Liberalism Quotes

“[t]he freedom of the free was the cause of the great oppression of the slaves …”
― Domenico Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter-History

“. . . 'science' was now called on to sanction and sanctify existing social relations. According to Malthus, it was wholly desirable that political economy be 'taught to the common people.' Thanks to it, the poor would understand that they must attribute the cause of their privations to Mother Nature or their own improvidence.”
― Domenico Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter-History

“How could the ‘horse’ or ‘beast of burden’ to which Locke and Mandeville compared the wage-labourer, or the ‘speaking instrument’, ‘bipedal instrument’ or ‘work machine’ that Burke and Sieyès referred to, claim to form part of it? In other words, those who continued to be defined via the categories used by Aristotle to conceptualize the figure of the slave could not enjoy political citizenship. If they were men, they were members of a different, inferior people; they were barbarians (the quintessential slaves).”
― Domenico Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter-History

“There is no doubt: it was San Domingo—Haiti that gave the Creole independence movement a decisive turn. To overcome the fierce resistance of the Spanish troops, Simón Bolívar sought to secure the support of the rebel ex­-slaves of the Caribbean state, which he personally visited. The president at the time was Alexandre Pétion, who immediately received the Latin American revolutionary. He promised him the aid he requested on condition that he freed the slaves in areas as they were wrested from Spanish control. Transcending the class and caste limits of the social group he belonged to, and demonstrating intellectual and political courage, Bolívar accepted. Seven ships, 6,000 men with arms and munitions, a printing press and numerous advisors set out from the island. This was the beginning of the abolition of slavery in much of Latin America.”
― Domenico Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter-History

“More even than trade-union activity in the strict sense—that is, action aimed at raising wages and improving working conditions—the very attempt by servants to escape their isolation and communicate with one another was viewed with dismay. They (thundered Mandeville in alarm) ‘assemble when they please with Impunity’. They even developed relations of mutual solidarity; they sought to aid a colleague dismissed or flogged by his master. Simply by virtue of not confining themselves to the vertical, subaltern relationship with their superiors, but seeking to develop horizontal relations with one another, servants were to be considered culpable of unacceptable subversion:”
― Domenico Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter-History

“The intervention of John Millar, prominent exponent of the Scottish Enlightenment, was especially stinging: It affords a curious spectacle to observe, that the same people who talk in a high strain of political liberty, and who consider the privilege of imposing their own taxes as one of the inalienable rights of mankind, should make no scruple of reducing a great proportion of their fellow-creatures into circumstances by which they are not only deprived of property, but almost of every species of right. Fortune perhaps never produced a situation more calculated to ridicule a liberal hypothesis, or to show how little the conduct of men is at the bottom directed by any philosophical principles.48 Millar was a disciple of Adam Smith. The master seems to have seen things in the same way. When he declared that to a ‘free government’ controlled by slaveowners, he preferred a ‘despotic government’ capable of erasing the infamy of slavery, he made explicit reference to America. Translated into directly political terms, the great economist’s words signify: the despotism the Crown is criticized for is preferable to the liberty demanded by the slave-owners, from which only a small class of planters and absolute masters benefits.”
― Domenico Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter-History