What are the most common misconceptions about liberalism? Why has the history of liberalism as an inspirational ideal been lost? […]
What are the most common misconceptions about liberalism? Why has the history of liberalism as an inspirational ideal been lost? How did liberalism come to mean so many different and conflicting things? And what is the historical relationship between ‘liberalism’ and ‘democracy’?
Leszek Jazdzewski (Fundacja Liberte!) talks with Helena Rosenblatt, a Distinguished Professor of history, political science and French at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her most recent book is “A Lost History of Liberalism from Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century” (Princeton University Press, 2018). She is also the author of “Rousseau and Geneva from the First Discourse to the Social Contract” (Cambridge University Press, 1997), and “Liberal Values: Benjamin Constant and the Politics of Religion” (Cambridge University Press, 2008) . Tune in the for their talk!
Watch the video of the conversation:
Helena Rosenblatt will be a guest during this year’s edition of the Freedom Games, a festival of ideas co-organized by the European Liberal Forum on October 23-25, 2026, in Lodz, Poland. Find out more: igrzyskawolnosci.pl/event/igrzyska-wolnosci-2026
This podcast is produced by the European Liberal Forum in collaboration with the Movimento Liberal Social and the Fundacja Liberté!, with the financial support of the European Parliament. Neither the European Parliament nor the European Liberal Forum are responsible for the content or for any use that be made of.
Leszek: Hello, this is Leszek Jażdżewski. Welcome to Liberal Europe. Today we are going to discuss our favourite subject, which is liberalism, and I have a great guest today: Helena Rosenblatt, Professor of History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and the author of, among others, The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century. She’s also a guest at the Freedom Games. So Helena Rosenblatt, very welcome to Liberal Europe.
Helena: Thank you so much for inviting me.
Leszek: Let me start with the question: what are the most common misconceptions about liberalism?
Helena: Oh, that’s a great question. The thing that surprised me and made me write this book, really, is that people seem to have their own personal definitions of what liberalism is. You notice that there are all these different definitions floating around. I think it’s caused some misunderstandings, frankly, about people and about its history. There are other things I could mention, like the idea that it’s a predominantly Anglo-American tradition. We hear that a lot — that liberalism was born in England and then came to America. The stories tend to privilege Anglo-American thinkers. Places like France and Germany are left out of the story, and French thinkers, German thinkers are generally left out of the canon. So that’s one of the things I set out to rectify in my book: to tell the story of where liberalism really originated and how it came to have these different interpretations and meanings around the world.
Leszek: You have this passage at the very end of the book — that liberalism meant not just freedom-loving and civic-minded, but also generous and compassionate, and that being liberal was an inspirational ideal, something to live up to. Why has this history been lost, you ask?
Helena: Oh, it’s so good that you bring that to my attention, because obviously one of the main points of my book is precisely that liberalism from the very beginning was also a moral ideal and had to do with showing generosity, not just loving freedom, which was very important, but also generosity. These are key terms that have always been core elements of liberalism. Now what’s happened today is that when we speak of liberalism, we tend to focus so much on individual rights, that it’s an ideology that centres on individual rights, and so this longer, more generous story has dropped out. I make the argument that this happened very much during the Cold War, first also because of the rise of fascism and communism and Nazism in Europe, and then the Cold War, when it became very important for the West, and particularly for the Anglo-American alliance that had become so powerful, to show what differentiated them from totalitarianism, and particularly from Stalinism. So they felt they had to emphasise this part of the liberal tradition — the individual rights tradition, property rights — very much as you can imagine when you’re up against the Stalinist regime. So I’m saying: this is what we stand for, the rights of the individual against the state; the state is dangerous and we need to protect the individual. That’s where this focus on individual rights comes from. It was always there — liberals have always been in favour of protecting individual rights, free press, free speech, religious freedom, and so forth. But there was a balance between that and the other side, which is showing compassion, generosity, citizenship, obligations, responsibilities. With the rise of totalitarianism, the idea that you might have duties and obligations, and that governments should get involved with this, became a very dangerous concept.
Leszek: What you’re describing is extremely important — that what we’re taking as the canon of liberal thought has basically been produced very late in the game, let’s say 70 or so years ago, and it hasn’t been like that for quite a time before. Let us start with the very beginning, because liberal — maybe not liberalism, because liberalism is also a relatively late concept and very often, as you indicate in your book, used by the enemies of liberalism — but let’s take what it meant, what liberal meant back then, perhaps even from ancient times, or as late as the 18th century. You write it was a man, usually a man, of generous sentiments, of a large and expansive mind. Can you talk a little bit about this original meaning of the word liberal?
Helena: Yes. The word liberal goes back to ancient Rome and Latin, of course, and the core is liber. Now people are quick to say that liber means freedom, and of course it does, and it did — but it also meant generosity. So to be liberal in ancient Rome meant to have the qualities, the noble qualities of a citizen, the correct values of a citizen. That is: you should love freedom, but you also should have compassion for your fellow citizens. You should be civic-minded, you should be generous, not selfish. Selfishness was a quality for slaves — and there were plenty of them in Rome, as we know. Generosity and commitment to the common good were the values of a citizen. The corresponding word — you mentioned liberalism didn’t exist as a term then. It only came about, it was only coined around 1813. Before liberalism there was the noun liberality, and to show liberality was precisely to show those high-minded values and virtues of a citizen. And over time, this core meaning of generosity and freedom, I show, remained within the term, even as it slightly changed according to circumstances over hundreds of years.
Leszek: What is interesting is how far from those original virtues the actual ideology has been shaped. Can you talk a little bit about how being liberal started to mean something else — not just a virtue, but also a sort of political predicament? What’s the story here in the perhaps late 18th, early 19th century?
Helena: Well, originally it really meant the values of a citizen — it described a person. But over time, the meaning expands so that it can start to mean a way of thinking, and then even a society. In the United States, I have some lovely quotations where George Washington is talking about a liberal society, a liberal constitution. What we mean by a liberal constitution is a tolerant, open one. It’s still not really a number of political or even constitutional concepts, but it does mean tolerant and inviting, and sort of noble. It has this meaning of nobility, in the sense of virtue. But over time, with Lafayette coming back to France, it becomes something political — describing a political idea. It starts with toleration, but then eventually it becomes associated with the constitutional principles of people like Benjamin Constant, who features in my book. And the original meanings then become the constitutional principles that we think are the core values of liberal democracy. And we’re in France now, so you’re up against a monarchy. It’s during the revolution that this is happening, and so you want a constitutional monarchy, a representative system. Civic equality is huge, of course — it didn’t exist at the time. The notion that everyone has equal rights — not equal political rights, but equal civic rights, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, association, eventually separation of church and state — these are core principles that start to become called liberal in the 1790s and so on in France. What I show also is that there’s a lot of emphasis here on France, which might surprise people. But as I said, we have this perception that it’s an Anglo-American tradition going back maybe to the Magna Carta. Really, if you do look at the word, and when people start to talk about something called liberalism, and when they start theorising something they call liberalism, and it’s accepted as liberalism by both its defenders and its critics — this happens in France. In fact, when this word liberal is used politically in England and in America, it is often spelled with an accent on the ‘e’ and an ‘e’ at the end, liberal, to show its foreignness. It’s a new way of using the term.
Leszek: I must say it’s quite interesting that, as a Polish liberal magazine published in Poland, we took the name Liberté very much in the spirit of this continental, forgotten history of liberalism. So I quite identify with what you described. And you mentioned Benjamin Constant and Lafayette as two leaders of liberals, two men engaged in a noble battle against the forces of reaction. This is very much the story of 19th-century liberalism. Can you tell a little bit how liberalism was shaped by this battle, first with absolutism and then with the reaction?
Helena: Well, I think liberalism was very much shaped in the end also by the two Napoleons, I would say. First, obviously, you are shaped by your adversary. I’m not even sure that liberals at first considered themselves enemies of the king. The early liberals wanted a constitutional monarchy, probably on the English model. Then you had the revolution kind of spin out of control, much to their displeasure and horror, into the Terror — and then end up with Napoleon, which was a great tragedy to liberals. French liberals at first believed in Napoleon. They thought maybe he could bring peace to France and the continent. They thought he would save the revolution. He made all the right noises. Most of them actually even supported his coup, but then quickly realised that was a mistake. And so, liberalism — really, the cluster of concepts that comes together in 1813 and is called that — is really designed to make someone like Napoleon never possible again. That this cannot happen again. Where you have somebody who is in principle democratically elected, or at least confirmed by plebiscite the way both Napoleons were in France, and who can say: I am yours. I am you. I know you. We don’t need these representative institutions between us. We don’t need all these judicial systems and pieces of paper that are just stopping progress. I understand you. I will rule for you. I embody you. A demagogue, basically a dictator. This is what really made liberals like Benjamin Constant and Madame de Staël and others want to create a constitutional system that would give some power to the people, that would be accountable to the people, and would make sure they would never get a despot again. Of course, it happened again — they get Napoleon III, and this gets another wave of liberals reacting against that. So I do believe adversaries and enemies shaped liberalism. The Catholic Church was another one — maybe the liberals’ most powerful adversary throughout the 19th century. The papacy came around very late to accept religious freedom, for example, as we all know. This was, as I’ve said, a core concern of liberals from the very beginning, freedom of religion. And we can understand why that is the case in France, because for centuries the Catholic Church had supported the absolute monarchy. Interestingly enough, the Protestants are highly over-represented, according to their actual numbers, in liberal movements, particularly in France. I don’t know what the case is in Poland, but in Germany, in France, obviously in England, in America, Protestants have been very much at the forefront of liberalism.
Leszek: There is some political thought coming back to the 16th century, when there were some movements within the Reformation, but Poland being predominantly Catholic, it’s not that friendly towards the liberal tradition, I’m afraid. But we can reveal to our listeners — as we are talking on a particular date, July 14th, Bastille Day in France — it’s very interesting to see, even in your book, that the history of liberalism is very much a history of French thought and French politics. How is it, in your opinion, that this word is virtually banished from the French lexicon today? Being liberal in France now means that you’re, like, extremely neoliberal — liberal in economic terms. This tradition seems to be, at least politically, maybe not intellectually, but politically non-existent, really.
Helena: I think that’s so fascinating. It’s another thing I explain a little bit in my book: you can’t use that word, you can’t be a liberal in France or in America. It’s also a liability. You may have noticed that people in the Democratic Party, generally, who are a little bit left of centre, avoid the word liberal — and it’s for diametrically opposed reasons. In France, to be liberal is to be a bit right of centre: free markets, globalism, small government, that kind of thing. In America, colloquially, it means the opposite — sort of big government. Nobody says they’re for big government, but more government intervention, welfare state, all these sorts of things. So you don’t want to be called a liberal — but the word means completely different things in the two places. This makes it hard to have a conversation if you don’t realise what’s going on. In my book, I try to explain how this happened, and how in fact both sides — the free market liberals and the more government regulation liberals — all come from the same place, but at a certain time kind of diverged into two streams in their reaction to the industrial revolution, to urbanisation, and to the problems that came along with that. They had two different approaches to how to deal with the new crisis of pauperism, of endemic poverty in the cities. Some liberals advocated for more government intervention. Others said more laissez-faire, even more deregulation, was the way to go. So you have these two streams. One became dominant in America — the government intervention one. That’s why it means one thing in America and something else in France, and most of the rest of the world. I think America is like an outlier in what liberal means colloquially. Although you may know that the so-called libertarians in America — some people call them neoliberals, but neoliberalism is generally a pejorative — the libertarians today say they are the true liberals, and that we, the democratic liberal types, are misusing the word. They are the true classical liberals, the true orthodox liberals.
Leszek: It’s quite fascinating, because especially when you deal with Americans and try to explain to them what it means that you are a liberal, it’s very hard. Because also when you use the term classical liberal, in the US it also means something else — perhaps you cross into the Hayek tradition. And as you indicate in your book, it’s very much an invented tradition, because there wasn’t such a thing. Most liberals in the 19th century didn’t even call themselves liberals. And many of them didn’t have these laissez-faire economic thoughts — they were disputing the economic tradition. It’s quite confusing that you can have, within a spectrum of 10 years, both Franklin Delano Roosevelt calling himself liberal and also Friedrich Hayek calling himself liberal. It’s almost meaningless when you try to grab this together. Do you have a theory about how liberalism came to mean so many different things, and how it became an economic term? I think most people would now associate liberalism with economics, which wasn’t the case for most of the history of this thought.
Helena: That’s exactly right. I found this wonderful story and quotation of Herbert Hoover, who was president when the crash happened — a real free-market, laissez-faire kind of guy — and he got so frustrated with the fact that FDR was using the word to describe himself and his policies. People working for FDR kept calling him a liberal. And the New Deal was liberal. And all of this was liberal and liberal and liberal. There’s literally a speech where someone uses the word 10 or 12 times to really reinforce the fact that it’s the New Deal people who are the liberals. So Herbert Hoover just says: oh my God, all right, then you can have the word. You can have the word. I’m fed up with this. You’ve polluted it. You’ve raped it of all meaning. You go ahead and take the word. So there was this fight. And I think that’s interesting, because there was something about the word that was very attractive to people. It is a word that continues to kind of mean generous and freedom-loving, and therefore people wanted to use it. Maybe today politicians avoid it. And that’s interesting too. I do think words are important. Words are tools. They’re rhetorical devices. And it’s good to be careful with our use of them.
Leszek: Speaking of words, for many liberals the term “liberal democracy” — they would find it sort of contradictory in terms. It’s quite interesting how you describe how the word democratic was understood back in the 19th century. It didn’t necessarily mean that you had to be for universal suffrage, which seems quite obvious today. Can you tell us a little bit more about this relationship between liberalism and democracy? When I was reading these passages from the 19th century quoted in your book, I realised this moralisation, this need for education of the voters, is very much present with liberals today. And this mistrust of democracy, which was very much associated with Napoleon III, Napoleon I. Can you tell us a little bit more how liberals came to terms with democracy?
Helena: Yeah, absolutely. In America, at least, people kind of use liberal democracy and democracy interchangeably, as if they’re the same thing. That’s also a little bit sloppy and lazy. But they don’t actually come together all that easily. They come together late in history. Democracy, of course, is a much older tradition. It goes way back to Greece and originally means people power, right? Demos and kratos — the power of the people. And for, I would say, 2,000 years or so, it was considered the worst kind of government possible, equivalent to anarchy — because how can you possibly… It’s direct government, right? They didn’t have the concept of representative democracy until quite late. Even as late as the 18th century, when they start using the word democracy in all these different ways — and I’ve been thinking about this recently, we do too. We don’t always mean a political regime, a political system. We can mean economic, we can mean a system that is more accessible, more egalitarian. It has these different uses and meanings. But anyway, when you say that in 1820 there were people in France saying that we’re a democracy — by that, they obviously didn’t mean that everybody had a vote. They meant that there was civil equality, that people had the same rights under the law. But basically what happened during the revolution — which is, as I’ve said, when really liberalism is born — the liberals see the crowd activity. They see what they consider the irrational behaviour of the crowds, the violence. They see: not only are they behaving irrationally and violently, but then they’re gullible. When a dictator like Napoleon comes along, you just can’t trust the people to give the people power directly. That would be a very foolish, incomprehensible thing to them. So what you need is liberalism, which will make, over time, democracy safe. It’ll tame democracy. You will hopefully get, through the representative system, the rule by the wise, by an aristocracy — not of blood, but of capacity. Usually that went along with property requirements for voting, and even stiffer ones for holding office. Only over time did liberals come to accept universal male suffrage, and even later universal suffrage, which would include women. They were not democrats originally. They were, to a certain extent, elitists. We can understand why, given the widespread illiteracy and poverty of the population. It was pretty much incomprehensible to them to get 20 million people to vote, much less directly legislate.
Leszek: We’re getting to the end of our conversation, sadly. One thing I take away from your book is how dynamic this concept of liberalism is, and how far away from the ivory towers of intellectuals — how it’s a living concept also struggling within the political realms, within discussions between certain groups also considering themselves liberals. It’s a fascinating story. I really recommend our listeners to get the book and discover this tradition for themselves. But the last question I want to ask you, a quick question: do you think it makes sense trying to come back to the original meaning of the word liberal, meaning generous, which I find extremely promising in many ways? And what sort of liberalism, if any, do you think we need today?
Helena: Well, that’s a great question, because how to do it, I don’t know. But I feel that there is a lack of imagination right now, and aspiration. We’re not generating enthusiasm — I’m talking now about America, where I am right now — to get young people involved with the democratic process. We are in dangerous free fall. Most of us feel it with the state of our liberal democracy right here. And I think to remind people of these sorts of values — I think people are yearning for voices that speak about this. It’s not just about selfish individual rights. It’s more about finding something that binds us, something worth fighting for, something worth saving. Looking at the past, and actually noticing that there were some really good and noble people in the past, who fought very hard and deeply for this thing we call a liberal democracy. Ant that it is worth fighting for we have to be generous and give of our selves and compassionate and that is really the core of a liberal democracy
Leszek: I think this is a great place to end, to bear in mind that being a liberal also means this aspiration: fighting for the common good and betterment of humanity, not only the rise of individuals but also for the obligations. This is inspirational. Thank you for being with us, and looking forward to seeing you at Freedom Games.