Talking to ... Helena Rosenblatt

There are those words whose effects are so powerful that many
using them are unaware they are standing before an idealized
reflection of themselves. Undoubtedly, the word Liberalism falls
into this category. Everyone using it thinks they know what it
means, but if you take a closer look, you realize you’re dealing
with a Protean entity that eludes understanding precisely to the
extent that you try to grasp it. Historian Helena Rosenblatt, who
had previously studied 18th- and 19th- century French thinkers,
such as Rousseau and Benjamin Constant, but also the Parisian
Salon of Madame de Staël, was asked by her publisher to write a
history of Liberalism. Upon embarking on this task, she
discovered the concept was not as evident as it seemed, and to
elude becoming lost in the labyrinth of grand ideas, she did
something highly unusual: namely, she looked into the word itself
and found that Liberalism didn’t appear on the political scene
until 1813. Tracing its conceptual origins back to Cicero, she
found that liberalitas refers to a free Roman citizen’s civic
virtue of behaving liberally toward one another by giving and
receiving to promote the common good. But because this points not
only to a class-based privilege but also to a gender–based one,
she notes with wonderful self-irony that when applied to women,
it meant something entirely different: »Being a liberal woman
wasn’t something women aspired to.«


What emerges from our conversation is that Liberalism is a
Protean entity whose meaning has fluctuated radically over the
centuries. From Roman civic duty to the Enlightenment’s tolerance
to today’s polarized debates—each era has produced its own
liberal precursors. And while today’s discourses, in their
rhetorical exuberance, are quick to proclaim a post-Liberal Age,
The Lost History of Liberalism serves as a kind of admonition, or
rather, a reminder of just how much we owe to this desire for
freedom.


Helena Rosenblatt is a Swedish historian
specializing in intellectual history. She is currently a
Distinguished Professor of History at the Graduate Center, CUNY,
and a member of the Board of Editors for both the Tocqueville
Review and Global Intellectual History Review. Dr. Rosenblatt is
currently researching and writing a biography on the life of Anne
Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein.


Helena Rosenblatt has published


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