“In the United States at this time,” Lionel Trilling asserted in 1950, “liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition.” A few years later, in his highly influential book The Liberal Tradition in America, the political scientist Louis Hartz would suggest that “the reality of atomistic social freedom” is “instinctive in the American mind.” Hartz construed liberalism narrowly as individualism and property rights, and he regarded these as the defining characteristics of American politics and culture. In turn, he took these as signs of an American exceptionalism, stemming from the absence of feudalism, as well as the weakness of both collectivism and a truly reactionary politics, in the nation’s history.

THE LOST HISTORY OF LIBERALISM: FROM ANCIENT ROME TO THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY by Helena Rosenblatt Princeton University Press, 368 pp., $35.00

Statements like those of Trilling and Hartz expressed a short-lived belief that the long sweep of American history was anchored in an elemental centrist political consensus wherein extremes of the Left and Right could only be viewed as deviations from the norm. Few scholars today would accept this depiction or the ideological weight it bore in the mid-twentieth century. In truth, the term liberalism was not widely used for much of American history. As Helena Rosenblatt argues in her wide-ranging and important book, The Lost History of Liberalism, this is a history mainly to be told in Europe. On a continent thrown into tumult by the French Revolution and the expansionist ambitions of Napoleon Bonaparte, the term “liberalism” first appeared around 1812. Initially a term of abuse, liberalism was soon accepted as a self-description by reformist politicians and intellectuals in Britain and Western Europe. As a political term, “liberal” was rare, by contrast, in early nineteenth-century America.

It was not until the early twentieth century that progressive intellectuals like the cofounder of The New Republic, Herbert Croly, began to popularize liberalism in America. Croly’s was a liberalism, Rosenblatt pointedly insists, that vigorously denounced laissez-faire economics and supported government intervention in the economy; its intellectual support came not from John Locke, America’s philosophical godfather in Hartz’s account, but from the so-called “social liberals” of late nineteenth-century Germany and Britain. A regular contributor to The New Republic, John Dewey, reinforced this direction in numerous articles in the 1930s, culminating in his assertion that there were “two streams” of liberalism. One was anchored in laissez-faire economics, worshipped the “gospel of individualism,” and served as a toady of big industry and banking. The other was humanitarian and open to government interventions and social legislation. American liberalism, wrote Dewey, stood for “liberality and generosity, especially of mind and character.”

American liberalism, wrote Dewey, stood for “liberality and generosity, especially of mind and character.”

Rosenblatt describes her book as, essentially, a “word history of liberalism”—a work tracing the variable meanings that lie behind the seeming stability of a word over time. Pursuit of this history leads Rosenblatt back to the ancient Roman Republic, where it was believed that liberty required more than the formal protections offered by the law; freedom demanded that citizens practice liberalitas, meaning “a noble and generous way of thinking and acting toward one’s fellow citizens.” Cultivating these qualities was the task and duty of the citizen, and the artes liberales were to be the educational forms that would aid in this task.

For almost two millennia, Rosenblatt contends, being liberal meant displaying the civic virtues. Clearly an aristocratic ethos, liberality in its Roman, medieval, and early modern forms supported the concept of noblesse oblige and, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the ideal of the gentleman who showed tolerance and munificence toward his inferiors. Below this hierarchical ideal of social relations, Rosenblatt detects gradual changes. The Protestant Reformation extended the virtue of generosity to the people as a whole, while Enlightenment thinkers began to speak not only of liberal individuals, but of liberal sentiments and ideas.