The Lost History of Liberalism by Helena Rosenblatt

A member of the editorial board of Modern Intellectual History, she has also been a fellow at the National Humanities Center. Rosenblatt’s numerous articles have appeared in such journals as Modern Intellectual History, French Historical Studies, History of European Ideas, French Politics, Society and Culture, and Daedalus. She is also the editor of Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (2010) and the Cambridge Companion to Constant (2009) and coeditor, with Raf Geenens, of French Liberalism from Montesquieu to the Present Day (2012). She is the author of Rousseau and Geneva: From the First Discourse to the Social Contract 1749–1762 (1997) and Liberal Values: Benjamin Constant and the Politics of Religion (2008). Her specialty is eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European intellectual history. Helena Rosenblatt serves as executive officer of the Ph.D. The Lost History of Liberalism sets the record straight on a core tenet of today’s political conversation and lays the foundations for a more constructive discussion about the future of liberal democracy.

In the United States, a “liberal” is someone who advocates big government, while in France, big government is contrary to “liberalism.” Political debates become befuddled because of semantic and conceptual confusion.

Today, we still can’t seem to agree on liberalism’s meaning. It was only during the Cold War and America’s growing world hegemony that liberalism was refashioned into an American ideology focused so strongly on individual freedoms. They believed in the power of religion to reform society, emphasized the sanctity of the family, and never spoke of rights without speaking of duties. Liberals were originally moralists at heart. Only in the mid-twentieth century did the concept become widely known in the United States-and then, as now, its meaning was hotly debated. She shows that it was the French Revolution that gave birth to liberalism and Germans who transformed it. In this timely and provocative book, Rosenblatt debunks the popular myth of liberalism as a uniquely Anglo-American tradition centered on individual rights. Taking readers from ancient Rome to today, Helena Rosenblatt traces the evolution of the words “liberal” and “liberalism,” revealing the heated debates that have taken place over their meaning. The Lost History of Liberalism challenges our most basic assumptions about a political creed that has become a rallying cry-and a term of derision-in today’s increasingly divided public square.

The Lost History of Liberalism by Helena Rosenblatt