The History of European Liberalism

"Yes, Guido De Ruggiero. I think he fits well into some of the themes that we’ve touched on. His book is more a history of philosophy, rather than a book of philosophy. The book I’ve chosen is a History of European Liberalism , which he wrote in the 1920s, just at the beginning of the fascist era. De Ruggiero was one of these Italian philosophers who was very much influenced by German idealism. He was, broadly speaking, part of Benedetto Croce’s circle. What is wonderful about this book is, first of all, the account that he gives of these four liberal traditions in Europe, the Italian, the French, German, and the English—he doesn’t call it ‘British’, which is a bit unfair, because he does include Scottish philosophers. He first sets out these four different liberal traditions. They’re quite distinctive. Some of the differences are themes that we already touched upon. He sees two key moments in British liberalism, the first one in the first half of the 17th century with the radicalism that comes from the Reformation and leads to the Glorious Revolution ; and the second one, the utilitarian moment, in the 19th century, with Bentham, Mill and the Manchester School. These are the two souls of British liberalism. German liberalism is different because, like Italian liberalism, it didn’t have to grapple with the existence of a state until much later. People like Humboldt or Kant were obviously associated with a state—Prussia in their case—but there was no German-wide state. A distinctive theme Ruggiero sees in German liberalism is Kant’s rejection of the idea that there should be a right to resist. He says that Kant is probably the greatest liberal thinker in terms of the way in which articulates the relationship between liberty and law. But he’s also the one who says there is no right to resist. Hobbes was obviously at the extreme end of that debate in the Anglo-American tradition. Somebody like Locke would have been fully in favour of a right to resist. Yet Kant, who was a liberal, certainly more liberal than Fichte or Hegel, can’t accept the right to resist. So there is something quite distinctive about that. French liberalism, which I think De Ruggiero is also extremely good on—Tocqueville and Constant, for example—always had this greater sensibility about the role of society. It never abstracted the individual from society in the way in which Anglo-American liberalism often has done – from Hobbes and Locke all the way to Rawls – whose starting point is usually an abstraction (state of nature for Hobbes or Locke, or the original position for Rawls). French liberals didn’t think like that. They always started, a bit like Machiavelli, from the social, historical and economic reality—ever since Rousseau at least, but probably before already with Montesquieu. So, De Ruggiero discusses these different liberal traditions, briefly and very insightfully. At the end of the book, he has an essay on the nature of liberty, and the relationship between liberty and democracy, which I think is also very good. Isaiah Berlin ’s famous essay on two liberties was, in part, inspired by what De Ruggiero wrote here, I think. There was a great tradition of idealism in England in the late 19th century, until the First World War, when it more or less disappeared. People like Collingwood would have been much more part of this European dialogue between post-Hegelian idealists and De Ruggiero and Croce were all part of that, too. It’s very readable and it’s not a very long book. It’s basically a history of ideas with an argument about liberty and liberalism at the end. It’s very enjoyable. There is so much debate about liberty, the rule of law, political institutions and self-government today, but it tends to be quite parochial. I don’t mean so much in philosophy, but in the wider public sphere. The cultural, political, historical and philosophical references of today’s wider public debate are extraordinarily limited. This, in contrast, is a book that really widens one’s horizons about the liberal tradition."