Thread by @paulcrider

What a curiously strongly worded tweet. Who are the good counter-examples? Adam Smith obviously. Condorcet, Lafayette, de Staël, Constant, Say. Does Paine count as a liberal? Who else?

https://twitter.com/chrisschuringa/status/1392497729675403265

Anyway I'm all in favor of dunking on liberals where they go wrong. Many liberals did defend slavery! Also imperialism, patriarchy, etc. But one of the more interesting things about reading the early liberals is how it was often *later* liberals who flubbed these issues.

.@HelenaRosenblat's Lost History of Liberalism and @Jennife31863712's Turn to Empire provide good material for the view that later liberals, partly due to gaining some actual power, lost their way on—from the perspective of we moderns—some crucial issues.

The cartoon view is that early liberals were laissez-faire, dismissed the "social question," and justified slavery, empire, & colonial exploitation. Even if that were true, you could still appeal to liberal values & the best of liberal practices to "occupy liberalism" à la Mills.

This is a kind of liberal revisionism, an effort by liberals to reform liberalism, open it up to "middle paths," "third ways," to answer the social question without succumbing to illiberal socialism. See the founding of the Mont Pelerin Society & the modern @ne0liberal movement.

But an alternative to revision might be *revival.* When you see that some of the earliest proto-liberals were actually quite woke and that there's a continuous line of "social liberals" from the early 1800s through to the present, you can occupy liberalism with a straight face.

Liberalism has always had resources for addressing power, inequality, and even racism and misogyny. It's a matter of dusting them off and developing them. End of rant but some links to follow.

Charles Mills's Occupy Liberalism. assets.documentcloud.org/documents/6589…

My essay on the radical resources in Adam Smith. liberalcurrents.com/adam-smiths-ra…

See @bill_easterly's recent paper on Smith and economic development by consent.

https://twitter.com/bill_easterly/status/1389957131923767309

My essay on how the borderlands between liberalism and socialism are vast, fertile, and should be demilitarized. liberalcurrents.com/at-the-sociali…

The Neoliberal Project on the original neoliberals: exponents.substack.com/p/how-modern-n…

.@TeenVogue is one of my favorite foils, and here I describe a feminist capitalism, drawing on a book that is criminally under-read: Ann Cudd's half of Capitalism For and Against: a Feminist Debate. bookshop.org/books/capitali…

liberalcurrents.com/a-capitalism-f…

At @LiberalCurrents see Michael Hoffman's contributions on Guido de Ruggiero and the Marquis de Condorcet.

liberalcurrents.com/guido-de-ruggi…

liberalcurrents.com/1795-and-1934-…

I'm repeating myself. Turns out I've done a few threads like this over the past year or so. See here:

https://twitter.com/paulcrider/status/1263938715769950210

And this one:

https://twitter.com/paulcrider/status/1275992557793587201