The Invention of Liberalism

Today, it is commonplace to claim that liberalism created the modern world. This paper examines how and why the rise-of-liberalism narrative first emerged by examining textbooks and surveys on the history of political thought published in Britain and the United States between 1890 and the 1990s. In doing so, it shows how, in the interwar period, a new conception of “liberalism” was invented, imagining it as a secular emancipatory movement that shaped the modern world in its image. Second, this paper highlights how this master narrative was created by liberalism’s self-professed enemies—by Marxists and conservative thinkers—as much as by its friends, to serve different polemical purposes. Finally, this paper offers some reflections on the implications of this account of the historiography of liberalism for its contemporary defenders. It concludes that liberals themselves might have good reason to relinquish overblown claims about the importance of liberalism in the making of the modern world.