A History of Liberalism and Illiberalism : Theorizing Racial Justice PART 1 | C. Mills
a Transcribed Lecture from Charles W. Mills
So, our starting point is the political philosophy of liberalism, but I need to quickly clarify that I'm using the word as a term of art the way political philosophers and political theorists do. So, liberalism does not refer just to the left wing of the Democratic Party, which we saw in action just last night. Rather, its reference is the political ideology that develops over the 17th to 19th centuries in Western Europe in opposition to the doctrines of monarchical absolutism, natural social estates, ascriptive social hierarchy, and inherited status.
Liberalism becomes the philosophy of the new social order, indeed, of modernity itself. The rule of law, limited government, democratic consent, individual equality, and equal rights all become the slogans of the revolt against the ancien régime. Hence, the American Revolution's famous opening statement of the Declaration penned by Jefferson: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." And the "liberty, equality, fraternity" of the French Revolution. Being a liberal commits you to these broad principles.
So, from this perspective, we have liberals on the right who insist on market solutions, and liberals on the left who argue for a state that intervenes on behalf of the disadvantaged. But by these minimal criteria, both groups count as liberals. Hence, conservatives' characterization of themselves sometimes as classical liberals, so: "We're the real liberals, you guys have usurped the title, you're really socialists."
So, liberalism can then be seen as the most important political ideology of the last few hundred years, the ideology that, especially after the 1989-1991 collapse of the East Block, had seemingly emerged triumphant over all its challengers. As I don't have to tell you, the celebratory moment was pretty brief. We're now in a period when liberalism is under assault by right-wing populism and authoritarian ethno-nationalism, and there are no guarantees who'll be the eventual victor. But certainly, we have to hope that liberalism will survive and eventually prevail, given the attractiveness of its ideals and the corresponding ugliness of those of its opponents.
So, in the official story, then, liberalism has historically faced foes both on the right and on the left and has historically maintained a principled opposition to reactionary pre-modern ideologies, ideologies that denied people individual status and equal rights and entitlement to government by consent. It's a great story, an inspiring story. The problem is, it happens to be untrue, or at least the extent to which it is true is severely qualified.
Far from being in principled combat from the start against anti-egalitarian beliefs and systems of ascriptive hierarchy, liberalism has been complicit with many of them until comparatively recently. And some critics would say it is, in effect, if no longer overtly, still thus complicit today. Liberalism, as ideal, turns out to be illiberalism in actuality.
Consider, for example, gender. From the first wave of feminism onward, feminist theorists have pointed out that the promise of liberalism was not extended to women, a challenge that would, of course, be greatly deepened and expanded in the second wave and later waves. Denied equal rights, unable to own property or run for political office, or even vote, their legal identities subsumed into their husbands' under the doctrine of coverture, women are clearly not ranked among the free and equal individuals liberated by this new political philosophy of government by consent. Rather, their status seems to be a kind of gender estate analogous to those subordinated in the feudal hierarchy. But women of all races constitute half the population, to begin with. This is not a minor exclusion but a huge one.
Then, think of race. Though this history is now marginalized in the official liberal story, we need to remember that most of the Western European states now uncontroversially considered part of the liberal West at one time or another had empires. British, French, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Belgian, in which non-Europeans, indigenous peoples, and in some cases, African slaves, were systemically subordinated. Together, these Western countries ruled undemocratically over the vast majority of humanity. Indeed, this global racial inequality was so firmly entrenched as a norm, so taken for granted— I've given this historical episode at numerous talks, I sometimes ask the audience how many of them have heard of this, and usually, very few hands go up.
1919, so a bit more than a century ago. We're in the post-World War I Versailles Conference in Paris to set up the League of Nations, just had this horrible war, the Great War, want to make sure this never happens again, but we all know how successful they were at that. Most of the world is colonized, most of the world is under the rule of the European powers. One of the few independent nations of color is Japan. The Japanese delegation says, "Hey, we need a racial equality clause in the Covenant of the League of Nations, so as to make sure that we have a world that's racially equitable." Nothing controversial about equality, after all, as I just said earlier, equality is supposed to be one of the watchwords of liberal modernity, and we are now deep into liberal modernity. I mean, for God's sake, it's the 20th century. And this proposal by the Japanese was unequivocally rejected by the six Anglo-Saxon nations, as they were then called. And who, we might ask, were they? Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa.
So let me ask you guys, how many of you have ever heard of this historical episode? A handful. This is in a prestigious, very well-known university of Michigan. It has not been part of your education, and you need to ask yourself why that is, what that says about the educational system that you were inculcated with, and what that says about the broader history of imperialism and colonialism that has now been covered up.
Think now of class. Though modernity is surely supposed, at the very least, to equalize status hierarchies among white males, even here, the process is very uneven. The birth of liberalism may date to the 17th century, but property restrictions under franchise in many European countries remained in place until the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And in the U.S., it's really only with 19th-century Jacksonian Democracy that you get universal suffrage, even among white men.
So, the point is, then, that once we put together all the exclusions of actual historical liberalism, we should be able to see that a conceptualization that represents them as anomalies and deviations is fundamentally wrong. The dominant varieties of historical liberalism excluded the majority of the world's population from equal normative consideration. But if exclusion is modal, if propertied white males are the major beneficiaries of modernity's liberalization, then how can the conventional narrative of a clear transition from the world of hierarchical estates to a world of equal individuals be sustained? Doesn't our periodization, doesn't our conceptual map, and our temporal map need to be changed?
So, the conventional periodization is illiberalism versus liberalism. So, illiberalism is pre-modern, inegalitarian political ideologies, such as you'd find in ancient Greece and Rome, such as you'd find in the Middle Ages. Those are the bad old days when your people were in these hierarchical social orders: citizens and slaves in ancient Greece and Rome, lords and serfs in the Middle Ages. But thank God that's all over. We're now in the modern period. We've put all that behind. We're now in the world of individuals. So that's a just-so story, that's a fairy story that you tell your kids, or alas, perhaps that you tell your students. Maybe some of you guys right here in this room have heard this story.
So the bottom diagram, the revisionist periodization, gives you the more accurate story. So, in that story, we should sort of see it as Illiberalism Part 1, and then Illiberalism Part 2, and Illiberalism Part 2 is, for some reason, known as liberalism. So in Illiberalism Part 1, we have the hierarchy, as I mentioned, and also gender hierarchies, which at least until recently were not part of the story, as feminists have pointed out. You can see women as constituting a kind of subordinate gender estate: citizens and slaves in ancient Greece and Rome, and men and women; medieval period, lords and serfs, and again, men and women. And then in the modern period, lo and behold, we continue to have these hierarchies, men and women still as a sort of enduring constant. There's also the property/non-property, insofar as the restriction on the franchise and stuff like that. And we have the new category of whites over people of color. So, by the conventional dating, you don't have race in a pre-modern period. It's only in modernity that race comes into existence.
So the point is, then, that with this reconceptualization, we would re-theorize liberalism to emphasize its continuity with the past rather than its putative sharp break from it. And we would then start to look at liberalism very differently, with shall we say a far more suspicious and critical eye. So rather than automatically presuming that liberalism is going to be adequate to dealing with a particular social problem facing us, we would begin by asking ourselves the question: If liberalism has been illiberalism along so many crucial axes of social subordination, how has this pernicious shaping by group domination affected its crucial concepts, norms, frameworks, and assumptions? What silences, what opacities, what inadequacies might we expect to find in liberalism given this history? Indeed, isn't it likely to be the case that where class, gender, and race are involved, inclusion of groups previously formally excluded is going to be merely nominal unless the deep structuring of liberalism as a theory by its previous history is acknowledged and expressly addressed?
So one can readily appreciate then why given this history, some radical political thinkers have given up on liberalism altogether, and have also given up on people like Charles Mills, who still insist that liberalism can break free. So now there's a bunch of folks who cross the street when they see me coming. What can I say, guys? I hope you won't join their company because I'm going to sort of defend here a radical liberalism.