🔬 Helena Rosenblatt — The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century

A Deep Bibliography & Critical Review

Princeton University Press, 2018 — 368 pages. ISBN 9780691170701. One of Foreign Affairs’ Best Books of 2018.

Introduction

Helena Rosenblatt’s The Lost History of Liberalism arrived in 2018 at a moment of acute crisis for the liberal political tradition. Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, the rise of Bolsonaro, Orbán, and the European far right had together fractured the post-1989 consensus that liberal democracy was the unchallenged horizon of modern politics. Onto this scene came a wave of books — Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed, Mark Lilla’s The Once and Future Liberal, Edmund Fawcett’s revised Liberalism: The Life of an Idea, Dan Edelstein’s On the Spirit of Rights — each trying to diagnose what had gone wrong. Rosenblatt’s contribution stands apart from this crowd because it refuses to attack or defend the tradition. Instead it asks a more elementary question: what did liberals actually mean by the word?

The book is, formally, a “word history” — a Begriffsgeschichte in the Reinhart Koselleck tradition. Rosenblatt traces the term liberal from the Roman liberalitas of Cicero and Seneca, through medieval Christian and Renaissance humanist usage, into the political nouns libéralisme and Liberalismus born of the French and German nineteenth century, and finally to the embattled American “L-word” of the late twentieth. Her central provocation is that Anglo-American intellectual history has gotten the story badly wrong: liberalism is not a Lockean inheritance about individual rights and property, but a Franco-German moral tradition about civic virtue, generosity, and devotion to the common good. The book’s project is to recover what liberals lost, or were stripped of, when their tradition was reinvented in the mid-twentieth century by Cold War theorists who needed an Anglophone genealogy.

This review covers Rosenblatt’s full corpus, situates The Lost History of Liberalism within contemporary debates, and presents a thorough critical assessment drawing on the leading academic responses — including the H-Diplo roundtable, Jeffrey Collins’s review essay, Gladden Pappin’s Catholic critique in First Things, and David Bell’s NYRB engagement.

Helena Rosenblatt: Author Profile

Helena Rosenblatt (born in Sweden) is Distinguished Professor of History, French, and Political Science at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where she serves as Executive Officer of the History Ph.D. program. She holds her BA from Barnard College and her MA and PhD from Columbia University. Her scholarly career has been built around the history of French and Genevan political and religious thought from the eighteenth century forward, with Benjamin Constant and Jean-Jacques Rousseau as her sustained intellectual companions.

She is a 2020–2021 Guggenheim Fellow and won the Prix Benjamin Constant (Lausanne) in 2010. The Lost History of Liberalism has been translated into Chinese, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish — a reach that has made her one of the most internationally read intellectual historians working today.

Full Bibliography

Monographs

Rousseau and Geneva: From the First Discourse to the Social Contract, 1749–1762 (Cambridge University Press, 1997; paperback 2007).

Rosenblatt’s debut and revised dissertation. The book reads Rousseau against the political and religious world of his birthplace — the Calvinist republic of Geneva — rather than against the Parisian Enlightenment with which he is conventionally associated. She argues that Rousseau’s political thought, especially the Discourse on Inequality and the Social Contract, can only be understood as a long argument with Geneva’s own civic and religious self-understanding. The book recovered an under-appreciated context for the most-studied works in the canon.

Scholarly Standing: A foundational contribution to Rousseau studies, widely cited and credited with redirecting attention to the Genevan dimension of his thought. Established Rosenblatt as a leading historian of eighteenth-century political theory in her early career. ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Liberal Values: Benjamin Constant and the Politics of Religion (Cambridge University Press, 2008).

The hinge book of Rosenblatt’s career. Liberal Values argues that religion was central — not peripheral — to Constant’s liberalism, against the dominant secularist reading. She shows how Constant’s lifelong project of writing a history of religion, his Protestant inheritance, and his engagement with Madame de Staël’s spiritual seriousness shaped his political thought. The book reframes Constant as the decisive theorist of modern liberty whose project was moral before it was institutional. Many of the arguments in The Lost History of Liberalism — that early liberalism was an ethical project tied to public religion — were first worked out here.

Scholarly Standing: A landmark in Constant scholarship and in the broader recovery of the religious roots of European liberalism. Won the Prix Benjamin Constant. The book set the agenda for a generation of work on liberalism and religion, and is the indispensable preparatory text for The Lost History of Liberalism. ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton University Press, 2018). 368 pp.

The subject of this review. A synthetic word-history of liberalism designed for general readers as well as scholars. Foreign Affairs Best Book of 2018; widely translated.

Scholarly Standing: Rosenblatt’s most important and most-debated book. A landmark of the “revisionist moment” in liberal historiography that includes Edmund Fawcett, Duncan Bell, Annelien de Dijn, and Dan Edelstein. Generated a major H-Diplo roundtable and substantive engagement from across the ideological spectrum. ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Edited Volumes

The Cambridge Companion to Constant (Cambridge University Press, 2009).

The standard scholarly reference on Benjamin Constant in English. Rosenblatt assembled an international team of contributors to cover Constant as political theorist, social analyst, literary critic, and historian of religion — including his views on slavery and empire, on women, and on the nature of modern liberty.

Scholarly Standing: The authoritative English-language guide to Constant. Required reading for anyone working in nineteenth-century French liberalism. ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (with Related Documents) — Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2010.

A teaching edition of the Second Discourse with a new translation and curated supplementary documents. Designed for undergraduate use.

Scholarly Standing: A serviceable teaching tool, modest in ambition. ⭐⭐⭐

French Liberalism from Montesquieu to the Present Day, co-edited with Raf Geenens (Cambridge University Press, 2012).

A major scholarly volume that consolidated the case for taking French liberalism as a coherent and distinct tradition — exactly the case The Lost History of Liberalism would later make to a wider audience. Includes Rosenblatt’s own essay “On the Need for a Protestant Reformation: Constant, Sismondi, Guizot and Laboulaye.”

Scholarly Standing: An important scholarly intervention that helped legitimize “French liberalism” as a research category in Anglophone political theory. The essential pre-history of The Lost History of Liberalism. ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Thinking with Rousseau: From Machiavelli to Schmitt, co-edited with Paul Schweigert (Cambridge University Press, 2017).

Eleven essays on Rousseau’s reception by major political thinkers from Machiavelli to Carl Schmitt.

Scholarly Standing: A solid contribution to Rousseau reception studies; less widely cited than the Constant volume but valuable for specialists. ⭐⭐⭐

Selected Articles and Essays

A representative sample of Rosenblatt’s prolific essay output, all relevant to The Lost History of Liberalism:

“The Liberal Mysticism of Madame de Staël” (2016) — establishes Staël as a central liberal thinker rather than a literary figure.
“Eclipses and Revivals: Constant’s Reception in France and America, 1830–2007” (Cambridge Companion to Constant, 2009).
“On the Intellectual Sources of Laïcité: Rousseau, Constant, and the Debates about a National Religion” (French Politics, Culture & Society, 2007).
“Sismondi, from Republicanism to Liberal Protestantism” (Kapossy and Bridel, eds.).
“Rousseau the anti-Cosmopolitan” (Daedalus, 2008).
“The Christian Enlightenment” (Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. VII).
“Liberal democracy is in crisis. But … do we know what it is?” (The Guardian, op-ed, 2018) — Rosenblatt’s public-facing distillation of the Lost History argument.

The Lost History of Liberalism: Themes and Argument

The Core Thesis

Rosenblatt’s central claim is sharply put on page 3: “France invented liberalism in the early years of the nineteenth century and Germany reconfigured it half a century later.” This is a frontal challenge to the Anglo-American story in which liberalism descends from John Locke via the Glorious Revolution to the American founders and J.S. Mill. On Rosenblatt’s reconstruction, that lineage is a Cold War invention — a mid-twentieth-century retrofit produced by writers who needed a tidy Anglophone pedigree for the ideas they were defending against communism and fascism.

What is recovered when the Lockean overlay is stripped away? An older, deeper, fundamentally moral tradition. Rosenblatt opens the book with a careful philological excavation of liberalitas in Cicero and Seneca, where to be liberal meant to be generous, magnanimous, devoted to the common good — the disposition of a free citizen toward fellow citizens. This Roman ethic was inherited by Renaissance humanists, by devout Protestants like John Donne and John Winthrop, and (in modified form) by the early Enlightenment. The political noun liberalism was coined only after 1789. Its first theorists — Madame de Staël, Benjamin Constant, the Marquis de Lafayette — were trying to consolidate the achievements of the French Revolution against both reactionaries (Burke, Bonald, de Maistre) and revolutionary extremists (Robespierre, Babeuf). What they meant by libéralisme was largely what we today would call republicanism: rule of law, civil equality, constitutionalism, representative government, freedom of the press and conscience.

The German Reconfiguration

The book’s second move is to insist that nineteenth-century German thinkers transformed this French inheritance rather than merely transmitting it. Wilhelm von Humboldt, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and the Prussian reformers reworked liberalism around the concept of Bildung — moral self-cultivation as a civic project. Liberalism on this account is not the protection of the private individual from the state; it is the formation of the kind of citizen capable of self-government. This reframing matters because it severs liberalism from the laissez-faire economics with which it later became identified: the early German liberals were perfectly comfortable with an active, educative state.

The Catholic Question

A persistent thread Rosenblatt traces is liberalism’s antagonistic relationship with the Catholic Church. From its French origins onward, liberal thought defined itself against ultramontane Catholicism — over education, marriage, the public role of religion. This anticlerical inheritance, Rosenblatt argues, is essential to understanding why nineteenth-century liberals were so concerned with public morality: they were trying to build a non-confessional ethical foundation for civic life. (As we will see, this is the chapter that has generated the sharpest critical pushback.)

The 1848 Crisis and the Mid-Century Pivot

After the failed revolutions of 1848, liberals confronted what was then called la question sociale — the rise of the industrial proletariat and the demand for democratic enfranchisement. Rosenblatt shows how the response was a turn toward moral education and development rather than economic redistribution. Liberal projects of public schooling, civic instruction, and “moral improvement” of the working classes were extensions, not betrayals, of the original Franco-German civic tradition. In this period, however, liberalism also fragmented: one wing moved toward what we now call social democracy, another toward the more familiar libertarian or “classical” liberal stance.

The Twentieth-Century Distortion

The most polemically charged section of the book treats the mid-twentieth-century American reinvention of liberalism. Cold War liberals — Isaiah Berlin, Friedrich Hayek (in a different register), Lionel Trilling, eventually John Rawls — needed a usable past, and they constructed one centered on Locke, individualism, and negative liberty. Rosenblatt argues this construction obscured liberalism’s authentic moral-civic core and bequeathed us a thinned-out, rights-only liberalism vulnerable to the contemporary attacks (from left and right) that we now see succeeding. The book is, on this reading, an attempt at ressourcement — a recovery of usable resources from the deeper tradition.

The Honest Reckoning

To Rosenblatt’s credit, the book does not whitewash. She gives substantial attention to liberalism’s complicities: with colonialism, with eugenics and “race science” in the late nineteenth century, with restrictions on women’s suffrage, and with paternalistic exclusion of working-class men from full citizenship. These are not presented as betrayals of liberalism’s true essence but as live currents within the historical tradition itself.

Critical Reception: The Academic Debate

The Lost History of Liberalism generated one of the most intense scholarly debates in recent intellectual history. The H-Diplo Roundtable (XXI-4, September 2019) gathered six leading scholars — Annelien de Dijn (Utrecht), Bryan Garsten (Yale), Daniel Gordon (UMass Amherst), Shannon Stimson (Georgetown), Cheryl Welch (Harvard), with an introduction by Gianna Englert (SMU) — to debate the book. Major reviews appeared in the New York Review of Books (David Bell), Review of Politics (Jeffrey Collins), First Things (Gladden Pappin), the American Historical Review (James Kloppenberg), the Hedgehog Review (Rita Koganzon), and the Los Angeles Review of Books (Christine Dunn Henderson). What follows distills the major lines of critique and praise.

Praise: What Rosenblatt Got Right

Samuel Moyn (Yale) called it “the most acute and careful account on the theme ever composed,” with “self-evident implications for our own time of ideological strife.” G. John Ikenberry in Foreign Affairs praised the book for showing that “liberalism has survived thanks to its appeal as a moral ideal, a vision of political community that is based not just on interests but also on values.”

Christine Dunn Henderson in the Los Angeles Review of Books credited Rosenblatt with rendering “a great service by illuminating the neglected tradition of continental European liberalism” and showing how those liberals responded to the political, social, and economic challenges of their day. Bryan Garsten in his H-Diplo review went further: Rosenblatt’s recovery of liberalism’s religious dimension provides not just a historical correction but a resource for evaluating contemporary liberal thought against its own tradition.

Critique 1 — The Anglophone Shadow (Stimson, Welch, Collins)

The most widely shared scholarly objection is that Rosenblatt overcorrects. Shannon Stimson (Georgetown) argues that without sufficient engagement with British political economy — Adam Smith, Francis Hutcheson, and the Scottish moral philosophy tradition — we cannot understand how French liberalism developed as it did. The French liberals Rosenblatt celebrates were reading Smith and Hutcheson; treating French liberalism as autochthonous misses the conversation.

Cheryl Welch (Harvard) extends the point, asking for more attention to “the very long shadow that England cast on the history of liberalism.” She also raises the most cutting methodological objection in the entire reception: Rosenblatt seeks to understand Constant and Staël on their own terms, but her characterization of contemporary American liberalism comes “mostly from its enemies” — the conservative critics who dismiss it as selfish and individualistic. The reader is left wondering whether Rosenblatt has fallen prey to the same impulse she set out to resist.

Jeffrey R. Collins (Queen’s University, now University of Florida) develops the most extensive methodological critique in his Review of Politics essay “The Lost Historiography of Liberalism” (2019). Collins largely sympathizes with Rosenblatt’s revisionist project but argues that the historiography of liberalism — Rosenblatt’s included — has only sporadically adopted sound historical methodology. His essay situates Rosenblatt within a longer tradition (Guido de Ruggiero, Harold Laski, Pierre Manent, Larry Siedentop) and suggests that the very category of “liberalism” may be too thin to bear the weight historians ask of it.

Critique 2 — The Normative Problem (de Dijn, Garsten)

Annelien de Dijn (Utrecht) — author of the major counterpoint book Freedom: An Unruly History (2020) — raises the deepest political objection. Rosenblatt presents liberalism’s historical entanglements with elitism, exclusion, and paternalism as “momentary lapses” or failures to live up to the tradition’s true ideals. De Dijn rejects this. The faults of liberals, she argues, cannot be so easily disentangled from their first principles. The history of liberalism, on her reading, should serve as a cautionary tale — not as a resource for our own time. Liberals’ restrictions on the franchise, their suspicion of democratic majorities, their colonial ventures, and their hostility to popular sovereignty were not deviations from liberalism but expressions of it.

This is a serious philosophical disagreement, not a methodological quibble. De Dijn’s own Freedom: An Unruly History recasts the entire Western political tradition by arguing that “liberty” was originally a democratic concept — popular self-rule — and was captured and inverted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by liberals who feared the masses and rebranded freedom as protection against the state. On this reading, Rosenblatt’s heroes — Constant, Staël, Guizot — are the villains of the freedom story.

Critique 3 — The Catholic Counter-Reading (Pappin)

Gladden J. Pappin (then University of Dallas, now President of the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs and a leading post-liberal Catholic intellectual) wrote the sharpest ideological response in First Things (“Liberalism Against the Church,” February 2019). Pappin reads Rosenblatt’s book against her intentions. She wants to show that liberalism had a serious moral core; Pappin agrees — and concludes that the moral core was fundamentally anti-ecclesiastical. “However noble early liberalism’s project of moral improvement may have been, its self-perception always included the specific aim of overthrowing the Church.”

For Pappin, Rosenblatt’s book inadvertently confirms Pierre Manent’s old observation that “the political development of Europe is understandable only as the history of answers to problems posed by the Church.” His verdict is striking: “The future lies in anti-ecclesiastical liberal ressourcement on the one hand, and anti-liberal ecclesiastical ressourcement on the other.” There can be no rapprochement; the more liberals return to their roots, the more their conflict with Catholicism intensifies. Pappin’s reading aligns with the broader post-liberal critique advanced by Patrick Deneen, Adrian Vermeule, and Sohrab Ahmari.

Critique 4 — The Global Absence (Goodreads consensus, postcolonial readers)

A persistent objection from readers and from postcolonial-leaning critics is that the book is essentially a Franco-German story dressed in universal clothing. The “world history” promised by the subtitle never materializes. There is no serious treatment of liberal or proto-liberal thought in the Indian subcontinent, the Islamic world (Persian and Ottoman constitutionalism), East Asia, Africa, or pre-Columbian America. The omission is particularly striking given that nineteenth-century French and German liberalism was deeply entangled with imperial projects and had to define itself against colonial subjects. African-American thinkers and women of color are also largely absent.

Critique 5 — The Methodological Question (Bell, Duncan Bell, Englert)

David A. Bell (Princeton) in his NYRB essay “The Many Lives of Liberalism” reviewed Rosenblatt alongside Edelstein and Miller. Bell is broadly sympathetic but raises a structural worry: if liberalism has meant so many radically different things to so many people across centuries, what is the historical work the category is doing? The political theorist Duncan Bell (no relation, Cambridge) has argued, on the basis of his own research, that we should question “the general utility of ‘liberalism’ as a category of political analysis.” Rosenblatt herself does not draw that conclusion, but her own evidence might support it. Judith Shklar’s old line — that liberalism is “an all-purpose word, whether of abuse or praise” — looms over the project.

Gianna Englert (SMU) in her H-Diplo introduction frames the central tension: Rosenblatt simultaneously wants to honor the bewildering plurality of historical liberalisms and to recover a usable normative core. These two aims pull against each other, and the book never fully resolves the tension.

What the Book Does, What It Does Not Do

What Rosenblatt has done, and done extraordinarily well, is shift the center of gravity in liberal historiography. After The Lost History of Liberalism, no serious account of the tradition can begin with Locke and treat the French and German nineteenth century as a footnote. The book has changed how the tradition is taught and how its intellectual map is drawn. Its philological work — particularly the chapters on liberalitas and on the post-1789 invention of libéralisme as a noun — is meticulous and likely permanent.

What it has not done is settle the question of whether liberalism so reconceived is desirable, durable, or even coherent. The book is most powerful as a corrective to a cartoon and least convincing when it pivots toward implicit advocacy in the closing chapters. The persistent ambiguity Englert identifies — between descriptive plurality and normative recovery — is not resolved. And the contrasting voices, especially de Dijn and Pappin from opposite ideological corners, suggest that the deeper political stakes of Rosenblatt’s recovery project may cut against her own intentions.

Read alongside Edmund Fawcett’s Liberalism: The Life of an Idea, Annelien de Dijn’s Freedom: An Unruly History, Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed, Duncan Bell’s Reordering the World, and Pierre Manent’s An Intellectual History of Liberalism, The Lost History of Liberalism is the entry point for any twenty-first-century reader trying to understand why this contested tradition remains the central terrain of our political arguments.