Historical Materialism 19.2 (2011) 92–112 brill.

nl/hima

Settling Accounts with Liberalism: On the Work

of Domenico Losurdo

Stefano G. Azzarà
University of Urbino
[email protected]

Abstract
Liberalism is currently the hegemonic world-view, capable of dictating its terms even to the very
movements that antagonise it. But does the history of liberalism really coincide with that of
modern democracy? In two of his recent works, Liberalism: A Counter-History and The Language
of Empire, Domenico Losurdo demonstrates that this is not the case. At its origin, liberalism was
not a universalistic defence of the individual’s freedom. On the contrary, it represented a demand
for wresting complete self-government of civil society from the monarch. However, given that
each society is traversed by deep differences and bitter conflicts, the emancipation from absolute
power turned into the possibility for the strongest individuals and social forces to exercise an
unprecedented absolute power over subaltern classes and ‘inferior races’. It was only after the
confrontation and clash with the demands of radicalism and socialism and two world-wars that
liberal thought was forced to make peace with the principles of democracy. However,
contemporary liberalism seems to have forgotten its own most-recent achievements and to have
returned to its eighteenth-century form: will modern democracy survive this involution?

Keywords
liberalism, slavery, colonialism, radicalism, democracy, universalism

Introduction
Domenico Losurdo can be regarded as one of the most important contemporary
Italian philosophers of Marxist orientation. He is Professor of the History of
Philosophy at the University of Urbino and an internationally acclaimed
Hegel scholar, presiding over the Internationale Gesellschaft Hegel-Marx für
dialektisches Denken. His research has focused on German idealism, including
right-wing philosophers such as Nietzsche and Heidegger. Of equal importance
has been his engagement with the classical theorists of the workers’ movement,
such as Marx and Lenin, Gramsci and Lukács, in a labour of reconstruction of
historical materialism that has spanned the past thirty years. The critique of
liberalism is an important aspect of his current work. In many essays of the
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 DOI: 10.1163/156920611X573815
S. G. Azzarà / Historical Materialism 19.2 (2011) 92–112 93

past decade, Losurdo has developed an anti-conformist critique of the history

of the liberal movement that refers to its main theorists as much as to the
concrete developments and political choices of the societies and states that
define themselves as liberal. The result is a great fresco incorporating a close
comparison of the revolutionary and the conservative wings of liberalism over
the centuries, which places in question the foundations of traditional
historiography and reveals the difficult process of the construction of modern
democracy. This critique has been developed in particular in the two books
that constitute the focus of attention of this article.

Liberal hegemony and the need for a counter-history

The Italian publication of Losurdo’s Controstoria del liberalismo spurred a lively
debate. Recently continued in Il linguaggio dell’Impero, at first sight Losurdo’s
counter-history might look like a ‘Black Book of Liberalism’.1 This was indeed
the way in which it was understood by many liberal critics who shy away from
open confrontation.2
Its real impact, however, is much wider than the list of crimes and mischief
documented by Stéphane Courtois et al., authors of the Black Book of
Communism. Its intention is also very different.
Undoubtedly, liberalism is nowadays the largely dominant world-view. Its
advocates have declared victory over all the different kinds of social conflicts that
have affected the West and the rest of the world for the past few centuries.
First, the property-owning class managed to oppose and co-opt the
European aristocracy and become dominant. Then it had the upper-hand over
the emerging movement of subaltern classes and their radical demands for
changes in social and international relations. This international conflict lasted
for a long time and became entangled with different forms of antagonism.
After the defeat of the socialist faction, ‘liberal democracy’ – its legal codes
grounded in private property and individual rights, the separation of powers
and the formalisation of conflict in representative government – was explicitly
defended as the ultimate outcome of history, the final achievement of a
multiplicity of social and political experiments over the course of human
history. Similarly, the history of the process of liberation of the colonies appears

1. Petrucciani 2005.
2. Examples of the liberal critiques of Losurdo’s book can be found in Cofrancesco 2005
and 2006; Morelli 2005; Bassani 2006; Lattieri 2006. For more sympathetic, albeit reductive,
liberal-socialist readings, see Gravagnuolo 2005 and Bedeschi 2005 (the author is an ex-Marxist
scholar of Galvano Della Volpe). See also a Catholic interpretation, in Pellicciari 2005–6. Finally,
for a more academic reading, see d’Orsi 2005.
94 S. G. Azzarà / Historical Materialism 19.2 (2011) 92–112

to clash with an objective tendency to re-colonise, which is indicative of the

liberal resolve to affirm liberal-global interests by forcedly exporting its
‘democratic’-political institutions under US-leadership.
In this context, it is hardly surprising that liberalism enjoys a solid ideological
hegemony. If socio-political conflicts are also a battle of ideas and theories,
a defeat at this level of the struggle represents an integral defeat: in the period
of the establishment of modern democracy and the emancipation from
colonialism, world-views that served as an alternative to liberalism were at the
forefront of conceptual developments and new artistic expression. Today, they
either no longer exist or, where they do, have little real effect.
What do the words ‘terrorism’, ‘fundamentalism’, ‘anti-Americanism’ and
‘anti-Zionism’ mean to the contemporary Left? The victory of liberalism is
also measured in terms of how deeply it was able to penetrate and restructure
antagonistic world-views, whether explicitly or, more often, surreptitiously,
whilst providing the whole of society and the subaltern classes with ideas with
which to perceive and understand reality, refashioning their vocabulary
according to liberalism’s own ‘lexicon’.3 In the last few decades, we have also
been witness to a revision of the interpretative paradigms of contemporary
history. So pervasive was this revision that it changed the collective imaginary
and asserted a drastic transformation of politics, social relations of power and
relations between nations. The world-wars, especially the second, were
interpreted and experienced by the anti-fascist front as a ‘social and democratic
revolution of global scope’ that brought ‘legitimacy to the revolutionary
tradition as a whole’,4 reinforcing a positive assessment of the chain of
revolutionary events running from the French Revolution to the upheavals of
the 1900s. Initially, this assessment also applied to the USSR as the latter was
part of the Anglo-American alliance against Nazism and its influence on
Western-political systems and civil societies was on the rise.
Today, in an epochal ‘historiographical and cultural turn’, ‘the historical
cycle from 1789 to 1917’,5 popular democracies and subsequent movements
of liberation from colonialism are being targeted and reinterpreted through
the category of ‘international civil war’.6 This concept, proposed by Ernst
Nolte, sharply distinguishes the Western (or Atlantic) revolutionary liberal
and democratic lineage from the ‘totalitarian’ one of Jacobin-Bolshevik
origins.7

3. Losurdo 2007, pp. ix–x.

4. Losurdo 1996b, pp. 9–11.
5. Losurdo 1996b, pp. 6–7.
6. Losurdo 1996b, p. 20. Cf. Losurdo 1996b, pp. 93ff. and Chapter III.
7. Losurdo 1996b, p. 13.
S. G. Azzarà / Historical Materialism 19.2 (2011) 92–112 95

Losurdo, in Hegelian fashion, remarks about this apotheosis of liberalism –

which demands that one sign up to the principles of liberalism as a minimum
requirement for access to public discourse – that what is noted is not necessarily
known.8 His Counter-History does not aim to be an epoché of this hegemony,
but takes it seriously and questions liberalism with respect to its foundations
in, and its self-identification with, the centrality of the individual and the
history of modern freedom. After all, what does this liberalism which has
witnessed the rise of its foremost interpreters into the contemporary cultural
and political establishment actually consist of ? In recent decades, liberalism
underwent a process of involution with respect to the position it used to hold
during the twentieth century. In its current ‘neo-liberal’ mode, it is carrying
out a ‘massive purge of elements of democracy, and social democracy in
particular, from “liberal-democratic” societies’,9 thus discarding ‘everything
that the prolonged struggles of workers and people’ had introduced into
liberalism. Whilst doing so, it is also recovering many of the positions that
were typical of nineteenth-century liberalism. Instead of presenting a
periodisation and categorisation of the different tendencies underlying such a
trend, Losurdo immediately strikes at the heart of the question. Since its
origins, liberalism has been threatened by an inherent contradiction. Whilst
undoubtedly it has developed the concepts of the individual and freedom, it
seems incapable of conceiving them within the framework of a real universalism.
This contradiction can first be seen in the socio-political context of ‘liberal’
countries that from their early days witnessed theoretical debates about
freedom and were harshly confronted by the problems posed to the friends of
liberty by the presence of colonised peoples and the concrete institution of
slavery.

Slavery and genocide in the history of liberalism

A comparative appreciation of liberalism at the level of theory and political
practice10 cannot ignore its systematic entanglement with slavery and even
genocide.11 Following the uprisings against Spanish domination, Holland was
the first country to proclaim itself a ‘liberal’ order. The United Provinces
relaunched colonial expansion and engaged in intense competition with Spain

8. ‘Das Bekannte überhaupt ist darum, weil es bekannt ist, nicht erkannt’ (G.W.F. Hegel,
Phänomenologie des Geistes, Vorrede).
9. Losurdo 1994, p. 19.
10. On the programmatic use of this methodology of historical investigation, see Losurdo
1996b, pp. 33–5.
11. See Losurdo 2005, pp. 16ff.; Losurdo 2011, pp. 15ff.
96 S. G. Azzarà / Historical Materialism 19.2 (2011) 92–112

over the control of the slave-trade. The same phenomenon occurred in England
after the Glorious Revolution, when, in the name of the freedom of civil
society and the interests of the individual, the political power of landowners
was established, placing rigorous limitations on the absolute powers of the
sovereign. The first move in foreign policy was to take the asiento away from
Spain and acquire the monopoly over the trade in black slaves, who were
destined for the mother country and the American colonies. Proto-liberal
England also distinguished itself by the harshness used in its subjugation of
Ireland, responding to the resistance of the local populations with systematic
oppression and massacre.12 At the level of domestic policy, this new liberal
England engaged in the promotion of primitive accumulation and the
development of industry, showing no hesitation in persecuting dispossessed
peasants and turning them into cheap labour by means of legislation that
punished vagrancy with imprisonment. In the 1800s, beggars and indigenous
populations in England were still persecuted to such an extent that they were
deprived of personal freedoms and confined to horrific workhouses, institutions
of forced labour.13 Finally, in the United States these contradictions were most
blatant.14 The United States emerged out of an act of rebellion that broke up
the unity between the liberal party and the Anglo-Saxon world, at a time when
the latter had already proclaimed itself the champion of liberty and of the
primacy of the individual, entrusted with the mission of exporting these values
to the rest of the globe where tyranny, war and oppression abounded. Colonial
powers rebelled in the name of a more accomplished liberalism, which entailed
emancipation from the despotism of the mother country and the constitution
of an entirely new, republican order founded on the representation of
individuals who were free by nature. However, the institutions of the American
republic were able to coexist with the most brutal form of slavery for over
a century, and only came to abolish it as a result of a bloody war that left
behind a persistent ‘ideology of white supremacy’15 and forms of hateful
discrimination that are yet to be overcome.16 The human nature of the
colonised people of colour was under question from the beginning of Western-
colonial expansionism. They tended to be seen as wild and dangerous beasts
whose subjugation or annihilation was not worthy of a raised eyebrow. In

12. See Losurdo 2005, pp. 21, 116–17; Losurdo 2011, pp. 19, 115–17. On the ferocious
English domination of Ireland and Scotland, see Losurdo 1996b, pp. 48–51, 71–2.
13. See Losurdo 2005, pp. 68ff., 117–20, 123ff., 180ff.; Losurdo 2011, pp. 67ff., 117–20,
123ff.
14. See Losurdo 2005, pp. 9ff.; Losurdo 2011, pp. 7ff.
15. Losurdo 1996b, p. 23.
16. See Losurdo 1996b, p. 62.
S. G. Azzarà / Historical Materialism 19.2 (2011) 92–112 97

North America in particular, the celebration of the freedom of the colonist

and the civilising rôle of Christianity and the Anglo-Saxon race went hand in
hand with the genocide of Indian nations: the extermination of these infidel
savages did not seem to represent any kind of contradiction.
Losurdo suggests that these were not degenerations or empirical deviations
from otherwise-noble ideals. These practices were fully self-conscious, justified
and even theorised by the main exponens of liberal theory.17 Grotius had
already lent full legitimacy to the enslavement and extermination of pagans
and of the peoples of colonised countries who rebelled against the sovereign
and God. The ‘just war’ waged against them turned them into the victor’s
legitimate property, as a theoretical tradition from Aristotle onwards claimed.
John Locke, the main theoretician of liberalism and of the limits of sovereign
power, not only had economic interests in the slave-trade, but also affirmed
the absolute power of the master over the men-commodities he owns, a power
that grants him absolute discretion over their sale as much as their death.
Locke also participated in the drafting of the constitutional provision that
sanctioned slavery in Carolina. In Locke, Losurdo finds a shift towards
commodity-slavery along racial lines that follows a period when the borders
between slavery and its different manifestations (servitus perfecta/servitus
imperfecta), including wage-labour, were still blurred. Locke notoriously
justified the colonists’ right to expropriate the Indians of their land and of all
rights of ownership on the grounds that they are incapable of labouring, and
thus of making land profitable. This claim recurs in nearly every political
figure and intellectual who collaborated in the founding of the republic of the
United States, and among those who supported it: from the Founding Fathers
to Calhoun and beyond, the exaltation of individual and social freedom
against political power, and the hatred of the political slavery that had been
abolished in the Western hemisphere but was still present in monarchical
Europe, coexisted with a vindication of the natural legitimacy and necessity of
racial slavery.
According to Losurdo, these positions would be inexplicable without an
appreciation of the history and moral sensibility of their times: the refusal of
enslavement and genocide and the recognition of the fully-fledged humanity
of colonised people is already present in the debate that followed the conquest
of America (from Las Casas to Montaigne), with which both Locke and the
Founding Fathers were largely familiar.18

17. See Losurdo 2005, pp. 22–8, 32–6, 42–6; Losurdo 2011, pp. 22–7, 30–4, 40–4.
18. See Losurdo 2005, pp. 34, 310; Losurdo 2011, pp. 32–3, 314–15.
98 S. G. Azzarà / Historical Materialism 19.2 (2011) 92–112

By the standards of the moral sensibility that was emerging in this period,
liberalism seems to take a leap backwards; unsurprisingly, a number of writers
perceived this contradiction at the time and subverted the assumption of
liberal theory and its ‘phenomenology of power’,19 in which the conflict
between freedom and slavery merely coincided with that between state and
civil society. Their hope was that a centralised political power – the crown,
government or church – could limit the unbridled exercise of power over
human property enjoyed by civil society and its strongest representatives since
the emancipation from absolutism, through despotic measures if necessary.
This was the case during the American Civil War, when those who defended
slavery in the South accused Lincoln of absolutist despotism and liberticidal
Jacobinism.20

State-power and civil society: liberalism as a ‘Herrenvolk democracy’

This brings us to the most brutal ‘paradox’ of liberalism in Losurdo’s
reconstruction.21 The question is not whether, in its early stages, liberalism
could not free itself from a pre-modern legacy. As Losurdo claims, ‘slavery
does not persist despite the success of the three liberal revolutions; on the
contrary, it reaches its highest development as a result of this success’.22 Rather
than signalling an unfinished stage of liberalism or its confutation, slavery was
a basic tenet and condition of existence of early-liberal societies. There is an
inevitable ‘connection between the permanence and reinforcement of the
institution of slavery on the one hand and the power of the organs of
representation on the other’.23
In Losurdo’s opinion, liberal civil society won out over absolutism under
extremely uneven conditions characterised by unequal social relations of
power, culture and property. In Anglo-Saxon societies there were masters and
servants, owners and slaves, peasants and wage-labourers. The break unleashed
interests and egoisms that were already widespread in society and made a
different horizontal conflict that had previously been contained more
prominent, whereby the dominant groups that had defeated absolutism no
longer tolerated any political tutelage and were free to defend existing power-
relations over other groups, sometimes using cruel forms of oppression.

19. See Losurdo 1996a, passim.

20. See Losurdo 2005, p. 8; Losurdo 2011, p. 6. Cf. Losurdo 1996b, pp. 33, 54–6, 142.
21. See Losurdo 2005, pp. 37–42; Losurdo 2011, pp. 35–40.
22. Losurdo 2005, p. 37. The three liberal revolutions are the Dutch, English and American.
23. Losurdo 2005, p. 39.
S. G. Azzarà / Historical Materialism 19.2 (2011) 92–112 99

‘The rise of liberalism and the spread of the commodity of slavery based on
race were born out of a twin birth’, because the rhetoric of ‘liberty’ and of the
‘self-government of civil society’ became linked to the ‘existence of an
unprecedented absolute power’.24 This power was exceptionally brutal to slaves
and also readily exercised upon the subaltern classes of the metropolis. The
latter were dehumanised and seen as in need of tutelage; their freedom and
civil, economic and social rights – not to mention their political rights – were
hardly recognised and guaranteed, as Losurdo demonstrates in his Democrazia
o bonapartismo.25 Even some members of the ruling classes ended up suffering
the oppression of this power when they did not completely adapt to the
dominant order of property and race.26
In the Anglo-Saxon world, the severe contradiction between this situation
and liberal ideals was resolved through a double process of ‘externalisation’ of
the negative. The proud liberal self-consciousness of England repelled slavery
from the sacred soil of its free island, as a form of contamination. Excluded
‘amongst us’, slavery was confined to places where it was still needed: distant
colonies where the border between civility and barbarism was blurred and the
state of nature still reigned.27
This spatial separation of the spheres of freedom and slavery was
unacceptable for the American settlers. They claimed that with their
independence they had picked up the flag of freedom that a tyrannical England
had thrown in the mud. In this new liberal country, civil society felt on a par
with English civil society and could not tolerate being excluded from the
‘community of the free’28 and assimilated to the blacks, so these two spheres
had to be redefined in racial terms: skin-colour marked the border between
freedom and slavery. Whilst the industrialised North tried to externalise this
crude reality again and confine it to the rural South, the South could never
uproot racial slavery. On the contrary, it explicitly defended it as a ‘positive
good’,29 so much so that slavery facilitated the development of a tendency
towards egalitarian relations within white communities in the States. The clash
of these different ‘liberal’ platforms led to the American Civil War, and its
outcome forced liberalism into a U-turn and repudiation of this institution, in
a slow and uneven ‘general condemnation’.30

24. Losurdo 2005, p. 42.

25. See Losurdo 1993, pp. 21ff.
26. See Losurdo 2005, pp. 97–102; Losurdo 2011, pp. 97–102.
27. Cited in Losurdo 2005, p. 50; Losurdo 2011, p. 48.
28. Losurdo 2005, p. 51; Losurdo 2011, p. 49.
29. Cited in Losurdo 2005, p. 4; Losurdo 2011, p. 1.
30. Losurdo 2005, p. 67; Losurdo 2011, p. 64.
100 S. G. Azzarà / Historical Materialism 19.2 (2011) 92–112

Given these premises, from their foundation to the end of the nineteenth
century the United States can hardly be regarded as a ‘liberal’ country in the
contemporary sense of the term. They were ruled by a rigid separation of the
population into closed groups, each of which was subject to different legislation
and a different order of rights and duties: the conditions of whites, free blacks
and slaves were so different that one could almost call it a caste-system. For
Losurdo and other authors, such as Van den Berghe and Fredrickson, its most
apt definition is ‘Herrenvolk democracy’: ‘a democracy which applied exclusively
to the master race’.31 This democracy operates through a movement that pivots
on the axis of a distinction between a superior white race and the black race.
Given the increase of land available as a result of the expropriation of the
Native Americans during the advance towards the Western frontier, the
discrimination against blacks and their reduction to human property also
facilitated the development of a tendency towards egalitarian relations, even
though these were not free from contradictions and conflicts based on class
and status, within the community of free whites.32 ‘The members of an
aristocracy of class or race tended to celebrate themselves as peers’33 and the
‘manifest inequality imposed on the excluded was the other aspect of the
relationship of parity established between those who enjoyed the power to
exclude inferiors’.34
A similar argument might apply to the British Empire, where an intermediate
caste of serfs was growing between the castes of free whites and black slaves,
who were mainly confined to the colonies. This growing caste was made up of
whites whose ‘freedoms’ were incomparable to those of their masters. Given
the limitations and duties to which they were subjected, they could not be
defined as free. This ‘inferior race’35 was deprived of modern freedom, or
negative freedom, and, as eugenic and social Darwinism was being developed,
some authors came to regard it as a real ‘livestock’ breeding race36 that, from
the mid-nineteenth century onwards, also included wage-labour and the vast
realm of the poor forced to beg. Clearly, the right to vote could not be granted
to this ‘infant multitude’37 lacking in culture and political discernment. ‘A sort

31. Losurdo 2005, pp. 107, 333; Losurdo 2011, pp. 107, 321. Cf. Van den Berghe 1994;
Fredrickson 1981.
32. See Losurdo 1993, pp. 36–8. On the complex evolution of the American constitution
and domestic social relations, see Losurdo 1996b, pp. 56–7 and Losurdo 1994, pp. 69ff.
33. Losurdo 2005, pp. 107–8; Losurdo 2011, p. 107. Cf. Losurdo 1996b, pp. 76–7.
34. Losurdo 2005, pp. 107–8.
35. Losurdo 1993, p. 44. Cf. Losurdo 1994, pp. 24–6; here the terms of ‘liberal racialisation’
of the ‘subclasses of society’ and the ‘losers in life’ are defined.
36. See Losurdo 2005, pp. 114–16, 212–15; Losurdo 2011, pp. 113–15, 213–17.
37. Losurdo 1993, p. 42.
S. G. Azzarà / Historical Materialism 19.2 (2011) 92–112 101

of social apartheid seems to correspond to the racial apartheid’,38 whilst the

Irish population and the peoples of subjugated India take the place of blacks
and Indians. Tocqueville had already noted how in Britain an ‘aristocratic
conception of liberty’ prevailed:39 a liberty that was the privilege of the
property-owning class. Up to a point, ‘even the society which emerged in
England from the Glorious Revolution was configured as a sort of master-race
democracy’,40 with the difference that the white subaltern-classes ‘continued
to be separated from this superior class or caste by a gap similar to the one
found in a racial State’.41
A glance at international relations shows a similar phenomenon. Throughout
the centuries, the Western colonial expansionism of liberal countries resulted
in a ‘master-race democracy on a planetary scale’.42 On the one side was the
demand for freedom of movement of the great powers who had the right to
obtain resources, markets, raw materials and even a ‘living-space’ outside the
borders of their so-called civilised world. On the other side were the ‘virgin’
territories, the empty cradles of colonial land, whose population enjoyed no
recognition. They could not determine themselves or claim any right because
they lived in barbarous conditions. They could be treated according to the
most hard-and-fast paedagogical dictatorship, and their enslavement or
exploitation did not violate the principle of freedom. When they opposed an
illegitimate resistance to the providential march of liberal civility, even their
extermination became a just act. In this case, the close dialectics of inclusion
and exclusion that animates liberal theory and practice is clear: the relaunch of
colonial expansionism systematically corresponded to a social-imperialist
nationalisation of the masses which entailed the gradual inclusion of the
metropolitan subaltern classes, who were easily decapitated at the ideological
level (consider the appreciation of colonialism showed by some trends within
European socialism) and co-opted into the circle of the ‘master-race’, albeit in
a subaltern position.43 In many respects, this dialectical mechanism of
‘extension of citizenship in the capitalist metropolis and the projection of the
process of racialisation to the outside’44 led, in the aftermath of World-War
Two, to the reabsorption of the Jews and the State of Israel, previously seen as

38. Losurdo 2005, p. 113; Losurdo 2011, p. 113.

39. Cited in Losurdo 2005, p. 123; Losurdo 2011, p. 123.
40. Losurdo 2005, p. 124; Losurdo 2011, p. 124. Cf. Losurdo 1998, pp. 19ff.
41. Losurdo 2005, p. 124.
42. Losurdo 2005, pp. 216ff.; Losurdo 2011, pp. 219ff.
43. See Losurdo 2005, pp. 223–4; Losurdo 2011, pp. 226–7. In Losurdo 1996b, p. 106,
Rhodes is cited as saying: ‘if you want to avoid civil war’, that is, if you want to neutralise the
agitation of the workers’ and socialist movements, ‘you must become imperialists’.
44. Losurdo 1993, p. 78.
102 S. G. Azzarà / Historical Materialism 19.2 (2011) 92–112

an extraneous and dangerous body in the midst of the Western community of

free peoples. This move also intensified the discrimination against Muslim and
Arab peoples who were guilty of not accepting their assigned rôle in the new
international semi-colonial order.45

Towards a redefinition of liberalism

In view of this argument, the concept of liberalism seems in need of drastic
revision. Rather than a category of the spirit, liberalism is a political movement
that emerged out of a historically determined situation, and has its basis in a
given social environment and its power-relations. As Losurdo explains, in this
political framework, the word ‘liberal’ emerged in opposition to the word
‘servile’, which described the followers of monarchical absolutism. But it also
emerged in opposition to the subaltern classes forced to lead a life that could
not be properly called human by the need for work, and in opposition to the
‘condition of servility’ in a strict sense, as the condition of the ‘plebs’.46 This
reflected a social configuration where the ‘well-off and wealthy’ enjoyed a
better education, were well-versed in the liberal arts and had no need to take
up manual labour, and so became aware of their own difference from ‘the
masses of people and their vulgarity’.47 ‘Liberals’ originally designates the
educated property-owning classes with their special interests. The term
‘emerged from a proud self-designation that was at the same time a political,
social and even ethnic connotation’ (in relation to the subalterns and especially
colonised people).48 It is a ‘movement and a party that tended to gather
together people with a “liberal education” who were authentically free and
have the privilege of being free, the “elected class”, the well-off ’.49
Here, Losurdo laments the inadequacy of the categories of traditional
historiography, and claims that the line between liberalism and conservatism,
or reaction, is blurred. Was there a clear difference between the positions of
nineteenth-century liberalism and those of Friedrich Nietzsche, a philosopher
renowned for his ferocious anti-liberalism? In the course of the evolution of

45. On the complex relations of integration and discrimination between the West and
Judaism, until the ‘Final Solution’, see Losurdo 1999c, passim; on the recuperation of Judaism
and the State of Israel within the framework of the sacred space of civilisation, see Losurdo 2007,
Chapter IV, ‘Antisemitismo’, pp. 114–52, and Chapter V, ‘Antisionismo’, pp. 153–86. On the
discrimination against the Arabs, see Chapter VI, ‘Filo-islamismo’, pp. 187–243.
46. Losurdo 2005, pp. 239–42; Losurdo 2011, pp. 242–6.
47. Losurdo 2005, pp. 240–1.
48. Losurdo 2005, p. 242.
49. Ibid.
S. G. Azzarà / Historical Materialism 19.2 (2011) 92–112 103

his theory, Nietzsche was deeply motivated to write a ‘militant critique and
denunciation of the revolution and of modernity’50 in the form of a critique
and denunciation of the processes of democratisation that they had initiated.
His was a contestation of massification and homogenisation; in the name of
‘instrumental’ reason51 and principles of equality inherent to humanism and
modern ‘optimism’52 revolution and modernity had burnt the soil beneath the
genius’s feet, and hampered exceptional individuals, superior castes, and the
few fortunate examples who are worthy of the name of man and whose greater
mission is the production of culture, arts, and literature. Nietzsche’s criticism
was consonant with the parallel liberal denunciation of the radicalism spread
by the French Revolution, and with the defence of the privileges of property
and culture found in authors like Tocqueville and Constant.53 In the last phase
of his conscious life, Nietzsche came to posit, against the rebellion of subaltern
classes and modern wage-slaves, whose only reason to live was work and the
burden of social reproduction, the foundation of a ‘party of life’54 and
‘aristocratic radicalism’: the party of the well-to-do and the powerful who
neither felt guilty about their hierarchical rank nor were ashamed to reinstate
its ‘natural’ legitimacy. The Dionysian appeal to the superman, the Hellenising
fantasies of a ‘reintroduction of slavery’ in Europe and the positivist and
eugenic ‘breeding’ of a race of servants separated from one of masters signalled
the need to recognise a political programme that could ‘drastically radicalise’
the liberal positions that had been calling for the open subjugation of the
masses and the colonised peoples.55
Nietzsche invited the ruling classes to leave all reservations and moral
inhibitions behind, as these belonged to the Christian herd and universal
rationalism, and to respond to the challenge of the subaltern classes and
inferior races by waging a total war, by means of political Caesarism rather
than through compromise and consensus-democracy. In this, Nietzsche – and,
in many respects, Heidegger after him56 – was actually warning and defiantly
challenging the cowardly and ‘degenerated’ liberalism of his times.

50. Losurdo 2002, p. 900. Cf. Losurdo 1991, pp. 119ff.

51. See Losurdo 2002, pp. 1070ff. The critique of ‘calculating reason’ or the ‘hubris of reason’
would later be a Leitmotiv of Heidegger’s critique of modernity. See Losurdo 1991, pp. 22–3,
113–19, 154 and passim.
52. Losurdo 2002, p. 7.
53. See Losurdo 2002, pp. 317ff.
54. Cited in Losurdo 2002, pp. 366–7.
55. Losurdo 2002, pp. 412, 651, 442.
56. See Losurdo 1991, pp. 89ff. On the affinities and differences between Nietzsche’s and
Heidegger’s ‘radical anti-modernism’, see Losurdo 1991, pp. 196ff. In Heidegger, the ‘criticism
104 S. G. Azzarà / Historical Materialism 19.2 (2011) 92–112

Losurdo goes back to the core of the apparent paradox of liberalism and
reveals it to be traversed by a constitutive laceration between drives to
‘emancipation’57 and violent ‘dis-emancipation’. He had already effectively
adopted these two categories in his research on the constitution of modern
democracy. In other words, liberalism was the movement of emancipation of
both aristocracy and property-owners from the tutelage of a higher sovereign-
power and the imposition on the latter of a constitution that was agreed by
them. This emancipation did not involve the social totality: in fact, without
the exclusion of subaltern groups, popular classes, servants, slaves, and
colonised people, it would not have been possible, as it finally granted free
men a clear separation from the common people; prior to that, their shared
subjugation to the sovereign, which flattened society, had been an obstacle to
their freedom. As far as subaltern groups were concerned, one could speak of
a dis-emancipation, because the freedom of action of higher interests no longer
subjected to any constraints, whether political, cultural or religious, came to
rest on their subjugation. This entailed the ‘autonomization of the property of
those who already enjoyed recognition, of those who aspired to form themselves
into the community or caste of freemen’,58 and thus formed a ‘civil society’.
Civil society, far from being a neutral territory, ‘could in turn become the
hegemonic field of the bourgeoisie or the landed aristocracy and emerged
from a compromise between these two classes’.59
In Losurdo’s opinion, liberalism coincided with a reconfiguration of power-
relations that was founded on a clear separation between the recognised and
the unrecognised, rather than the limitation of power as such.60 On the one
hand, social relations amongst the recognised, emancipated from the absolute
power of the monarch, were increasingly free and egalitarian, and guided by a
proud individualistic affirmation of the group’s autonomy that abhorred any
constraint, whether issued by equals or by the higher power of the state. The
state was assigned the task of policing, but denied any right of intervention
that might lead to an equalisation of social disequilibrium in the sphere of civil
society. The unrecognised, on the other hand, did not gain any new liberal
right, whether civil or political, and the old power came to exercise new forms
of domination that were equally oppressive, resulting in ‘reification’61 or

of the revolutionary tradition’ is said to have found its highest expression: Losurdo 1996b,
pp. 32–3.
57. See Losurdo 1993, pp. 34ff.
58. Losurdo 2005, p. 316; Losurdo 2011, p. 329.
59. Losurdo 2005, p. 316.
60. See Losurdo 2005, pp. 180ff.; Losurdo 2011, pp. 181ff. Cf. Losurdo 1993, pp. 24–6.
61. Losurdo 2005, p. 298; Losurdo 2011, p. 302.
S. G. Azzarà / Historical Materialism 19.2 (2011) 92–112 105

‘un-specification on natural grounds’.62 But liberal consciousness did not even

perceive the fate of these social groups as a problem because its own power
rested on a drastic differentiation between a ‘sacred space’63 of equals, the
well-to-do who recognised one another and developed liberal relationships
amongst themselves, and a ‘profane space’ that was beastly and intrinsically
lacerated by conflict and negativity, where the question of freedom was not
even raised. Hic sunt leones: whoever belonged to this group, whether manual
labourer, serf, peasant, woman, Indian, black, coolie, Chinese, rogue-state,
Arab or, today, the cheap immigrant-workforce, could no longer be said to be
free, either by right, or in practice.
For this reason, liberal theory did not problematise the ‘clauses of exclusion’64
that keep a vast mass of subalterns identified at the social, national or racial
level outside of the realm of freedom. For the same reason, in European
countries, and even in England, it was possible, for a long time, to resist and
openly vindicate the ‘census-restriction’65 on suffrage. Safeguarding the divide
between the sacred and uncontaminated space and the profane space was an
absolute priority. Any attempt at destroying it, or even redefining it by forcing
its borders and opening it to the inclusion of social and ethnic dis-emancipated
social groups, would be an undue intervention of extrinsic social issues into
the political sphere66 and entail a crisis of the ruling order which had to be
carefully prevented. The demands of those excluded from the universalisation
of liberal freedom receive no recognition: all of the movements and struggles
for inclusion and the rights of modern citizenship had to be crushed with an
iron fist. They were seen as an illegitimate attack on the freedom of the only
subjectivity that liberalism knows, that of the property-owning white man. To
this purpose, the very theory that had so carefully imposed limits on the field
of intervention of political power by expelling it from the private sphere and
affirming the principle of sovereignty of civil society and the individual was
also perfectly capable of pushing for the opposite agenda. When confronted
with the ‘dead wood’67 of the ‘redskins’ and colonised people, it could easily
theorise and practice total war and genocide, exercise the purchase and selling
of slaves and black ‘human tools’, and lead the ruthless extirpation of the

62. Losurdo 1996b, p. 67.

63. Losurdo 2005, p. 305; Losurdo 2011, p. 309.
64. Losurdo 1998, p. 19.
65. See Losurdo 1993, pp. 12ff.
66. See Losurdo 2005, pp. 186ff.; Losurdo 2011, p. 188. On the separation between the
sacred space of civility and the profane realm of barbarism, see Losurdo 1996b, pp. 174–8, where
this attitude is shown to be rooted in Western culture since the times of classical-Greek
philosophy.
67. Losurdo 1999a, p. 13. Cf. Losurdo 1996b, pp. 205ff., pp. 251ff.
106 S. G. Azzarà / Historical Materialism 19.2 (2011) 92–112

Jewish ‘pathogenic element’.68 The main liberal thinkers and ruling classes
always show a readiness to face the state of exception by means of a suspension
of the rule of law and the establishment of a strong personal and despotic
power, even by invoking ‘Caesarism’ and ‘dictatorship’.69 The questioning of
slavery legitimated the bloody conflict of the American Civil War. The
uprisings of subaltern peoples in Europe during the nineteenth century were
faced with a military and police repression that violated both political and
private freedoms, as well as numerous coups d’état theorised or practised by the
forces of liberalism in order to bring the revolutionary crises to a halt.70 Even
a conflict between nations that belong to the sacred space, as the experience of
the two world-wars demonstrated, called for the need of a total or totalitarian71
regimentation of civil society. This regimentation did not stop at the suspension
of rights and the introduction of measures such as deportation72 and
concentration-camps: in defiance of any presumed liberal ‘individualism’ it
relied on the enthusiastic celebration of the ‘Gemeinschaft’73 and the ‘destiny’74
of the motherland by inciting the organicist fusion of the social whole in a
‘total mobilisation’.75 An enlargement of the sacred space could only occur by
means of a selective co-optation from above operated by the ruling classes,
rather than an autonomous pressure from below carried out by excluded social
groups or subjugated nationalities.76 This significant crack in the liberal
movement would determine its evolutionary leap. The ruling classes gradually
opened the doors of freedom when they no longer had a choice, or when it
was necessary to consolidate the body of the nation or even find the lost unity
of the white people against non-Western barbarism. In these cases, the
inclusion of subaltern classes occurred passively through the development of a

68. Losurdo 1999a, p. 15. On the different forms of discrimination against Jews in Western
history, ‘anti-Judaism’, ‘Judeophobia’ and ‘anti-semitism’, see Losurdo 1999b, passim, where
Poliakov’s thesis on ‘eternal anti-semitism’ is criticised.
69. See Losurdo 2005, pp. 248ff.; Losurdo 2011, pp. 251ff. Cf. Losurdo 1993, pp. 66ff.,
97–116, 172ff.
70. See Losurdo 1993, pp. 35, 91–5, 157.
71. Losurdo criticises the wholly ideological meaning of the term ‘totalitarianism’, first used
in the Truman Doctrine to assimilate Nazism and Communism against liberal democracy, and
refers the genesis of total institutions to the colonial history of the West and liberal countries: see
Losurdo 1996b, pp. 188ff., and, in general, Losurdo 1998, passim.
72. See Losurdo 1996b, pp. 183–4.
73. Losurdo 1991, p. 41. The key-notion of all organicist and anti-modern theories is that of
‘community’, born out of liberal rhetoric: Gentz translates as ‘Gemeinschaft’ the ‘partnership’
defended by Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France: see Losurdo 1991, pp. 191–3.
74. Losurdo 1991, p. 4.
75. Losurdo 1991, p. 40. See Losurdo 1993, p. 165.
76. On the ‘radical’ pressure from below, see Losurdo 2005, p. 167; Losurdo 2011, p. 168.
On the evolution of liberalism, see Losurdo 2005, pp. 277–81; Losurdo 2011, pp. 280–5.
S. G. Azzarà / Historical Materialism 19.2 (2011) 92–112 107

‘new mode of political and social control’, the Bonapartism that allowed
leaders to charismatically lead the masses.77
Other majority-electoral mechanisms were put in place in order to
undermine the autonomy of socialist and radical parties and to preventively
neutralise the formation of a popular majority.78 This movement of ‘passive
emancipation’ was also often associated with the revival of colonial expansionism
and fratricidal wars between liberal countries in moments of crisis when the
international borders of the sacred space were questioned. Emancipation then
turned into forms of aggressive and chauvinist nationalism, or an unbridled
‘pathos of the West and civilisation’79 that glorifies war and its rituals of
‘proximity to death’80 as an instrument of unification of the national community
(and in this, many liberal thinkers were largely in agreement with the
philosopher who was close to national socialism, Heidegger).81 This pathos fed
on fundamentalist war-myths of origins and produced conspiracy-theories
and delirious naturalistic, psychopathological and even racist visions of the
conflict between states:82 the ideology of imperialist nationalism was realised
through the drastic dis-emancipation and subjugation of other people and
countries, whose belonging to the sacred space was disputed and denied time
after time.
In conclusion, when seen in the perspective of historical revision, liberalism
seems to arise as the ‘self-consciousness of a class of owners of slaves or
servants’,83 who, at the outset of capitalism, demanded ‘self-government and
the quiet enjoyment of one’s property (including slaves and servants) against
the monarchical despotism of central powers, and for it to be sanctioned
by the rule of law’.84 Contrary to the common thesis of the liberal apologists,
Losurdo claims that liberalism is primarily ‘the theoretical tradition that most
rigorously circumscribed a restricted sacred realm’.85 Within this realm, which
is the result of a legacy that since the Old Testament was strongly rooted in the
ideology of Western culture, what matters most is not ‘the celebration of
freedom or the individual’ as such, but the ‘celebration of that community of
free individuals who define the sacred realm’ and who are increasingly distinct
from those who are relegated to the profane space.86

77. Losurdo 1993, p. 60.

78. See Losurdo 1993, pp. 55ff., 196ff.
79. Losurdo 1991, p. 68.
80. Losurdo 1991, p. 10.
81. See Losurdo 1991, pp. 150ff.
82. See Losurdo 1991, pp. 93ff.
83. Losurdo 2005, p. 305; Losurdo 2011, p. 309.
84. Losurdo 2005, p. 305.
85. Ibid.
86. Ibid.
108 S. G. Azzarà / Historical Materialism 19.2 (2011) 92–112

The limits and merits of liberalism: towards modern democracy

At this stage we can begin to see how disparate themes running through the
whole of Losurdo’s research come to intersect. Rather than a Manichean
doctrine or ideological polemic, Losurdo’s analysis is a comprehensive attempt
to conceptually understand history and politics. Despite its ruthlessness, the
dissection of the real movements underlying liberalism does not lead Losurdo
to misunderstand and criminalise this trend. His comparative work does not
lead one to reject its ‘merits’,87 originality and progressive characteristics.
Although, in some cases, it is presented as a reactionary movement, a rebellion
based on class, nationalist and racist egoisms against any control and limitation
from higher powers, which takes it upon itself to regulate the whole of society,
liberalism cannot simply be reduced to that.
The liberal tradition shows an ‘extraordinary flexibility,88 an ability to
modernise and defeat all of its adversaries. It has also shown a great sense of
realism in the epistemological recognition of the intrinsically contradictory
nature of social reality expressed in the ‘competition between individuals in
the market for the development of the wealth of society and the productive
forces’.89 In fact, more than any other tradition, liberalism theorised the
‘decisive problem of the limitation of power’.90 ‘The conquest of the self-
government by civil society had a genuine revolutionary significance’91 and
must be understood as a progressive trend in itself. ‘Freed from an arbitrary
power, the members of the class that seized power reciprocally safeguarded
their freedoms and respected their rules with the establishment of a
constitutional state and the advent of the liberal rule of law’,92 thus creating an
order that had not previously existed, and that was a crucial achievement for
society as a whole. This constituted one of the highest points of human history:
any political trend that addresses the question of overcoming liberalism cannot
leave aside the concomitant task of inheriting its achievements, something
that twentieth-century communism was unable to do. Despite the objections
of Losurdo’s critics, in the Counter-History and the texts of the same period,
one can find a consistent recognition of the ‘real strong points’93 of liberalism,
consonant with Losurdo’s philosophical approach to history.

87. Losurdo 2005, p. 336; Losurdo 2011, p. 341.

88. Losurdo 2005, p. 339; Losurdo 2011, p. 343.
89. Losurdo 2005, p. 339.
90. Ibid.
91. Losurdo 2005, p. 304; Losurdo 2011, p. 308.
92. Losurdo 2005, p. 339.
93. Losurdo 2005, p. 339; Losurdo 2011, p. 343.
S. G. Azzarà / Historical Materialism 19.2 (2011) 92–112 109

First of all, Losurdo contests the idea of a ‘linear’94 evolution of liberalism

from a rough and unfinished pre-history, in which clauses of exclusion are
justified, to a fully accomplished modernity where generalised liberal freedom
triumphs. This apologetic account is decisively refuted by historical analysis.
The history from Locke to the democratic liberalism of the twentieth century
(which, in any case, is only a part of liberalism at a particular historical
moment) is discontinuous and fragmented into a contradictory succession of
progressive and regressive movements, an inextricable ‘web’ of pushes, leaps
towards emancipation, and equally drastic fall-backs into dis-emancipation.
Liberalism has often come to theorise and realise a widening of the sphere of
rights and freedom that hitherto excluded subaltern groups and races, but was
also often capable, when faced with historical contingencies and states of
exception, to return to ‘pure liberalism, not to be confused with democratic
liberalism’.95 During the first half of the twentieth century, attempts were
made to backtrack on the emancipation of the excluded that had been achieved
by the pressure of the working classes towards full social inclusion, and by the
movements for national liberation of colonised people. This attempt followed
the experience of colonialism and led from imperialist total war to the total
institutions of the twentieth century, when liberalism was so compromised
that it became the main agent of the so-called ‘Thirty-Years War’.96
Secondly, Losurdo claims that the idea of a ‘spontaneous development of
liberalism towards democracy’97 – argued, amongst others, by Norberto
Bobbio – is wrong.98 Far from a process of immanent evolution that slowly led
it to free itself of the clauses of exclusion that had characterised its beginnings,
liberalism univocally evolved through a clash with the outside, with the other,
and with social and political reality. Rather than the coherent unfolding of an
idea, it was a dramatic clash with the harshness of objectivity. From its
historically-determinate social genesis, liberal theory seems to suffer from the
inevitable inability of thinking the universal. The gap between sacred and
profane is constitutive of its epistemological status and makes it impossible for
liberalism to fully appreciate rights and freedoms; these are solely seen as
partial, no longer as privileges, but still exclusively belonging to those who
enjoy the recognition of the members of a community of freemen. In fact,
Losurdo accuses liberalism of ‘completely ignoring the figure of the modern

94. Losurdo 1993, pp. 34–5.

95. Losurdo 1994, pp. 38–9. Cf. Losurdo 1993, pp. 101ff., 130ff., 162ff.
96. Losurdo 1998, p. 36. For a discussion of this category, see Losurdo 1996b, pp. 135ff.
97. Losurdo 1993, p. 46.
98. See Bobbio 1984.
110 S. G. Azzarà / Historical Materialism 19.2 (2011) 92–112

individual as an autonomous subject of rights’.99 Liberals’ hostile attitude to

the French Revolution and their aversion to the general principles it upheld
demonstrated how liberalism had not comprehended the universal concept of
man in its concreteness. However, the foundation for a real appreciation of
human freedom can only be the latter. One might say that liberalism contains
the form of universality as an exigency with no content, because it lacks its
bearer, that subject which is the human as such. Only when ‘contaminated by
the struggles of the democratic and socialist movement’, in a confrontation
with negativity and the actual presence of the excluded and their demands,
was the liberal tradition forced to open up its doors.100
Therefore, the objective dialectics inscribed in reality led liberalism to an
inner separation resolved in the form of ‘democratic’ liberalism. This dialectics
confronted liberalism on the one hand with the political and social radicalism
of the French Revolution and socialism, on the other hand with the struggles
for emancipation of colonised people. ‘The development of liberalism in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is explained, in the first instance, by the
struggle waged by the bipedal machines of the metropolis, on the one hand,
and slaves and colonial populations or populations of colonial origin, on the
other’.101 Losurdo consistently defends this thesis and develops it in order to
show how the building of modern democracy was not even conceivable
without the eruption of the autonomous movement of subaltern classes and
that of ‘barbaric’ peoples on the world-political scene.102 The definition of
modern democracy cannot be abstracted from the achievement of economic
and social rights and the principles of people’s self-determination. These two
revolutionary movements are parallel and intersect at their highest moments,
succeeding, for the first time, in thinking the universal concept of humanity
and practice it in its integrity. All of the principles that were compressed in the
ideological form of liberalism finally assumed a truly universal scope.
‘Contemporary democracy presupposed the overcoming of three great
discriminations (of race, census and gender) still alive and in force on the eve
of October 1917’.103 The struggle for the autonomous emancipation of
subaltern classes and of the underdogs of the colonies against the liberal clauses
of exclusion was primarily a ‘struggle for recognition’104 to achieve equal

99. Losurdo 1993, p. 48.

100. Losurdo 1994, p. 17.
101. Losurdo 2005, p. 180; Losurdo 2011, p. 181.
102. See Losurdo 1993, pp. 50ff.
103. Losurdo 1998, p. 30.
104. Losurdo 1991, p. 186.
S. G. Azzarà / Historical Materialism 19.2 (2011) 92–112 111

dignity as people and eventually became the most authentic actualisation of

liberalism and the premise for democracy.

Conclusion
Here, we can trace some conclusions for this excursus, which aimed to place
the dogmatic self-consciousness of triumphant liberalism into question, and
to provide a preliminary introduction to the work of Domenico Losurdo.
Ideology-critique often runs a great risk: that of indulging in an attitude of
abstract and indeterminate negation, incapable of seeing things dialectically,
and thus of grasping the elements of truth present in the position under
critique. This is not the lesson of historical materialism. From Marx onwards,
historical materialism has taught us to walk the fine line between the critique
of modernity and the recognition of its legitimacy, that is, of the clear progress
that modernity and capitalism have signified with respect to feudalism and its
underdevelopment and villeinage. Marxian studies too often forget this lesson,
and the desire to subject to critique degenerates into a demonisation,
criminalisation and, ultimately, a subaltern misunderstanding of the object of
study, be it liberal theory or capitalist society as a whole. This signals an
unresolved relation to history that inevitably results in unsophisticated and
scientifically irrelevant analyses. A dialectical approach, as suggested by
Gramsci, is, on the other hand, fully endorsed by Losurdo, as he never sets out
to present a moralistic denunciation of liberalism as an ideological perversion
and an antechamber of terror, but aims to comprehend its genesis
materialistically, with its objective reasons and limits. It is therefore not a
matter of destroying the philosophical foundations of liberal thought in order
to go back to what preceded it. If anything, the historical premises of the
troubled evolution of liberalism and its current involution need to be
understood. The danger of detaching liberalism from democracy and returning
to eighteenth-century positions that were brutally proprietary is clear and
present. In such a scenario, modern democracy would be condemned to suffer
from a seemingly interminable illness.

References
Bassani, Luigi Marco 2006, ‘Review of D. Losurdo’s Controstoria del liberalismo’, Libero,
6 January: 27.
Bedeschi, Giuseppe 2005, ‘Libertà fondate sulla schiavitù’, La domenica de Il Sole 24 ore,
11 September: 31.
Bobbio, Norberto 1984, Il futuro della democrazia, Turin: Einaudi.
112 S. G. Azzarà / Historical Materialism 19.2 (2011) 92–112

Cofrancesco, Dino 2005, ‘Ma l’Occidente non è mister Hyde. L’equivoco di Losurdo’, Corriere
della sera, 8 November: 47.
—— 2006, ‘Non fare di tutto Liberal un fascio clericale. In merito all’intervento della Pellicciari’,
Il Riformista, 26 January: 12.
d’Orsi, Angelo 2005, ‘Tocqueville nobile “schiavista”: è l’altra faccia del liberalismo’, La Stampa
Tuttolibri, 22 October: 7.
Fredrickson, George M. 1981, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South
African History, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gravagnuolo, Bruno 2005, ‘Liberalismo, ecco il suo libro nero’, l’Unità, 26 September: 21.
Lattieri, C. 2006, ‘Review of D. Losurdo’s Controstoria del liberalismo’, L’Indipendente, 8 January: 18.
Losurdo, Domenico 1991, La comunità, la morte, l’Occidente. Heidegger e l’«ideologia della
guerra», Turin: Bollati Boringhieri.
—— 1993, Democrazia o bonapartismo. Trionfo e decadenza del suffragio universale [Democracy
and Bonapartism: Triumph and Decadence of Universal Suffrage], Turin: Bollati
Boringhieri.
—— 1994, La Seconda Repubblica. Liberismo, federalismo, postfascismo [The Second Republic.
Liberalism, Federalism, Post-Fascism], Turin: Bollati Boringhieri.
—— 1996a, ‘Fenomenologia del potere: Marx, Engels e la tradizione liberale’ [Phenomenology
of Power: Marx, Engels and the Liberal Tradition], in Autore Attore Autorità, edited by Alberto
Burgio and Domenico Losurdo, Urbino: Quattro Venti/Istituto Italiano per gli Studi
Filosofici.
—— 1996b, Il revisionismo storico. Problemi e miti [Historical Revisionism: Problems and
Myths], Rome/Bari: Laterza.
—— 1998, Il peccato originale del Novecento [The Original Sin of the Twentieth Century],
Rome/Bari: Laterza.
—— 1999a, ‘L’ebreo, il nero e l’indio nella storia dell’Occidente’ [The Jew, the Black and the
Indian in the History of the West], Giano. Pace ambiente problemi globali, 33: 103–56.
—— 1999b, ‘Antigiudaismo, giudeofobia, antisemitismo’ [Anti-Judaism, Judeophobia and
Anti-Semitism], I viaggi di Erodoto, 13, 38/39: 139–60.
—— 1999c, ‘La crisi del processo di emancipazione degli ebrei: per un’analisi comparata’ [The
Crisis of the Process of the Emancipation of the Jews: a Comparative Analysis], in Nel nome
della razza. Il razzismo nella storia d’Italia 1870–1945, edited by Alberto Burgio, Bologna: Il
Mulino.
—— 2001 [1991], Heidegger and the Ideology of War: Community, Death and the West, translated
by Marella and Jon Morris, New York: Humanity Books.
—— 2002, Nietzsche, il ribelle aristocratico. Biografia intellettuale e bilancio critico [Nietzsche.
The Aristocratic Rebel: Intellectual Biography and Critical Assessment], Turin: Bollati
Boringhieri.
—— 2005, Controstoria del liberalismo, Rome/Bari: Laterza.
—— 2007, Il linguaggio dell’Impero. Lessico dell’ideologia americana [The Language of Empire.
Lexicon of American Ideology], Rome/Bari: Laterza.
—— 2011 [2005], Liberalism: a Counter-History, translated by Gregory Elliott, London:
Verso.
Morelli, Raffaello 2005, ‘Critiche alla controstoria del liberalismo’, Libro aperto, 43: 26–35.
Pellicciari, Angela 2005–6, ‘La tolleranza che viene dal cattolicesimo’, Liberal, 33: 44–5.
Petrucciani, Stefano 2005, ‘Il libro nero del liberalismo’ [The Black Book of Liberalism], Critica
marxista, 4: 32–3.
Van den Berghe, Pierre L. 1994, Race and Racism: A Comparative Perspective, New York: Wiley.
Copyright of Historical Materialism is the property of Brill Academic Publishers and its content may not be
copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written
permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.