In this definitive historical investigation, Italian author
and philosopher Domenico Losurdo argues that from the outset liberalism, as a
philosophical position and ideology, has been bound up with the most illiberal
of policies: slavery, colonialism, genocide, racism and snobbery.
Narrating an intellectual history running from the
eighteenth through to the twentieth centuries, Losurdo examines the thought of
preeminent liberal writers such as Locke, Burke, Tocqueville, Constant,
Bentham, and Sieyès, revealing the inner contradictions of an intellectual
position that has exercised a formative influence on today’s politics. Among
the dominant strains of liberalism, he discerns the counter-currents of more
radical positions, lost in the constitution of the modern world order.
