In Search of European Liberalisms, de Freeden e Fernández-Sebastián — Resumo
Sinopse
The book’s central thesis is that European liberalism is not a single doctrine spreading uniformly across the continent but a family of related political languages sharing a common semantic substrate — liberty, constitutionalism, individuality, toleration, reform, progress — while combining those concepts differently in each national setting. Freeden and Fernández-Sebastián’s core claim is that only conceptual history, not doctrinal history, can explain how a word of moral praise became the name of parties, constitutions, academic debates, and contradictory twentieth-century inheritances. Liberalism survives not because it has an immutable essence but because it repeatedly assembles families of meanings that people can identify, defend, adapt, or attack — which is why neoliberalism may still count as a liberal descendant in one narrow sense while being plainly estranged from constitutional or social liberalisms in others.
The argument is built through eleven national and regional case studies — the Habsburg lands, Germany, the Iberian world, Portugal, France, the Nordic countries, the Netherlands, Poland, Italy, Russia, and Britain — framed by a theoretical introduction by the editors and a conclusion by Freeden. The method is conceptual-morphological: rather than testing whether historical actors were “really” liberal against some abstract standard, each chapter reconstructs what those actors meant when they used the word, tracking partner concepts, opposing categories, national narratives, and institutional contexts. Freeden’s morphological theory of ideologies — the idea that ideologies have “core,” “adjacent,” and “peripheral” concepts whose combinations change the total political meaning — provides the underlying comparative architecture, surfacing most fully in the British chapter but operating as an implicit lens throughout the volume.
For the vault’s interests, the book matters on at least three dimensions. First, the Iberian chapters (Spain, Portugal) and the “peripheral” chapters (Poland, Italy, Russia) document how liberalisms born without a consolidated state, under colonial pressure or conditions of late modernization, systematically emphasize state-building, national survival, and modernization — a pattern directly applicable to the Brazilian liberal tradition. Second, the Italian chapter’s thesis — “liberal politics without liberal ideology” — is a plausible diagnostic for Brazil: a country that produced liberal constitutions and institutions without ever broadly socializing a liberal political culture. Third, Freeden’s morphological framework supplies rigorous vocabulary — especially the distinction between liberal constitutionalism as a framework and liberalism as a mass ideology — directly useful for the book Pedro is writing on the Nova República.
Introduction — European Liberal Discourses: Conceptual Affinities and Disparities
The introduction begins by refusing any simple, settled definition of liberalism. Instead of asking what liberalism is in the abstract, Michael Freeden and Javier Fernández-Sebastián ask what historical actors in different European settings meant when they used words like liberal and liberalism. That shift matters because liberalism appears in the book not as a single doctrine unfolding cleanly across the continent, but as a cluster of related political languages. It carries some broadly admired associations—openness, reform, legality, tolerance, accountability, and human betterment—but it also carries less flattering histories: elitism, paternalism, colonial entanglements, and moments of economic or political exclusion. From the outset, then, the introduction frames liberalism as both attractive and unstable, morally resonant yet internally divided.
The editors’ core methodological claim is that conceptual history is better suited than doctrinal history to understanding liberalism’s European career. They are not trying to legislate the one correct definition of the term. They want to reconstruct the changing semantic constellations within which liberalism operated: the partner concepts that gave it meaning, the enemies against which it defined itself, the national histories through which it was narrated, and the different futures it promised. Liberalism therefore appears less as a timeless essence than as a set of shifting collocations—freedom, constitution, individuality, reform, property, civilization, legality, toleration, democracy, progress, and sometimes social responsibility—whose relative importance changed from one context to another.
A major theme of the introduction is plurality. The editors insist that European liberalisms shared a common semantic substrate, but not a uniform political content. Long before liberalism became an ideology, the language of liberality already circulated across Europe as a moral vocabulary associated with generosity, magnanimity, civility, and openness of mind. That shared older moral register helps explain why later political uses of liberal could travel so effectively across borders. But the transition from moral virtue to political identity never produced a single stable creed.
The introduction places liberalism at the center of the nineteenth-century “age of the isms.” It argues that liberalism was both the earliest great political “ism” of modernity and, in a sense, the prototype against which later ideologies positioned themselves. Because liberalism opened public argument over how society should be organized, it helped create the ideological arena in which conservatism, socialism, nationalism, and other movements would later define themselves. At the same time, liberalism itself often functioned as a kind of umbrella concept sheltering subordinate “isms” inside it: constitutionalism, parliamentarism, free trade, rationalism, individualism, egalitarianism, and developmentalism.
One of the introduction’s most useful contributions is its six-phase account of how the word and concept evolved: from moral adjective to political adjective; from adjective to noun; from noun to -ism (often through hostile labeling); into partisan and pluralized forms; into historical and canonical self-narration; and finally into broader systematization and renovation, especially when social liberalisms reworked older assumptions about the state and economy.
The introduction ends by rejecting any linear story in which liberalism simply evolves toward its supposedly fulfilled form in twentieth-century parliamentary democracy. It argues instead for a more differential and comparative account. Some societies called themselves liberal states without making liberalism central to political life; others gave liberal ideas real institutional weight without stabilizing a liberal consensus; still others built influential liberal languages whose internal components—constitutionalism, property, individuality, social justice, national progress—were arranged very differently.
Chapter 1 — Habsburg Liberalisms and the Enlightenment Past, 1790–1848
Franz Fillafer’s chapter begins by bringing together two lines of scholarship that are too often kept apart: the recent study of the Enlightenment as a plural and internally conflictual phenomenon, and the equally recent study of nineteenth-century liberalisms as more varied than the old laissez-faire-versus-republicanism binary suggests. His central claim is that the transition from Enlightenment to liberalism was neither smooth nor uniform. Liberalism did not simply inherit a coherent Enlightenment package. Rather, nineteenth-century liberals actively reconstructed the Enlightenment in order to make it into a usable ancestry. The chapter is therefore about more than Austria or the Habsburg lands. It is about how political traditions invent their own pasts.
The chapter challenges the conventional liberal narrative of the Habsburg world. In that retrospective story, Joseph II appears as the great enlightened reformer, Francis II/I and Metternich as reactionary suppressors, and 1848 as the triumphant reemergence of a liberal constitutional project whose roots had been merely buried, not destroyed. Fillafer argues that this narrative is far too neat. It was itself a liberal construction, designed by later actors who wanted to claim the Enlightenment as their exclusive patrimony. In reality, the allegedly reactionary regimes after Joseph II continued to rely on Josephinian innovations in law, administration, toleration, and economic policy. Liberalism did not simply resume an interrupted project. It selectively appropriated some elements of that earlier reformism while erasing others, especially those that could be claimed by conservatives, Catholics, or alternative reform currents.
Religion forms one of the chapter’s detailed case studies, and the argument is revisionist. Catholic liberalism in the Habsburg and broader Catholic European world emerged through complex struggles over method, theology, and church-state relations. Catholic liberals did not simply continue the Enlightenment, nor simply reject it. They often redefined the Enlightenment as rationalist, deist, and statist in order to oppose the subordination of the Church under enlightened absolutism. Their ideal became a “free church in a free state.” Yet in building that position they retained, reused, and transformed many procedures and habits of enlightened scholarship.
The chapter closes by restating its fundamental thesis: the Enlightenment was many before nineteenth-century actors made it seem like one. Physiocracy, mercantilism, Smithian economics, natural law, historical jurisprudence, Catholic theology, and rationalist or sensualist strands all belonged to that earlier plural world. Liberalism’s rise did not simply continue that inheritance; it narrowed, reframed, and historicized it. Fillafer’s deeper methodological point is that historians should pay less attention to supposedly fixed “political languages” and more attention to the framing cues through which legacies are constructed and contested.
Chapter 2 — Formulating and Reformulating ‘Liberalism’: Germany in European Comparison
Jörn Leonhard opens with an apparent paradox. By the late 1940s, after a century in which liberalism had often been associated with progress and national modernization, German liberals themselves seemed unsure whether the word liberal could still bear political weight. Theodor Heuss’s hesitation in 1948, and Thomas Mann’s even harsher suggestion that the concept had become exhausted, provide the chapter’s starting point. Leonhard does not take that exhaustion at face value; he historicizes it. The problem, he argues, was not simply that liberalism had failed after fascism, but that in Germany the term had accumulated too many conflicting historical meanings.
Leonhard’s first major move is to distinguish the prepolitical meanings of liberal from its later ideological ones. In Britain, before and even long after 1789, liberal retained strong aristocratic and cultural overtones: liberality, gentlemanly conduct, tolerance, education, open-mindedness, generosity. In Germany, by contrast, the term became tied earlier to an ethical and enlightened disposition—liberale Gesinnung—a morally serious cast of mind rather than a merely social style. This difference matters because older meanings never disappeared when political meanings emerged.
The chapter then traces how the modern political concept moved across Europe after 1800, describing four ideal-typical processes: a prepolitical stage, the politicization of the term, its ideological polarization, and finally the emergence of party-political differentiation. The Spanish liberales were crucial to this transition, and in Britain the imported label initially sounded foreign and unsettling. In Germany, because political institutions were weaker, the semantic struggle over liberalism often preceded full party institutionalization. After 1815, Metternich’s order cast “liberal” as a dangerous, even revolutionary direction. By the late 1820s, liberal signified reason, progress, and historical movement against a backward restorative order.
The revolutions of 1848–49 exposed the limits of the liberal umbrella. The dual aim of national unity and political liberty proved especially destabilizing. The failure of 1848 transformed the meaning of liberalism: what had earlier been a broad movement for reasonable progress fragmented into rival strategies, and the appeal of Realpolitik grew from this experience.
The most consequential feature of German liberalism’s trajectory was the growing suspicion of democracy. After 1848, democrats and radicals could claim universal suffrage, social equality, and popular sovereignty as their own language; liberal parties grew wary of that vocabulary. This semantic distancing had long consequences—it meant that German liberalism would often remain politically modern yet emotionally suspicious of democracy. That suspicion hardened after 1871, as liberal actors frequently linked democracy with socialism and internationalist threats to the nation-state.
Leonhard concludes that there is no linear European story in which liberalism gradually converges on one universal meaning. Germany’s case illustrates how the same word can accumulate overlapping layers—moral disposition, constitutional reform, national progress, anticlerical struggle, bourgeois exclusiveness, suspicion of democracy, and later social opening—without ever fully shedding earlier ones.
Chapter 3 — ‘Friends of Freedom’: First Liberalisms in Spain and Beyond
Javier Fernández-Sebastián’s chapter begins with a forceful revision of the standard map of political modernity. The Iberian revolutions of 1808–40, he argues, should be understood as the third great Atlantic revolutionary wave after the American and French upheavals, not as a peripheral imitation of more authentic northern experiences. At the start of that process, the Spanish and Portuguese monarchies stretched across immense territories in Europe, the Americas, Asia, and the Pacific, encompassing roughly thirty million people. Their crisis triggered a transformation of extraordinary scale: the breakdown of empires, the making of new states, the spread of constitutions, and the creation of republics.
One of the chapter’s central arguments is that liberalism in the Iberian world was not an “exotic plant” transplanted from elsewhere. In Cadiz, Lima, and other nodes of the Hispanic Atlantic, the vocabulary of liberalism appeared early and decisively, sometimes earlier than in major northern Atlantic centers. Hispanic Americans took part in founding the first so-called liberal party in the Cadiz Cortes, and liberal language circulated widely across the Atlantic monarchy before it had fully stabilized elsewhere in Europe.
The chapter situates the birth of Spanish liberalism in the crisis of monarchy caused by Napoleon’s invasion and the resulting collapse of legitimate authority. Liberalism first emerged less as a mature doctrine than as a practical response to a state emergency. Its meanings were forged in newspapers, juntas, town councils, congressional debates, pamphlets, manifestos, and mobilizations—practical, polemical, and improvised before it became systematic.
The chapter also shows that early Iberian liberalisms were deeply Catholic. Clerics and lay writers alike drew on scholastic and Catholic sources—Aquinas, Vitoria, Suárez, Mariana, and others—to construct constitutional and anti-absolutist arguments. Liberalism here did not begin from the social ontology of later Anglo-American individualism. It emerged from a different moral and constitutional universe and retained the marks of that origin.
The chapter underscores the profoundly transnational character of these first liberalisms. The collapse of the Hispanic monarchy should be read not as a simple series of national uprisings but as an imperial revolution whose repercussions spread across both sides of the Atlantic. The revolutionary wave of 1820 is the clearest example of that transnational dynamic. Riego’s pronunciamiento helped revive the Constitution of 1812, energized constitutional movements in Portugal, Naples, and Turin, and resonated with the Greek uprising.
Fernández-Sebastián’s concluding warning follows from this entire reconstruction: historians should resist projecting later, more coherent versions of “classical liberalism” backward onto the first third of the nineteenth century. For contemporaries, liberalism was not a completed doctrine inherited from the past. It was an open, unstable, future-oriented political language being invented in struggle.
Chapter 4 — Liberalism in Portugal in the Nineteenth Century
Portuguese liberalism, as Rui Ramos and Nuno Gonçalo Monteiro present it, emerged from a crisis of monarchy and empire rather than from a settled philosophical school. The decisive background was the breakdown of the Bragança monarchy during and after the French invasions of 1807–11, followed by the 1820 constitutional revolution. From the start, Portuguese liberalism was inseparable from the problem of how to rebuild political authority after the weakening of the old intercontinental monarchy. The authors insist that this history already complicates any easy identification of liberalism with a weak state, laissez-faire dogma, or a tidy party ideology.
Before the 1810s, the word liberal in Portugal did not designate a political camp. It belonged largely to an older moral and social vocabulary—generosity, nobility, princely conduct, and the “liberal arts.” The politicization was therefore a relatively abrupt process, imported and adapted under pressure from foreign events and internal crisis.
A striking feature of the chapter is the role of Brazil in shaping Portuguese liberal vocabulary. During the crisis of 1822, deputies invoked “liberalism” to persuade Brazilians that metropolitan constitutionalism was not a plan to recolonize them. Liberalism could therefore signify openness, constitutional reciprocity, and a promise of a less oppressive imperial relationship.
One of the chapter’s central claims is that Portuguese liberalism was not anti-statist. The wartime legislation of Mouzinho da Silveira and others did not shrink the state into a mere guarantor of private autonomy. It used central power to destroy the institutional and social bases of the old order: entails, tithes, ecclesiastical corporate privilege, traditional jurisdictions, and older forms of local autonomy. Liberalism in Portugal therefore became the language of a state-led remaking of society—modernizing, but also centralizing and often authoritarian in style.
After victory in 1834, liberalism did not crystallize into a single party or doctrine. All legitimate actors within the constitutional monarchy claimed the liberal inheritance. Septembrists and Chartists both called themselves liberals. Their conflicts were fierce but fought inside the shared symbolic universe of liberalism. This regime-wide quality persisted after 1851 under the politics of “Regeneration.” Liberalism became the common language of the constitutional order, flexible enough to include conservatives, progressives, free traders, protectionists, monarchists, and even later republicans. Portuguese liberalism is best understood as the broad civic and state-building project that replaced the old Catholic-absolutist monarchy and governed the horizon of political legitimacy in nineteenth-century Portugal.
Chapter 5 — The Rise and Fall of ‘Liberalism’ in France
Helena Rosenblatt’s chapter begins by overturning a durable misconception: France did not lack a liberal tradition. On the contrary, she argues that “liberalism” as a political term was first coined in France, not in England or the United States, and that its meaning can only be understood historically rather than by measuring French thinkers against a later, abstract definition.
Before the nineteenth century, the relevant word was not liberalism but liberality. In classical and Christian traditions, liberal carried moral, educational, and aristocratic meanings: the liberal arts, qualities suitable to a free-born man, virtues like generosity, charity, elevation of soul, and patriotic service. Rosenblatt insists on this older semantic field because later political uses of the term did not simply erase it. They borrowed from it, and in doing so acquired moral prestige.
Benjamin Constant was one of the first to describe a political stance as “liberal.” For him, liberal principles meant defending the gains of the Revolution while rejecting both royalist reaction and Jacobin terror—moderate, constitutional, representative, civilly egalitarian, and anti-feudal. Conservatives immediately understood the rhetorical force of this maneuver and fought it. To them, the new “liberal” politics was neither generous nor noble; it was disguised revolutionary subversion. That struggle also helped stabilize the new meaning: enemies of liberalism often contributed to clarifying what the word meant.
Rosenblatt argues that the noun liberalism was probably coined by French ultraroyalists as a term of abuse—an attempt to expose the alleged fraud of the liberals who claimed the mantle of generosity while supposedly practicing selfishness and perfidy. Yet once coined, the word stuck. The Restoration liberal camp contained former Jacobins, republicans, Bonapartists, constitutional monarchists, religious skeptics, Protestants, Catholics, and multiple shades of moderate and “exaggerated” reformers. Liberalism was strong enough to name a camp but too internally divided to function as a single coherent doctrine.
The vulnerability of French liberalism deepened under the July Monarchy. Liberal rhetoric remained strong, but the state intervened inconsistently, often on behalf of the rich: repressing labor unrest, maintaining tariffs, and subsidizing favored sectors while leaving poverty largely unanswered. By the 1840s, “true liberalism” had become a phrase claimed by mutually opposed factions. The collapse of the July Monarchy in 1848 marks not the disappearance of liberalism but the fragmentation of its meaning—and the beginning of the semantic divergence between French usage (liberalism = small government) and what would eventually become American usage (liberalism = an interventionist state).
Chapter 6 — Nordic Liberalisms: Sweden and Denmark in Comparison
Jussi Kurunmäki and Jeppe Nevers begin from a paradox. The Nordic countries are often treated as obviously liberal societies because they combine constitutional government, civil freedoms, and the welfare state. Yet “liberalism” itself has not been the dominant concept through which Nordic political cultures have described themselves. The chapter argues that liberal actors and liberal languages were important in both Sweden and Denmark, but they developed along sharply different paths. By the early twentieth century, Swedish liberalism had moved toward a progressive, centre-left position, whereas Danish liberalism had become increasingly associated with agrarian politics, antiregulation, and opposition to social democracy.
In Sweden, the language of liberalism entered political debate very early, in the early 1820s, and did so in a highly self-conscious way. The Swedish debates quickly developed a sophisticated conceptual structure—newspapers defending liberalism associated it with constitutionalism, publicity, checks on officials, the curbing of monarchical power, and the abolition of estate and guild privileges. Swedish liberalism developed in intimate relation with democratic expansion rather than as a stable identity opposed to labor politics from the outset. The Liberals and Social Democrats needed each other to break the old constitutional order and secure parliamentarism and expanded suffrage. In Sweden, the authors argue, liberalism became one of the genealogies of the welfare state rather than simply its enemy.
Denmark followed a different path. Bourgeois liberals played a central role in dismantling absolute monarchy and in shaping the constitutional order of 1849. Yet nineteenth-century Danish liberalism did not consolidate itself as a lasting, self-confident liberal party tradition—it disintegrated. The disastrous war with Prussia in 1864, closely tied to national-liberal policy, further damaged the prestige of the liberal label. Around the turn of the twentieth century, Danish urban reformers who in another context might have been called new liberals preferred the language of radicalism.
The major semantic shift came when the agrarian Venstre, enraged by wartime economic regulation during and after the First World War, began to redefine liberalism as the ideology opposed to regulation, socialism, and an expanding state. Twenty-century Danish liberalism became an agrarian, anti-regulatory, center-right language.
The comparative conclusion is stark: there was no single Nordic liberalism. Sweden and Denmark shared an early constitutional liberal phase and a mid-nineteenth-century national-liberal moment, but then diverged structurally. That divergence explains why, in contemporary Nordic usage, “liberal” can point in Sweden toward a center-left reform tradition, while in Denmark it more naturally indicates a center-right, market-friendly one.
Chapter 7 — ‘Liberalism’ and ‘Liberality’: The Liberal Tradition in the Netherlands
Chapter 7 argues that Dutch liberalism cannot be understood only as a political doctrine. In the Netherlands, the word liberal carried two long-lived meanings that never fully merged: one referred to political liberalism, while the other came from the older idea of liberality—generosity, broad-mindedness, tolerance, and pluralism. The chapter’s central claim is that Dutch liberal history unfolded inside the tension between those two inheritances.
The chapter begins by showing that the Netherlands could look “liberal” even before liberalism existed as a political ideology. The old Dutch Republic is described as moderate, rights-conscious, and tacitly tolerant in religious and political matters, but not liberal in any doctrinal sense. After independence was restored in 1813, the revolutionary interlude was remembered less as a native political awakening than as a foreign fever—and that memory made Dutch elites deeply suspicious of abstract ideology and of anything smelling of Jacobin radicalism.
That suspicion shaped the first Dutch encounters with the word liberalism in the 1820s and 1830s. The term appeared as something alien, associated with French excess, disorder, and doctrinaire politics. To be Dutch, in the self-image described by the chapter, was to be practical, modest, empirical, and wary of sweeping theory.
The decisive turning point came with 1848 and Johan Rudolf Thorbecke. The constitutional revision of that year fixed the meaning of Dutch liberalism for decades by attaching it firmly to constitutionalism—ministerial responsibility, direct elections to the lower house, freedoms of assembly and association, further steps in separating church and state. Thorbecke’s version was not romantic, revolutionary, or socially expansive. It was legalistic, balanced, and disciplined; the chapter emphasizes his notion of maat—measure, proportion, staying within bounds.
The chapter treats the concept of vrijzinnigheid as crucial—a Dutch term that linked liberalism to liberal Protestantism and to a broader culture of anti-orthodox, intellectual openness. As confessional and socialist parties grew stronger, they too claimed to defend forms of freedom, while liberals increasingly lost their monopoly on the language of emancipation. The school struggle in particular exposed liberalism’s vulnerability, because efforts to use public education to spread liberal values helped mobilize a durable Catholic-Protestant alliance against it.
The final movement of the chapter traces both decline and afterlife. The epilogue jumps to the postwar VVD, D66, Mark Rutte, and Geert Wilders to show that the old Dutch tension remains alive: a pseudo-liberal rhetoric of freedom can easily drift toward exclusion, uniformity, and state-enforced moral nationalism—the very Jacobin danger earlier Dutch observers feared.
Chapter 8 — A Conceptual Scheme of Polish Liberalism: Six Pillars
Chapter 8 does not narrate Polish liberalism as the history of a stable party or a fixed canon of thinkers. Instead, it reconstructs what the author calls a conceptual scheme: a structure of recurring ideas that gave Polish liberal thought coherence across ruptures, partitions, and changing political conditions. Because Poland spent much of the nineteenth century without a sovereign state, and because political language shifted dramatically from Enlightenment to Romanticism to Positivism and then to the interwar period, liberalism appears here less as an institutional continuity than as a pattern of concepts.
Those pillars are the chapter’s organizing device. The author identifies six central ideas: liberty; normality, meaning a normative image of the West; backwardness and modernization; the state; the nation; and universal or humanitarian ethics. These are not separate compartments. They form a connected structure in which each concept modifies the meaning of the others.
In the eighteenth century, liberty in Polish political language was largely republican and estate-based, tied to political participation and noble privilege rather than individual rights. Enlightenment reformers who wanted stronger state institutions could not easily appropriate the language of liberty because it had been monopolized by defenders of old noble freedoms. Hugo Kołłątaj’s attempt to distinguish civil from political liberty is treated as a significant conceptual innovation, moving away from estate privilege toward a more modern understanding grounded in the relation between individuals, society, and government.
Romanticism then altered the picture. In Mickiewicz and other émigré thinkers, liberty became at once national and universal—Poland’s struggle imagined as part of a broader European and human struggle for freedom. This widened the moral horizon of liberty but pushed political thought away from institutional liberalism. Romantic liberty distrusted dry constitutional formulas and placed its faith in peoples, souls, sacrifice, and historical mission.
The pillars of normality, backwardness, state, and nation give the chapter its strongest sense of Polish specificity. “Normality” means the West as a normative reference point, especially in Positivist language about organic social development. The state becomes indispensable, not merely as a threat to liberty but as a possible instrument of modernization. Nationhood remains unavoidable but conceptually unstable: the liberal nation can be civic and democratic in a Jacobin style, yet it can also shade into coerced assimilation and ethnic nationalism.
The chapter’s conclusion is that Polish liberalism was reactive, peripheral, and deeply marked by nationalism and backwardness, which made it more centralist and more open to state action than “core” liberalisms. Yet precisely because Romantic universalism survived within it, Polish liberalism also retained a moral check against the harsher, more chauvinist versions of nationalism.
Chapter 9 — Liberal Politics without Liberal Thought? The Strange Career of Italian Liberalism
Chapter 9 advances a sharp and deliberately paradoxical thesis: Italy built and repeatedly rebuilt a political order on liberal constitutional principles without ever developing a comparably powerful liberal ideology. Liberalism mattered in Italian institutions, law, and elite political language, but it did not become the broad meaning-making system capable of binding the community together and educating citizens into a liberal self-understanding. The author therefore distinguishes between liberal constitutionalism as a framework and liberalism as an ideology in the fuller sense. Italy had much of the first and too little of the second.
Raffaele Romanelli’s formula—an “impossible command”—captures the difficulty: liberal Italy effectively said, “I order you to be free.” The new state wanted to implant liberty in a society whose communal structures, political habits, and cultural formations were not naturally aligned with liberal constitutionalism. This made Italian liberalism statist from the beginning. Even when it honored liberty, it often relied on command, administration, and centralization rather than on the slow social internalization of liberal norms.
A further weakness lay in liberalism’s limited ability to popularize itself. The chapter stresses that Italian constitutional values were not translated into a mass civic pedagogy. Liberal culture influenced schools and state institutions, but it did not build a durable liberal ideological community. Unlike the Anglo world, Italy lacked a healthy dialogue between conservative and progressive liberalism, and Catholicism complicated the picture at every stage.
This failure helps explain the turn toward nationalism and the disastrous role of the First World War. Italian liberal elites hoped war would nationalize the masses and supply the civic integration that liberalism itself had failed to produce. That choice proved fatal because nationalism offered a more emotionally potent, more exclusive, and more coercive answer to the problem of community. Fascism succeeded politically because it supplied exactly what liberalism lacked: a unifying, intelligible, mass ideology of the nation.
When the republican Constitution of 1948 restored liberal principles, it did so in an ironic way. Many of the Constitution’s most substantial liberal elements were advanced not by self-described liberals but by forces that had long attacked liberalism in theory—especially social Catholics and, in part, communists. The Dossetti circle, influenced by personalism and French social thought, defended pluralist democracy and the dignity of the person; yet the author argues that much of what they were institutionalizing was in fact compatible with broader liberal traditions. Italian liberalism, weakened and divided, did not lead this refoundation; others imported into the Constitution forms of pluralism that liberals elsewhere would have recognized as liberal enough.
The author’s final judgment is severe but not nihilistic: Italy’s most original liberal minds still pointed toward a future liberal society, but really existing Italian liberalism remained too elitist, too statist in origin, and too suspicious of popular politics to become the animating ideology of the constitutional order it had helped create.
Chapter 10 — Encounters with Liberalism in Post-Soviet Russia
The chapter’s central argument is that post-Soviet Russian liberalism should not be read as the simple revival of an older Russian liberal tradition. Olga Malinova insists that the liberalism that returned during perestroika and after the collapse of the USSR was, semantically and politically, a new formation. The chain of continuity had been badly broken by decades in which Soviet ideology had turned liberalism into a hostile, bourgeois label. That rupture matters because it helps explain why the meaning of liberalism in the 1990s was so unstable, so heavily improvised, and so vulnerable to distortion.
In imperial Russia, “liberalism” never had a single, settled meaning; it could refer to constitutionalism, Westernizing reformism, moderate legalism, or a broader current of educated opposition to autocracy. Soviet rule pushed this tradition into the shadows. Official Marxist-Leninist historiography treated liberalism as weak, compromised, and irrelevant—merely one hesitant stage in the longer revolutionary story that culminated in Bolshevism. By the late Soviet period, Russian liberalism existed more as a stigmatized object of criticism than as a living political inheritance.
The reappearance of the terms “liberal” and “liberalism” in 1987–88 is therefore crucial. Malinova shows that the words entered contemporary discourse from multiple directions at once: sympathizers used them to describe reformist ambitions inside perestroika, while critics used them to condemn deviations from socialist orthodoxy. Liberalism returned already contested—those who wanted to be liberals had to reconstruct the tradition almost from scratch, often borrowing more from late twentieth-century Western debates than from prerevolutionary Russian sources.
The key divide ran between Democratic Choice of Russia and Yabloko. Democratic Choice embraced the most radical Westernizing vision, treating Russia’s transformation as an urgent effort to join the developed democratic world. Gaidar and his allies defended price liberalization, privatization, and financial stabilization as the only realistic route out of Soviet collapse; liberalism became identified with shock therapy, economic expertise, and the belief that society had to endure pain on the way to a civilized capitalist order. Yabloko shared the liberal commitment to markets and the rule of law, yet distrusted purely technocratic Westernization and argued that Russia’s historical specificities mattered. Yet even Yabloko did not fully break with the dominant post-Soviet framing: it too treated the market as the core of the liberal project.
This economy-centered definition of liberalism is the chapter’s main explanatory key. Both major liberal currents ended up portraying liberalism first and foremost as the ideology of civilized capitalism—a serious mistake in a society where support for economic liberalism was weak and where the collapse of Soviet controls had generated insecurity, corruption, and institutional breakdown.
Malinova’s final diagnosis is unsparing: the crisis of Russian liberalism in the 2000s and 2010s resulted partly from the authoritarian turn of the regime and the official rehabilitation of a strong-state, great-power narrative. But it also resulted from the specific bundle of meanings liberalism had accumulated in the 1990s—Westernism, economism, distrust of paternalism, criticism of imperial identity, and a somewhat pedagogical attitude toward a skeptical majority. Once anti-Westernism became a powerful instrument of state legitimation, those meanings turned toxic. The chapter’s larger implication is that concepts do not fail only because opponents attack them; they also fail because the historical form in which they enter political life narrows their appeal and hardens their liabilities.
Chapter 11 — Temporal Evolution and Morphological Complexity: The Multiple Layers of British Liberalism
Michael Freeden’s chapter begins by rejecting any simple history of British liberalism as the story of a single word entering political language and then steadily developing. Britain, he argues, is a case where the concept long predates the regular use of the labels “liberal” and “liberalism.” If one looks only at lexicography, the British story appears comparatively late, beginning in the early nineteenth century. But if one looks conceptually, much of what later becomes liberalism had already been assembled through earlier traditions associated with Whigs, radicals, utilitarians, and moral philosophers. Freeden insists on a distinction between word and concept. Liberalism is a “super-concept,” a cluster of interacting ideas rather than a single doctrine, and British liberalism is especially hard to capture because its sources never fully fused into one neat whole.
The chapter reconstructs five successive conceptual layers. The first is the layer of boundaries: carving out zones of protected human action against arbitrary interference. Locke gave the most recognizably liberal formulation by distinguishing liberty from license and connecting freedom to law, reason, and non-arbitrary rule. Out of this layer came constitutionalism, the public/private distinction, the limiting of power, and the lasting liberal preoccupation with accountability.
The second is the layer of exchange: liberty comes to mean not only security against arbitrary rule but also the opening of markets, trade, and contract under conditions of noninterference. Figures such as Richard Cobden treated free trade not merely as efficient economics but as an ethical force that could soften antagonisms and promote peace.
The third is the layer of development: with J. S. Mill above all, liberalism shifts from the merely protected individual to the developing personality. The decisive change is from individualism to individuality. Individualism implies separateness; individuality implies growth, cultivation, and self-formation over time. Liberty is no longer just a shield against intrusion but part of an environment in which human capacities can unfold.
The fourth is the layer of interrelationships, where the most dramatic mutation occurs. Liberalism ceases to imagine society mainly as a set of separate individuals bounded against one another and begins instead to think in terms of interdependence. This is the intellectual background of British new liberalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Thinkers such as J. A. Hobson, Herbert Samuel, and L. T. Hobhouse attacked the older Manchester liberalism for reducing society to selfish economic actors. In its place they proposed an image of society as an organic whole whose health depends on the flourishing of its parts. Freeden is careful to show that this was not a surrender to collectivism: Hobson’s point was that social welfare and individual self-development are not opposites. T. H. Green’s move from negative restraint to positive assertiveness is pivotal: freedom is not exhausted by the absence of interference; it is the effective power to do or enjoy things that are genuinely worthwhile, in common with others.
The fifth and contemporary layer is group particularism: claims rooted not only in eccentric individuality, as with Mill, but in the identities and grievances of groups defined by gender, ethnicity, religion, and culture. Freeden treats it as evidence that liberalism remains messy and unfinished.
The chapter culminates in Freeden’s broader theory of liberalism’s conceptual morphology. Liberalism is not only historically layered; it is internally structured as a cluster of core and adjacent concepts whose meaning changes according to their combination. Freeden identifies seven core concepts that recur across liberalisms: liberty, rationality, progress, individuality, the general interest, limited and accountable power, and sociability. Because concepts gain meaning from their neighbors, liberty linked to property and security is not the same as liberty linked to democracy and welfare. Freeden’s closing claim is that the British case, far from yielding a single orthodox liberalism, reveals a multilayered, centre-left tradition whose most distinctive modern hallmark is the entanglement of individuality, sociability, and welfare.
Conclusion
In the conclusion, Michael Freeden steps back from the national chapters to argue that the conceptual history of European liberalism occupies a singular place in the continent’s modern life. Liberalism, he suggests, is not just one ideology among others. It is the first fully comprehensive secular ideology in Europe, and for that reason it has shaped public language, political expectation, and collective self-understanding with unusual force. Even where liberalism has been politically blocked, defeated, or diluted, it has still altered the vocabulary through which societies imagine freedom, power, progress, and reform.
A major theme of the conclusion is temporal and geographical asymmetry. Liberalism does not mature, peak, or decline everywhere at the same time. Russian, French, Polish, British, Iberian, Dutch, Nordic, Italian, and Habsburg liberalisms all move through different historical rhythms, under different pressures and with different emphases. Freeden stresses that liberalism survives partly because it can move across several dimensions at once: political, ideological, philosophical, and cultural. A liberalism that weakens in party politics may remain strong as a moral language or institutional common sense.
This leads to one of the conclusion’s strongest formulations: liberalism has lived a triple life. First, as a political concept, tied to parties, constitutions, movements, and state-building projects in highly varied ways. Second, as a philosophical and cultural concept, linked to universalism, toleration, self-determination, broad-mindedness, and the aspiration to civilize public life. Third, as an economic concept, tied to private property, market exchange, commercial expansion, and material prosperity—a real liberal strand, but never exhaustive.
The national contrasts Freeden draws are sharp and economical. In Portugal, France, and parts of Italy, liberalism often attached itself more to constitutionalism and the state than to enduring party forms. In Spain, constitutional liberalism and party liberalism were closely intertwined from the Cádiz era onward. In Germany, liberalism became powerfully linked to the Rechtsstaat and the constitutional nation-state. In the Netherlands, it acquired a politically conservative tint while appearing weak on the social question. In Denmark and Sweden, the position of liberalism on the ideological spectrum differed markedly, falling more to the right in one case and more to the left in the other. In Poland and Russia, liberalism often fused with modernization projects and debates over nationhood.
Freeden’s final conclusion is that the durability of liberalism lies in its adaptability. Liberalism lasts because it can reorganize its internal concepts, shift emphasis from one register to another, and settle differently in distinct national settings without losing all recognizability. The book therefore ends not with a definition of liberalism in the singular, but with a defense of pluralization. There are many European liberalisms, connected but non-identical, sharing family resemblances rather than one immutable core. The comparative task is not to force them into one doctrine, but to understand how each local liberalism assembled freedom, power, progress, sociability, and reform into its own historically specific language.
Ver também
mapa_conceitual_liberalismo_e_arredores — Structural map of concepts adjacent to liberalism; read alongside Freeden’s morphological framework, it becomes a navigation guide through the seven core liberal concepts identified in chapter 11.
newliberalism — Dense study of British New Liberalism (Green, Hobhouse, Hobson); direct extension of chapter 11, especially the move from negative liberty to positive liberty as effective developmental power.
ordoliberalism — Twentieth-century German liberal reformulation; the ordoliberal settlement is the institutional resolution of the German problem described in chapter 2 — reconciling liberty with order without collapsing into fascism or social democracy.
mapa_tradicao_liberal_brasileira_18a20 — Maps the Brazilian liberal tradition from the Empire through the First Republic; connects directly to the book’s Iberian comparative framework, with the Cádiz Constitution as a shared origin point.
Mapa do Liberalismo Político — Pedro Doria — The book supplies the comparative vocabulary that contextualizes Pedro’s self-identification as a “liberal progressista”: his liberalism carries traits of British new liberalism (ch. 11) and deliberately avoids the economistic version traced in post-Soviet Russia (ch. 10).
gopnik_thousand_small_sanities_resumo — Normative defense of liberalism as everyday practice and moral disposition; a useful contrast of register — Gopnik is advocacy, Freeden/Fernández-Sebastián is conceptual history — for Pedro thinking about how to write about liberalism.