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Near the start of her fascinating new book The Lost History of Liberalism, Helena Rosenblatt dryly observes that “available histories of liberalism are seldom helpful” (2). The point is well taken: the historiography of liberalism—largely written as intellectual history—is not particularly coherent, and has only sporadically adopted sound historical methodology. The genre emerged relatively late. The proliferation of the language of liberalism in the nineteenth century, not least in party politics, did not produce theoretically informed historical accounts of particular note. A historiography of liberalism really only developed in response to the perceived “crisis of liberalism” of the early twentieth century. Guido de Ruggiero's 1925 The History of European Liberalism was written in a Hegelian idealist tradition, according to which liberalism was an “organic development of freedom coinciding with the organization of human society and its progressively higher and more spiritual forms.”1 Coming from a different direction was Harold Laski's The Rise of European Liberalism: An Essay in Interpretation, published in 1936. Laski's liberalism was as much a “habit of mind” as a set of doctrines, with a complex history making both “clarity difficult” and “precision unattainable.” An essentialized understanding of liberalism was nevertheless still at work. Laski's liberalism was that the individualist, utilitarian mode of thought necessary to an emerging capitalist society. “The liberal creed, in a word,” he wrote, “is a doctrine woven from the texture of bourgeois need.”2
Others mobilized still more superficial definitions of liberalism, conflating it with representative democracy, for instance. The interwar crisis atmosphere framed much of this literature. Liberalism was a tradition under assault, and those who wrote about it did so with a profound sense of identification. This investment offered little clarity. Idealist, materialist, and constitutional definitions collided or combined with theoretical abandon. In 1935, an American Philosophical Association symposium on the “crisis of liberalism” could not settle on a single definition. Max Lerner characterized liberalism as the “most disputed term of our generation.”3 Surveys of the public during this era found a general approval of liberalism, but an inability to define it, or to recapitulate “historic liberal dogmas.” Regretting this fact in 1949, the editor of the Nation defined liberalism as a “timeless mission” from “Bentham to Roosevelt” to “secure for...