather than a result of the rise of market societies.Footnote ⁹ Macpherson's thesis, James Tully noted in a 1989 lecture, was initially a challenge to received wisdom, but it “soon became reigning orthodoxy and then it was subjected to intense and sustained criticism.”Footnote ¹⁰ From the 1970s, Macpherson's attempt to situate modern political thought in the sociopolitical context of the rise of capitalism was displaced by J. G. A. Pocock's revival of republicanism, Michel Foucault's genealogies of the arts of government, and Istvan Hont's and Richard Tuck's works on juristic political thought. Speaking several weeks before the Berlin Wall came down, Tully suggested that this more recent work had “opened up a form of reflection on the seventeenth century which is not determined by the question of the rise of capitalism.”Footnote ¹¹ From our own vantage point, more than three decades later, the details of Macpherson's reading of Locke seem less significant than the legacy of the more recent turn away from capitalism and economic context. For all their brilliance and insight, these earlier critics of the analytical value of capitalism were swimming with the Cold War current. Today, De Dijn's attempt to disavow the significance of capitalism and markets for the development of an antidemocratic liberal ideology of freedom disarms her attempt to challenge this ideology. It does so at the very time when political thinkers are increasingly grappling with the deleterious effects on political and economic life of rampant inequality, the subordination of precarious workers, and widespread marketization.

De Dijn goes further than Macpherson's earlier critics in her denial that the emergence of freedom as limited government was related to the rise of capitalism or market societies. As well as dismissing the idea that Locke advocated a “possessive individualism” that went on to influence the American revolutionaries, she also rejects the idea that they were influenced by a new idea of “natural social order, created without compulsion but, as it were, through an ‘invisible hand’” (217). Although he is evoked here, Adam Smith, whose idea of natural liberty would complicate De Dijn's argument, is never explicitly mentioned. However, De Dijn depicts his Scottish contemporary Adam Ferguson as one of the “counterrevolutionary thinkers” who reinvented freedom in reaction to the modern revolutions (244). Quoting from the latter's 1776 “Remarks on a Pamphlet Lately Published by Dr. Price,” she notes that while Richard Price's Observations on Civil Liberty had stressed the relation between freedom and democracy, Ferguson severed this connection by defining civil liberty as “the security of our rights” rather than control over government; from such a perspective, the Americans, who enjoyed “more security than was ever before enjoyed by any people,” were already free (237). Yet, in his major work, the Essay on the History of Civil Society (first published in 1767, almost a decade before the American Revolution), Ferguson wrote that, amongst his contemporaries, “where the citizen is supposed to have rights of property and of station, and is protected in the exercise of them, he is said to be free.”Footnote ¹² Ferguson himself expressed more sympathy with the ancient virtue of Sparta, yet he conceded that his contemporaries “must be content to derive our freedom from a different source; to expect justice from the limits which are set to the powers of the magistrate, and to rely for protection on the laws which are made to secure the estate, and the person of the subject.”Footnote ¹³ Once mankind is “seized with their passions for riches and power,” Ferguson argued, ancient liberty must give way to civil liberty.Footnote ¹⁴ Rather than a political reaction to the Atlantic revolutions, Ferguson's account of the shift from ancient to modern civil liberty must be situated within his account of the development of commercial society, with its extended markets, private property and wealth inequalities.

Property is also central to the question of the relation between freedom and slavery, although De Dijn gives much less weight than does Stovall to the determination of the Founding Fathers to protect their own human “property.” Noting that the cry “liberty or death” was central to the Atlantic revolutions, she cites Virginians for whom allowing Britain to impose tariffs was “nothing less than a question of freedom or slavery” and French revolutionaries who proclaimed themselves willing to die for freedom (184). Yet she pays little attention to the distinction between metaphorical condemnations of slavery and actual revolts against it. When she turns briefly to the revolution in Saint Domingue, she treats Jean-Jacques Dessalines's independence speech—which warned of the “need to take any hope of re-enslaving us away from the inhuman government”—not as a rupture with dominant conceptions of freedom but as just another example of the fact that, at the end of the eighteenth century, “the whole of the Atlantic world talked constantly of freedom” (188).

This is not to say that De Dijn ignores the spectacle of slave owners railing against their enslavement or obscures the limits to the demos of the “democratic” freedom she celebrates. On the contrary, many of the book's chapters follow a certain formula: praise for an antique model of democratic freedom is followed by acknowledgment of its exclusions: ancient freedom excluded all but male citizens, the humanists’ free regimes were “defined in narrow terms,” and not only slaves but also women and (somewhat less systematically) poor white men were excluded from the freedom of the American colonists (165). Yet here, as elsewhere, De Dijn's phrasing suggests that, while this freedom remained limited and exclusionary, it was, potentially, unlimited and inclusive. “Many Atlantic revolutionaries,” she writes, “believed that these exclusions by no means undermined their adherence to the democratic theory of freedom” (200). What the book seems not to consider is that they may have been right. Could it not be that, far from their political vision being “riddled with inconsistencies,” as De Dijn suggests, this exclusionary model of freedom may have been a consistent one, in which freedom was necessarily the prerogative of a small class of independent white male property owners with the time to devote to public affairs (202)? Given that this particular “inconsistency” has been a particularly consistent feature of the model of freedom that De Dijn avows, it cannot simply be treated as a contingent historical accident.

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It is on this point that Stovall's most important contribution lies, and where his book offers a powerful challenge to a dominant understanding of the supposed contradictions of freedom. White Freedom begins by challenging the idea that the relation between freedom and race is contradictory. His key claim is that, if we have so often seen affirmations of freedom paired with enslavement, colonization and racial hierarchy, then this is because the relation between liberty and racism has its own “internal consistency” (15). Considering the development of ideas of freedom over a two-hundred-year period (roughly 1789–1989), he insists that there is no contradiction once one recognizes that the freedom at stake has been white freedom. Beginning in what he calls the “era of liberal revolution,” Stovall presents the “racial history” of freedom (102). For him, as for De Dijn, hegemonic understandings of freedom have come into being only by suppressing an alternative imaginary and practice. White Freedom begins with the claim that the “savage freedom” of Native Americans, pirates and children had to be disciplined and civilized so that a “mature” white freedom could reign. Freedom became white, on this reading, “by divesting itself of qualities seen as primitive or retrograde” (26). In an insightful opening chapter, Stovall situates all of these figures of immature freedom in the magical Neverland of J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan. The white children (the “lost boys”) ultimately leave this untamed land and their Native American allies behind, slay the pirates and—by killing “the primitive beings inside themselves”—grow up to become Edwardian English gentlemen, practicing a civilized, or white, freedom (24).

While the Statue of Liberty symbolizes this freedom, Stovall traces white freedom to the modern revolutions and to Enlightenment thinkers who were more comfortable indicting the metaphorical slavery of despotic rule than challenging the trade in slaves. Stovall's treatment of the American Revolution is particularly striking. While the fact that the men who fought for American freedom themselves owned slaves has often been viewed as “the central paradox of American history,” Stovall challenges this refuge in the paradoxical (112). “Denying freedom to Black slaves was not a contradiction,” he argues, “because freedom was reserved for whites” (113). The strength of Stovall's approach is that, rather than assuming that those who defended freedom contradicted themselves, it highlights the consistency of a model of freedom for which ownership of slaves was central to the independence required for liberty (and the time to devote to statecraft) and abolition a threat to property rights.

The importance of property to Stovall's narrative allows him to conceptualize the intersection of race and class. In an approach deeply informed by whiteness studies, Stovall follows thinkers such as David Roediger and Noel Ignatiev in conceiving white racial identity as an element of an elite social and political status, and in drawing attention to the shifting boundaries of that whiteness.Footnote ¹⁵ During the French Revolution, he contends, the sans-culottes were conceived by their opponents as “a bloodthirsty savage mob” and radical desires for freedom were depicted as “a reversion to primitive and racialized savagery” (130). The working class during and after the Industrial Revolution was similarly depicted as a distinct “species”—as “savages, barbarians lurking at the gates of civilization” (143). The Paris Commune demonstrated that civilization required the suppression of such unruly freedom. The project of readying the domestic working class for democracy thus paralleled the imperial project of civilizing the natives. Yet Stovall does not offer consolations about the automatic solidarity of the oppressed. What could have formed the basis for political relations across racial divides instead gave way to the entrenchment of such divides, as white working classes were increasingly incorporated into the project of empire. When the indigenous Kanaks of New Caledonia revolted in 1878, for instance, French Communards who had been exiled to the island largely sided with the colonial authorities, and in some cases even took up arms alongside the same forces of order who had massacred their compatriots in Paris four years earlier.

When Stovall turns to “liberal democracy,” which he treats as an unstable amalgam of Enlightenment freedom (“civil liberties, religious tolerance and property rights”) with popular sovereignty and democratic rule, he notes that liberals depicted property rights as threatened by universal suffrage (139). Yet, in the United States, the gradual abandonment of property qualifications for white men coincided with the further disenfranchisement of black men, especially following the 1857 Dred Scott decision. The rise of democracy coincided with the elevation of whiteness as the key “litmus of citizenship”—and a status within which immigrant populations like the Irish would fight for inclusion, often at the expense of black Americans. It was only when European immigrants became Americans that the Statue of Liberty become a symbol of welcome. “No one proposed building similar statues on the US–Mexico border,” Stovall writes, “in Miami, or on Angel Island in San Francisco Bay,” let alone in Charleston or other Middle Passage ports (92).

Turning to the twentieth century, Stovall considers ideologies of freedom during World War I, the Paris Peace Conference and its aftermath, the racialization of Bolshevism in the wake of the Russian Revolution, the rise of Fascism and then World War II—“the Great Antifascist War.” Stovall cites Gandhi's remark that the Allied fight for freedom “seems hollow” as long as Great Britain exploits India and Africa and “America has the Negro problem in her own home” (228). But rather than indicting the Allies for their hypocrisy, Stovall contends that “freedom was a complicated affair,” and never more so than during a war fought against fascism (229). Stovall's sympathies are with those who argued for the need for African Americans and colonized peoples to fight a “war on two fronts” against both the Axis powers and the racism and colonialism of the Allies (245). It was their participation in the former fight, he argued, that threatened the entire edifice of white freedom, and set the stage for the anticolonial struggles of the postwar period.

Stovall's book deftly analyzes the whiteness of dominant ideas of freedom while also acknowledging struggles against white freedom. Nonetheless, the book is marked by a tension concerning the possibilities of, and paths to, a freedom that would not be white. While Stovall notes that the idea of freedom has also animated powerful struggles against colonialism, racial segregation and apartheid, he rejects a Whig history according to which the inclusiveness of (white) freedom expanded with every new freedom struggle. Just as he stresses that the historical problem was not simply exclusion, he also insists that, rather than fighting for inclusion in white freedom, people of color have had to struggle to “overthrow it as a concept and as a social and political reality” (116). In contrast to all those who, since C. L. R. James, have read the revolution in Saint Domingue through a Hegelian lens, as the universalization of the freedom proclaimed by the French revolutionaries, Stovall argues that postindependence Haiti, mired in poverty, was treated as evidence that “black freedom” was “a political and conceptual impossibility” (119). Overthrowing white freedom, on this reading, cannot simply mean universalizing its always-too-particular promise.

Yet Stovall also declares the Age of Revolution a “work in progress” (120). In the period of Restoration, he argues, “Liberty remained to a large extent an insurgent idea, and the progress of that idea and the fight against slavery frequently went together” (133). While De Dijn paints a picture of decline—from the glorious days of Athenian democracy to the contemporary capitulation of liberal intellectuals to the view that democracy is a threat to liberty—Stovall is more willing to recognize that change has, at times, been for the better, and to identify forms of social progress brought about by social struggles, if not an overall progressive logic. Thus he insists that World War II, successful struggles for decolonization and the civil rights movement wrought profound challenges to white freedom, even if formal national independence did not overcome the dependence of the colonial period, and the civil rights movement sparked a powerful backlash in the form of a newly ascendent New Right. For Stovall, as much as it has been reconfigured in new guises, “white freedom was never the same after 1945”; in the wake of a victorious war against fascism, the idea of liberty as a universal right became and remained dominant (310).

Stovall concludes that the history he has outlined leaves him with the hope that societies will free themselves from the need for whiteness by “assuring a good life for all their members” (321). White Freedom seems to identify such a hopeful moment in the twentieth century, when Stovall argues that “the rise of the welfare state in Europe took place at the same time as the collapse of colonialism” (263). The claim that more equal polities at home required the dismantling of empire abroad bolsters a progressive argument about “how far post-war Europe had come from the social imperialism of Cecil Rhodes and others at the beginning of the century” (263). Yet social imperialism was not vanquished by the immediate postwar period. While the British Labour government that built the postwar welfare state presided over the independence of India, it remained deeply invested in the empire. In 1948, the United Kingdom's minister of economic affairs, Sir Stafford Cripps, contended that Britain's very survival depended on “a quick and extensive development of our African resources.”Footnote ¹⁶ Kwame Nkrumah, among the most astute observers of this coexistence of metropolitan welfarism with colonial exploitation, noted that “no post-war capitalist country could survive unless it became a ‘welfare state.’”Footnote ¹⁷ Yet he argued that the relative de-subjugation of metropolitan working classes had exported class struggle to the international stage and made colonial exploitation newly central to the stability of capitalism.Footnote ¹⁸ What Nkrumah called “neo-colonialism” (and what Stovall recognizes as one of the guises in which white freedom reemerged in the wake of the struggles for decolonization) was, in his view, even worse than the older colonial rule, in that it enabled former colonizers to exercise power utterly untethered from responsibility.

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What, then, of the present? Both Freedom: An Unruly History and White Freedom are framed as histories of a persistent model of freedom. The former begins with the claim that today “most people tend to equate freedom with the possession of inalienable individual rights, rights that demarcate a private sphere no government may infringe on” (1). The latter ends with the claim that the recent rise of “authoritarian populism” demonstrates that white freedom is alive and well, notwithstanding the dominance of formal commitments to racial equality (287). If both books are, in a sense, histories of the present, then it is worth concluding with a more detailed account of how each one depicts this present. For both De Dijn and Stovall, the Cold War was central to the consolidation of a counterrevolutionary or white version of freedom, yet both downgrade the significance of the Cold War victory of liberal capitalism. For De Dijn, after 1945, a new, transatlantic Cold War liberalism reinvented liberalism and its restricted conception of freedom as the essence of Western civilization. Today, she argues, the Cold War is “long over,” but this model of liberty lives on as “a battering ram against democracy” (343). For Stovall, the Cold War was not simply a conflict between capitalism and its antagonists, and the “free world” was defined less by capitalism than by whiteness. Cold warriors, outraged by the denial of freedom to white Europeans but not to colonized peoples, constituted a “New Right” (and a new white), which fused traditional conservatism and libertarianism to reframe personal liberty as racial liberty.

Although both De Dijn and Stovall discuss figures who have played major roles in the recent intellectual history of neoliberalism (Friedrich Hayek in the former case, and Milton Friedman in the latter), neither refers to this literature.Footnote ¹⁹ Yet, situating their respective accounts of freedom in relation to the development and political influence of neoliberal thought may help to bring together the starkly different pictures they offer of today's liberal freedom. For De Dijn, those on the right in the United States still embrace “Cold War (or, if you will, nineteenth-century) ideas about liberty”—ideas she attributes to figures as distinct as Hayek and Herbert Spencer (343). For Stovall, it was William Buckley Jr of the National Review who played a key role in fusing individual liberty with traditional moral values and blending ideas of white privilege with liberalism to re-create a powerful new white freedom. Yet the neoliberalism pioneered by Hayek was as much a critique of nineteenth-century laissez-faire as it was a response to the welfarism and economic planning of the twentieth century. Hayek saw Spencer, and much nineteenth-century liberalism, as overly influenced by French rationalism and the “false individualism” of the so-called “economic man.”Footnote ²⁰ When he founded the Mont Pèlerin Society (MPS) in 1947, he sought a new liberalism that would blend moral traditionalism with individual liberty.Footnote ²¹ The German ordoliberal Wilhelm Röpke, a founding member of the MPS, saw Buckley's blend of “free markets and social traditionalism” as a reenactment of the MPS's early neoliberalism.Footnote ²² Buckley seemingly agreed, describing himself as a “disciple” of Röpke.Footnote ²³

Throughout the twentieth century, the neoliberal campaign against socialism, social democracy and economic planning was fought, to a large extent, on the terrain of freedom. In books with titles like Law, Legislation and Liberty and The Constitution of Liberty (Hayek), or Capitalism and Freedom and Free to Choose (Milton Friedman and Rose Director Friedman), neoliberals contended that market competition offered liberation from the paternalism and dependence of state planning and the welfare state. It was this mythos that Ronald Reagan invoked in 1986 when he used the term “emancipation” to refer to “freeing” poor families from welfare dependence.Footnote ²⁴ At stake in this emancipatory language was an attempt to mobilize the republican valorization of freedom and independence against a welfare system that Reagan implicitly racialized and aligned with slavery, blackness and dependence. Neoliberalism was never simply a Cold War phenomenon. Rather, it was as much a reaction to the rise of social democracy in Europe and the United States and to Third Worldism in former colonies. For the neoliberals, the competitive market was not simply a more efficient technology for the distribution of goods and services; it was the guarantor of individual freedom and its demise augured the rule of a coercive, bureaucratic power. The correlate of seeing the competitive market as the sine qua non of individual freedom was always that this market order was far higher in the order of priorities than was political democracy. Indeed, in a late work, Hayek argued that the “particular form of representative government that now prevails in the Western world” was incompatible with both “individual liberty” and a functioning market order.Footnote ²⁵ In the conflict between democracy and market freedom, it was the former, he believed, that would need to be sacrificed.

Today, we face the legacy of decades of neoliberal restructuring, including spiralling economic inequality, the privatization of health care and basic services, and the entrenchment of precarious work. The (neo)liberal utopianism of the Reagan–Thatcher era has been left tattered by decades of actually existing neoliberalism, but freedom remains central to contemporary social–political conflicts. The narrow conception of freedom from government, traced by De Dijn, finds almost parodic expression in armed protests against the imposition of face masks and for the Bill of Rights, while white freedom is embraced on the right in increasingly explicit terms. Stovall ends his book with the suggestion that “the politics of white freedom has never just been about race” (320). Rather, he argues that its advocates have promoted racial distinctions and white superiority as a means to ends that all people value: peace and security, adequate food and shelter, and confidence in the future. In the context of a rise of authoritarian populism and racist and reactionary movements, he argues that today's demands for white freedom are responses to the failure of contemporary societies to provide such goods to all their people. The question, he contends, is thus not whether racism will disappear and universal freedom triumph. Rather it is whether we will “find a way to free our societies from the need for whiteness” (321). Doing so will require that political thinkers attend once more not only to questions of distribution and redistribution, as both Stovall and De Dijn suggest, but also to the labour market, where the freedom of some is still purchased with the exploitation and subordination of others.