Domenico Losurdo sets Liberalism: A Counter-History with the ambitious task of redefining a centuries-old political tradition. He spends little time exploring the usual definition of liberalism — a system of thought and political organization built on individual liberty — and instead dredges up aspects of it that “have hitherto been largely and unjustly ignored.” Losurdo focuses on the exclusion clauses written into liberal ideas and societies for slaves, laborers, the poor, and colonial peoples. He doesn’t just want to correct a record too hagiographic for his tastes, but to say something profound about paradoxes at the heart of liberalism.

Liberalism argues with liberal thinkers, major and minor, but it isn’t clearly an intellectual history. Against “liberal thought in its abstract purity,” Losurdo draws attention to how liberal theorists, particularly when they wrote about people denied liberty, either justified or glossed troubling aspects of the societies they touted: foremost Great Britain after the Glorious Revolution and the United States, but also the Netherlands, France (at certain moments), post-revolutionary Latin America, and the Germany that emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century. These liberal bastions are responsible for innumerable repressive and even barbarous policies, which today would be called illiberal without hesitation but at the time had no shortage of liberal defenders.

One of Losurdo’s central contentions, however, is that institutions like racial chattel slavery, colonialism, and legally codified class hierarchies not only found willing liberal apologists, but were expressions of liberal society itself. In his book’s opening salvo, he claims John C. Calhoun, theorist and statesman of the slave-holding American South, for liberalism. Calhoun inveighed against abolitionist “fanatics” and praised compromise; he declared himself an opponent of “absolute government” and believed firmly in constitutionalism. He argued for freedom — but only for some, and at the price of one of the least free and most brutal institutions in human history.